In the Spotlight

What is your position in the department? What are some of the projects/research you currently are working on?

Well, I am retired now. My role has been to be part of the PET effort. I have a rather unusual role, often unsung, which is the interpretation of the data. When data are all taken, it’s my job to turn them into the information that people are seeking, both physiological and chemical and biochemical. So, that’s what I do, that’s what I love.

You’ve had such a long history with our department. How did you get started here?

Well, it’s a good-luck story. I arrived in 1974 at a discouraging time for new physics Ph.D.’s. The jobs section in Physics Today was typically just half a page of one-semester teaching jobs, perhaps at Montana State. Now, I’m not being hard on poor Montana, but that gives you an inkling. And I don’t mean a year, I mean a semester. Colleges were hiring physicists semester by semester. It was a gloomy time. Congress had gotten the idea that physics, nuclear physics in particular, was going to win all the future wars and therefore every year the system was producing a hundred Ph.D.’s for every one or two positions.

So, two miracles happened. One was that when I went to my postdoc at the University of Pittsburgh, I got very interested in real-time computer control of experiments. That was a brand new idea back then. At the time, of course, when you bought a computer you had to program it yourself in assembly language. So I learned assembly language. It was just an exciting time–it was wonderful. At the end of my two years, they offered me a third year. During that third year, Jim Sorenson, who was occupying an entry level assistant professorship here in nuclear medicine decided he was going to go off to Utah, and he did. That opened a position, I got it, and I’ve been here ever since. There were two very low-key attempts to attract me away, but I didn’t really pay any attention to them. I simply love it here. I can’t imagine working anywhere else.

How has the field of Medical Physics evolved since you started? Where do you see it going in the future?

Well, I’m going to keep this short, because my views won’t be very popular. I don’t like the emphasis on intellectual property and patenting, I understand it, I accept it, but I’m such an old timer that I still regard myself as a basic scientist. Having income as the primary motivation turns me off. You’ll have to trust me that I have no particular person in mind, and I understand how important it is in our field now. I just wish people could re-emphasize the creation of new knowledge over the creation of new patents.

Year after year, your students love your classes. What is your teaching style and/or philosophy?

The key to teaching is respect for the students. If you respect the students it will show, and they will respond. The second is to assume that you are there to help them discover what they already know. In other words, you’re not spouting truths that they write down and absorb. It’s a matter of discovery. Another very important thing is that if you’re going to get up and teach something you should love it. That will show too. The students can tell easily whether you love what you’re talking about. If you don’t think what you’re teaching is simply amazing, then you’re in the wrong job.

As for the format of my course, I’m unique in teaching from the whiteboard. Every course review, I get compliments for that. (Well, once every five years someone says that’s terrible and why don’t you use PowerPoint.) The key to whiteboard use is the controlled pace. I see my colleagues lecturing as if they’re giving a talk at a national meeting, and of course that is ten times the pace appropriate for teaching. If I write down what I want to say as I go, then obviously the students have time to take in the material.

Another sign of me being a dinosaur is that I believe in written notes. I have class notes available on the Web that are a product of decades of work. The students could just use those notes. but I’m delighted when I see people taking notes during the lecture hour. Even if they’re often exactly the same as the printed notes, the atmosphere behind them is completely different.

If you’re going to use a whiteboard, the two secrets are big and black. It just makes my heart ache when I walk past the classroom and I see people working away with colorful markers under the illusion that what they’re writing can be read from the middle or back of the room. Only black markers; this is my trademark. If you write nice and big on the board, and in black marker, it is first of all appreciated and second of all successful. It works. With PowerPoint, it takes no time to get the information up there, whereas with a board, it takes time. Needed time.

What is your favorite part of your job?

Teaching, so we’ve already covered that! Teaching is my favorite part.

If a student asked you for career or life advice, what would you tell them?

It’s a cliché, but it works for me: Do what you love. Try your best to hold all other priorities secondary (although if you have a new baby of course sometimes that gets hard). I think our students are in a position where they really can be a bit choosy, and I think we’re preparing them in pretty decent shape in terms of job prospects, so they should really pay attention to seeking out something they are going to love.

What is some advice you have received that meant a lot to you?

The best advice that I’ve received was mostly by example. I had a one-year sabbatical with Louis Sokoloff, the inventor of deoxyglucose. For a year at the NIH, 1986-87, I saw him almost every day. This is someone twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, and of course I went to lunch each day with people who did have their Nobel Prize. What I learned from Sokoloff was modesty and simplicity and love for what you do. That whole experience meant a great deal to me. He didn’t advise me: he showed me.

What is your worst failure in your career and what did you learn from it?

I think I was raised to be too risk averse. That kept me from making leaps that I otherwise might have made. I won’t go into detail, but once when I had the seeds of a discovery—I had the data, it was right there—I just didn’t get it. I had all the seeds, but somehow I was holding myself back. Another time, at a site visit, the site visitors were saying, “Aren’t you worried that those two approaches don’t agree?” and I said in essence that we just pay attention to the one that we like. I’ve just been very hard on myself, but the point is there was a particular method of data reduction that was defective and that defect was there for me to see, but I thought that what we were applying the methods to was far more important and interesting than the fact that two methods that should have given equivalent answers didn’t. A missed opportunity.