This interview with Kristina Johnson, dean of the Pratt School of Engineering, is the fifth in a series of Oak Room Interviews, designed to shed light on the personalities of campus figures in an informal setting. The interview was conducted by John Bush, editorial page editor of The Chronicle.
JB: Did you watch the women's basketball team play Monday?
KJ: Yes, I did.... I'm going to San Antonio to watch them in the Final Four.
JB: Did you play sports in high school or college?
KJ: When I was in high school, it was before Title IX so there were pretty limited opportunities for girls to play sports. We had swimming, tennis and track--which I was good at none of them. We did not have team sports like volleyball, basketball, hockey, lacrosse--so I actually played on the boy's lacrosse team my senior year, which was very brutal. It's a different game from the women's sport--I played at Stanford on the field hockey and lacrosse teams, which was exciting and very, very fun and a big part of my undergraduate education.
JB: How do you see the Stanford undergraduate experience comparing to the Duke undergraduate experience?
KJ: I see Stanford and Duke as very similar institutions. I find at Duke that everyone is very supportive in helping you be the best. And we want our students and faculty to succeed in outrageous ways....
JB: What motivated you to go after three degrees from Stanford?
KJ: I hadn't actually intended to do that. I was pretty serious about sports and athletics and had great dreams for my field hockey career. I planned to get a masters and work part-time so that I could train for the '80 or '84 Olympics. There were a couple of things that got in the way. One was raw talent; at the very upper levels I realized there was a difference between what I had and what everybody else had who was on the Olympic teams, but I didn't know at the time, which is a good thing. Otherwise, you never push yourself to see how good you can be if you think from the beginning that you can't do it. So I learned an awful lot about competition itself by trying to compete at the Olympic level.
And then I also had a very serious illness that manifested itself senior year in Hodgkin's disease, of which some of the first symptoms are anemia. I found that I would run and run and run and then just crash. I did n't think much of it; I thought that everyone else was feeling the same way. The harder I trained, my endurance just didn't build up. I kept going to the doctor and never was diagnosed until I found some lumps on my collar. And then I went through a bunch of surgeries and radiation therapy, and 20 years later, I'm surviving, which is great. And I think that I, at a point, I realized my career was probably better being in the classroom than being on the hockey field. That's when I decided... to go on and get the Ph.D.
JB; What were the three degrees?
KJ: I got a bachelor's, a master's and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering--'79, '81 and '84.
JB: How do you feel that electrical engineering has changed since computers came into play?
KJ: When I was a first-year student at Stanford in '75, we didn't have PCs. In fact, I remember being with a good colleague on what we called the Trash 80--the 8080 processor.... In my first computer class, I punched cards, and I'm not that old. It wasn't as endemic. We had e-mail, we had talk/chat--which we thought was marvelously unique, and it was just confined to Stanford. We ran our computer programs on HP minicomputers, which were just awful classes--a real struggle. To see the evolution of the past 25 years has been just phenomenal. And as a result, I think that all our students--no matter what career they're in--need to be proficient in running software packages that can do simple or complicated computations--trends, statistics, those sort of things. So, I think the role of science and engineering could be to develop some courses that would be very accessible to all students here at Duke; that's something that we're looking at in our curriculum revision, among many other things.
JB: How do you feel engineering fits into a university where most of the students are liberal arts majors?
KJ: We often talk about the benefit to coming to Duke to do engineering is that, within the context of a great liberal arts university is a technical education so that our students are [working with] future leaders in political science, government, business, economics.... I think, vice versa, the advantage of us to Trinity students is to build ties to a network in the technical community and to be able to take courses in technical subjects that will give them a context for our ever-evolving, complex society that is becoming much more technical.
Now, that's what we talk about; the real question is whether we can integrate the two so that students can get the best of both worlds. I think that the FOCUS programs are doing that marvelously....
JB: Did you anticipate as much fundraising or recruitment when you became dean?
KJ: I had not done very much fundraising before coming here, except for several start-up companies that I had been involved with but that's a different kind of fundraising. That was a real eye-opener because it's so important for the future of the University, especially for a private university, as well as our [engineering] school.
I knew that we were going to go into an extensive recruiting campaign because of "Duke at the Millennium," an extensive piece written by John Strohbehn had written, who was provost at the time I was hired. And with a new provost coming in, both provosts had articulated a vision for expanding the School of Engineering in terms of faculty. I was really excited about that, and one of the key aspects of coming here was to guide that expansion of faculty, of resources, of facilities--of programs that we couldn't even envision.
JB: How do you attract more women to engineering at the undergraduate and graduate levels?
KJ: Having more women faculty as role models and under-represented minority faculty members helps recruit a diverse undergraduate and graduate population--no doubt about it. Because they can look and make them say, "I look like her or I look like him." So we have a plan in the Pratt School to double our diversity as part of our five-year strategic plan and contribution to the University's plan....
So, it comes back to recruitment. We've really created an incentive for departments to hire women and under-represented minority candidates, which is working very well and we've had some awesome candidates this year. We're one of the top programs in the country in terms of percentage women and that's a real credit to our existing faculty.... We have a top-ranked biomedical program that's very attractive to women--so that's very helpful as well....
JB: How do you get these groups interested in pursuing engineering to begin with?
KJ: It's very important to the future of our country to attract a diverse population to engineering, and the reason for that is I really believe that problems facing our global society require more engineering and more science talent than we are currently educating in this country. It's a great career because it's one way that we can rebuild the middle class in this country. What used to be considered a moral obligation is now a pragmatic reality. Fewer students are going into engineering--it's been documented by the National Science Foundation. And if we only have 20 percent of women nationally--30 percent at Duke--and fewer than that in under-represented minorities, you are really creating as--we move forward with better jobs in technology-- haves and have-nots. We cannot afford not to empower all students to get that kind of education.
How you increase interest is capturing imagination at a young age. Studies have shown that women and minority students turn off to math concepts sometime between the third and sixth grades. I think an emphasis on math and science, making it relative to their lives at a young age. So you get them to look at something and ask, "How does that work?" Because that's what engineers do--they like to figure out how things work. They design things to work under certain constraints. Whether they're cost, performance, quality, music, the arts, video, etc. doesn't matter. We learn how things work, and we design things to work....
JB: Where are you from?
KJ: I grew up in Denver, went to Stanford, and have lived overseas for several years. Then I came back to Boulder, Colo., where I taught for 14 years on the faculty there. Mainly, I came back to Colorado because my mother was still alive. There's an old Irish saying, "A mother can take care of seven kids, but seven kids can't take care of a mother." Well, that was definitely ingrained in my mind when I came back.... I was number six.
JB: What made you start founding companies?
KJ: Well, I had not wanted to start a company; I wanted to license our patents to other companies that are in the business of making products, and licensing and technology is a very difficult thing.... I was passionate about research, students wanted to form companies, and I wanted to help them realize their dreams. I graduated 17 Ph.D. students and it's sort of funny that 15 of them started up or wanted to start up companies; one went into academics....
When we couldn't get companies to license our products and believe in our technology, then it really was no choice either to let the technology die or to try to form some ventures. I went half-time at the University of Colorado, but I still [worked] 100 percent--still taught a course each semester, still ran my research group, still directed the Engineering Research Council--only getting paid half-time.... Then the next year, I took a two-year leave of absence but still ran my research group, still taught a course because if I didn't, it wouldn't have been taught. So, I was making nothing and doing pretty much everything I did before....
JB: What drew you to photonics?
KJ: I thought it was magic. I did a science fair project on using holographic techniques to measure growth in fungus... and went to an international science fair and won first and second place. I figured, "Wow, this really is magic," and wanted to learn more about it. When I went to Stanford, I studied with Professor Joseph Goodman, who later became my Ph.D. adviser, about using holographic techniques to image and visualize medical data. Plus, you could see it. I always worked in invisible wavelengths.... You have to wear goggles or trace pieces of phosphorous cards around the room [to see it], which is a little more challenging....
JB: What do you see yourself doing in 10 years?
KJ: I have no idea. Probably something in industry. I'm thinking there may be some ventures that we'll spin out, and it could be fun to be involved in those. It might be fun just to take a year off and think about what company to start from scratch with everything learned up to now. It's fortunate to have gone through a couple of start-ups and come out relatively unscathed and to have had some successes.... I'm intrigued with the fun technology to make a global impact, including security....
I never thought that I would be dean and that sort of happened; I never wanted to start a company and that happened. So, it's really hard to say.... I teased my friends that I went through my mid-life crisis at 26. Prior to 1970, Hodgkin's was not the curable cancer it is today.... I worked hard; the one thing that I wanted to do when I got cancer was that I wanted to finish my Ph.D.--that was my singular goal--so I remember sitting there in the amphitheater on a sunny, gorgeous day, popping the champagne they passed out to graduating [students], just soaking it all up. And that's what I wish for all our students here when they graduate, just to soak it all up and take in their wonderful accomplishments for four years.
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