Idea Vaccuum

Yesterday the smartest person I know left our lab. He was a post-doc here for the last 3 years, and is returning to Germany to start down the path for becoming a professor in Munich. Originally he was supposed to be here for a year, but ended up staying much longer because (in his own words) "progress was pretty slow." If you look at his first week on the job and last week on the job, that actually seems true. The first week he was here, our PI (principle investigator / professor-type person that runs the lab) told him that he should work on building a swept-wavelength laser for imaging the retina. Last week, we finished taking the first 3D datasets of human (ie, my own) retinas with just such a laser. In keeping with the academic tradition of finishing everything at the very last second, we were scheduling the imaging runs around the times when people were showing up at his apartment to buy his furniture. But in the end, everything worked out.

What happened in the 3 years in between is a bit hard to describe...basically he spent the first year trying a bunch of unsuccesful designs that were pretty much doomed to failure. In the second year though, he came up with a new kind of laser that is dramatically changing the OCT (that's optical coherence tomography) world...basically we can now image much, much faster than was ever possible, and suddenly things like imaging the entire esophagus or the entire retina in just a few seconds are looking reasonable. Over the last year, I was lucky enough to work with him on refining the lasers and doing some initial demonstration experiments, and man, the future's so bright I gotta wear laser safety shades.

There's a saying in academia that when you get your B.Sc. degree, you think you know everything. When you get your M.Sc. degree, you realize that you know nothing. And when you get your Ph.D., you realize that nobody else knows anything either. I think that's pretty true...there were many, many times when we were working in the lab all day, getting nowhere, and then one of us would yawn, stretch, and say "you know, we have NO IDEA what we're doing, do we?" And it was true! But somehow we ended up destroying all the OCT imaging speed records out there...the thing about a guy like him is that he knows how to stay creative and inventive even in the face of terrible results and massive frustration. I learned from him that even if you don't know what you're doing, you have to keep thinking and pushing and eventually you'll find that you're not quite as confused as you used to be.

The lab will miss him, and his never-ending flow of ideas...me, I'm just thankful that I had almost a year to learn from him.