Interview with Dr. Yiran Chen
By 高妹（Fiona）, Oct 2015
Fiona: After you have graduated from Purdue with a Ph.D., you worked in industry for five years. Why did you decide to go back to academia? Has the industrial experience provided you with extra skills, vision, social network, or benefits to your current research in any other way?
Dr. Chen: I was asked this question by many of my colleagues and students. The truth is that the research lab I was working in was dismissed during the last economic crisis. The company deployed all the researchers to product departments as R&D engineers, including me.
However, having been “spoiled” by the freedom offered by the research lab, I was unable and unwilling to adapt myself to an ordinary engineer’s life. So after nine months, I quit and joined my current university. The manager did not even know I had a Ph.D. until my resignation, or maybe they simply did not care.
Fiona: When people talk about your achievements, they often mention your wife, who’s an equally accomplished engineer in the same field. How would you describe your professional relationship with her? Do you two discuss about work at home? Who wins more often when disputes occur?
Dr. Chen: My wife is my (without “one of the”) best partner in my career. We graduated from the same group in China and are currently working in the same department of our institution. As a couple, we simply 100% trust each other in all aspects.
(Fiona commented: That can be boring sometimes.)
For example, you never need to worry about if your editing on her draft would harm her feeling. I think both of us benefit significantly from this mutual trust, which makes our collaboration extremely efficient. Yes, we do discuss about work at home. We have many divergences in our work. But we always manage to reach an agreement when we are facing the students. Neither of us always wins, though my wife claims she is the one who often gives in (which is questionable, in my humble opinion).
Fiona: “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) Related to the last question, what do you think is the overall condition of engineering women in industry or academia, in terms of competence, promotional opportunities, peer recognition, etc.? Do they tend to be better than men with regard to certain skills? Are there areas they need to strengthen?
Dr. Chen: Women are normally considered as “minorities” in engineering. Under this presumption, the current systems of both industry and academia provide women engineers and professors with many additional opportunities. In fact, I think academia offers more than industry through creating special programs or considerations in hiring and research funding.
A female engineer or professor is also more visible (say, easier to be noticed or remembered) during daily working contacts. Nonetheless, female engineers and professors often encounter more difficulties when being considered for administrative positions.
In academia, my observation is that female professors are more aggressive (of course, not everyone) than their counterparts in industry. I am not sure whether it means that academic life is harsher, or only the “aggressive” women would choose academia. I don’t see any difference between male or female engineers from technical perspectives, but apparently female engineers take more responsibilities for their families than male engineers. That may explain some of our observations.
Fiona: Your 35-page single-spaced CV told me you must be a genius as well as an extremely busy person. How could you find time for serving as journal editors, conference organizers, panel reviewers, and numerous service and dissertation committees, while maintaining high productivity with several ongoing federally funded projects (there are 14 manuscripts under review at this moment!)? Do you have secrets in time management?
Dr. Chen: You have to prioritize them and attend to the most important tasks first. Not everything is equally important and their value alters at different phases of your career. I work hard, of course, but in academia almost everybody (if not all) is working hard.
If I have any secret, I think that is probably motivating my team effectively: my students participate in writing proposals, driving meetings with collaborators and funding agencies, and helping with many administrative and logistic duties of mine. Through learning from these extra activity, they become well prepared for the “cruel” society they will be facing upon graduation.
Fiona: Considering the short duration you have worked as a college professor, the number of students and postdocs you have trained is impressive. Do you mentor them on an individual basis or rely mostly on lab culture and peer supervision?
Dr. Chen: We have two types of meetings – weekly 1-1’s and small study-group meetings. We have only one general group meeting per semester because it is hard to find a meeting room for 40 people and such a meeting is often inefficient. With a hierarchical personnel structure, senior students help me mentor the juniors.
I monitor students’ research progress though 1-1 meetings, which I try my best to protect even considering my busy travel schedule, as well as weekly reports. I usually tell them what I want to see rather than what they need to do. They figure out the details by themselves or with other students.
Luckily, our group is sufficiently large so that they can always find an expert to answer their questions. I have never laid off any students (so far), but our peer pressure is huge with so many productive members. In short, we run as an efficient team, in which individual genius is not essential.
Fiona: Now that all of you students are productive and competent, can you tell which ones are more likely to succeed as scientists, which ones should aim at industrial leadership? Has anyone disappointed you with his/her decision?
Dr. Chen: First of all, not ALL of them are productive or competent. People likes to imagine that we have different requirements of personal characteristics for scientists or industry leaders. Unfortunately, this presumption does not exist. These two roles share many common expectations from personality perspectives: persistence, diligence, teamworking, … I am happy as long as my students become successful, no matter in academia or industry.
Fiona: Hollywood likes to portrait us scientists as long gray haired nerds who have little idea about how the society outside our labs functions. Tell us about the online bookstore you cofounded as a college student. Are you still participating in the management? Do you have plans for other types of business in the future?
Dr. Chen: I quit from the online store business around 2004 and am no longer a part of the team. But many of the people I worked with have become important in internet industry in China now. That was one of my most valuable investments (in terms of personal connections). Also, if you have gone through the whole process of building a startup, you would know whom you want to work with, what you can and cannot do.
In China, there is a popular saying, “personal connection is the first productive force”. Although it is a joke, it states a truth that your reputations and personal connections are vital for your career, and I carefully maintain them. I like trying new things and I will experiment with some start-up in the future. In fact, I think we have already come up with some good ideas now and we’ll see.
Fiona: Entrepreneurial mindset is currently a hot topic in the engineering disciplines. For students who are still pursuing their degrees, do you think it helps to bring up their awareness of industrial opportunities, risk management, etc., or would you rather have them focus on basic engineering skills, e.g., signal processing, without being overly distracted?
Dr. Chen: Although I started my own company when I was a M.S student, I am generally against the idea to sacrifice your study for a commercial opportunity. I still remember when I told the advisor of my M.S. thesis about how “successful” my start-up was and learned many things I could not learn from the school, he said:
“I agree with you that you might learn something you cannot learn from the school, but the reason why we still have school is because there are also many things you can ONLY learn from the school.” I will keep this word in my mind forever and share with all my students.
Fiona: Would you also like to share the experience of organizing the concert for two famous singers at Tsinghua? Could you have become an artist yourself?
Dr. Chen: Ahha! They are very famous now and I have witnessed their growth in our young age and early stage of their career. I was the producer of that concert, and I still consider it as one of my proudest accomplishments.
You wouldn’t believe we only spent RMB12000 organizing the whole concert, and I still owe one of the two singers RMB2000 for the recording tapes we used. I met them again at the 60th anniversary party of the department I graduated from, and we were glad to see all of us doing well in our own careers. My mom has a B.S. degree in music, but I failed to inherit the talents from her. I enjoy art and music, without ever pretending to be an expert.
Fiona: Did the concert bring back enough gross to cover the expenses?
Dr. Chen: No. If I remember correctly, the admission is free because charging ticket price took a long time to get approval. You can imagine how hard to get one ticket. Many famous singers or musician attended the concert: Lao Lang, Lu Gengxu, Gao Xiaosong, Li Jie, … We had an exclusive party for the whole night in a pub named “BlueJay” near the university after the concert.
Fiona: Your research covers the areas of embedded systems, memory and sensing, nano-devices, etc. Which topic do you think has the potential of making the largest impact? If you are asked to make a prediction, what types of new business related to EECS are likely to prosper in the rest of the century?
Dr. Chen: As computer engineers, my wife and I started to gain attentions for our research on emerging memory technologies. We recently shifted to brain-inspired computing, which is believed to revolutionize computer industry by allowing computer think like a human. We are still far from this ultimate goal but we have already seen some lights above the horizon.
I like to use the following sentence to summarize our research: “I imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the difference between humanity and technology fades, where the soul and silicon chip unite.” (Raymond Kurzweil, “The Age of Intelligent Machines”).
