Transcript

Derek Smith:

Hello and welcome to Baylor Connections, a conversation series with the people shaping our future. Each week we go in depth with Baylor leaders, professors, and more, discussing important topics in higher education, research, and student life. I'm Derek Smith, and our guest today is Dr. Linda Olafsen. Dr. Olafsen serves as associate professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Baylor. She joined the Baylor faculty in 2006 after serving on the faculty at the University of Kansas. Also a postdoctoral researcher at the Naval Research Laboratory from her laboratory in the Baylor Research and Innovation Collaborative, better known as the BRIC. Her research focuses on semiconductor laser devices and nanomaterials for optoelectronic applications. She's with us today on the program. Dr. Olafsen, great to have you here. Thanks so much for joining us.

Linda Olafsen:

Thank you. Glad to be here.

Derek Smith:

So we're going to dive into your research and what that means, but before we do let's start off from a slightly different angle. As we talk about semiconductors and optoelectronic applications, let's say for lack of a better term, what's the most cool thing to you about what you get to do? The most fun?

Linda Olafsen:

In addition to all the fascinating scientific stuff, I enjoy working with students. So it's really fun to see a student discover something and to see a student learn and develop critical thinking skills. That might be in the classroom, being able to solve problems. Some students think I'm a really hard professor. I give them a lot of homework and so they'll get frustrated because there's so much homework, and then later they'll say, ooh, you've really prepared me for the next class or the next thing. I love being in the lab with my students and being able to show them how to solve problems. If they see how I think about a problem, that helps them learn how to attack things and discover that as well. So that's a really fun aspect of my job.

Derek Smith:

Oh, absolutely. Well, that work you're doing with them, could you help us unpack that a little bit? Break it down a little for us.

Linda Olafsen:

So I study semiconductor materials and devices. Semiconductors are things that we can scale down. They're not metals. They're not insulators. So we think about, oh, metals conduct current, great. Well, we can use semiconductors to help make lasers, LEDs, other switches or things like that, other kinds of devices, which is fun. I'm particularly interested in doing that to make infrared lasers, things that are safe for your eyes and can have all kinds of applications in terms of a shining light through the atmosphere. It transmits through the atmosphere, but it's safe for your eyes. It's not absorbing it, so it's not like, ooh, you just shined a laser pointer in my eye. That was really dangerous and painful. No, we're looking at things where you can have broad applications and they're also useful medically or for chemical sensing, environmental sensing, because you can apply them and say, great, what happens? I can have a molecule vibrator rotate and it's going to absorb that light, that way I can use it as a sensor. Or we can use this to transmit light through the atmosphere for defense applications. So really, you can make things safe for other people because you can have things that are safe defense or safe medically as well.

Derek Smith:

Visiting with Dr. Linda Olafsen. As we envision this work a little bit, how should listeners envision semiconductors?

Linda Olafsen:

So I'll show a picture in my class that kind of puts them in between, if you think about a metal pot or something. It conducts a heat. If I think of a styrofoam cup, it doesn't conduct at all. That's why I put my coffee in a coffee cup like that because it doesn't conduct that. Also electrically, that happens to. Metals conduct current well, insulators don't. Semiconductors are kind of material that's in between those two. In being in between, we're able to switch them on and off, make diodes, for example, and diodes are useful for switches or they're also useful for light emitters, and so we can can use them that way. So semiconductors are in your computers, they're in all kinds of light devices, so they're all over the place whether you realize it or not.

Derek Smith:

Well, you just gave us some good engineering 101 there. Any other foundational elements that are helpful for us to process as we think about this?

Linda Olafsen:

Absolutely. One of the goals of my research is to make more efficient devices, more efficient lasers. What do I want to do? I want light. I want to get light out of all my devices and I want to do that for the minimal cost. Cost here would be the energy I need to put into the system. So the engineering 101 or kind of physics 101, however you want to think about it, is we need to conserve energy. I put energy in, I'm going to get energy out. Now the energy I put in, I'm not going to get all of it out as the light that I want, but I want the most of that to get converted. That's the most efficient device that I can have. So I'm really excited when I can get as many photons, chunks of light, out for my devices. So I'm trying to make the most efficient device that I can. So from an introductory principle, energy conservation, I want to get the most of the kind of energy I want, which is light. I don't want heat. I don't want other things. I want light out. That's what we're trying to do.

Derek Smith:

What factors play into that as you test and look for the most efficient means of getting that light out there? What are some of the factors that play into that?

Linda Olafsen:

One of the thing is how well you can connect or integrate materials together. So part of what we're trying to do to get the infrared wavelengths of light out, there's lots of things you go, oh yeah, I can have something that admits in the red, or emits in the green, or something like that. But to get the longer wavelengths of light out, naturally occurring materials don't necessarily give you that. So what we'll do is layer different materials together and take advantage of either the composition of the material or the thickness of the material in order to tune that and say, all right, I want to push this out, I want to push the frontiers of this and get a wavelength of light out. So we can push that and do that by engineering materials, but then you can make things less efficient by how they couple. So part of it is saying, oh, I'm going to put different layers of semiconductors on each other to get a different wavelength of light out. That's great, but then how am I going to get, I talked about energy, how am I going to get electrons, how am I going to get current into that device to get the light out? Well that's means I have to make efficient electrical connections, ones that aren't very resistant. We think about resistors, kind of an intro engineering, as well. I don't want this to act like a really big resistor. I want it to act like a very low resistance in order to get the most current in and get the most light out.

Derek Smith:

You mentioned physics, Dr. Olafsen. What are some of the disciplines that your students need to be well-versed in to do the work effectively?

Linda Olafsen:

This work is really interdisciplinary, often. So I call on their physics knowledge, I call in their chemistry knowledge a little bit, and just basic engineering principles. So a lot of this falls under an interdisciplinary nature. So when I teach particularly upper level electives or classes, I'll say, hey, do you remember this from chemistry? Do you remember this? I was teaching something yesterday that all the students, even though there's graduate students and juniors and seniors in there, I called on something they would have learned in their freshman physics class in order to understand the principle of how molecules rotate and vibrate and things like that.

Derek Smith:

If we went and visited your lab, Dr. Olafsen, take us on a little mental tour of what we'd see.

Linda Olafsen:

Okay. You'd walk in the lab and if we had a laser on, you'd actually run directly into a curtain, because we want to keep it safe for everyone. So we have a light on that tells you, hey, the laser's on. You go, why are the lasers on? You just told me you wanted to make eye safe lasers. I do, but we use other lasers that are higher power and potentially can hurt your eyes. So we're real careful, we'll have goggles in place and things like that. But we have a couple interesting and cool lasers in the lab. They're on big optical tables that are a 4 foot by 10 or 12 foot things with drilled holes and things like that so we can attach optics and mirrors and all sorts of things. The windows are actually covered, which is fun, because what are we trying to do? Because we want to have infrared light. We don't want to be flooded by sunlight, which is kind of sad. You go, oh, okay, I don't have a view. But that's okay. We have blackout shields and things like that to keep the lab safe and also just to keep it more efficient so that we can can align and tune and see. There's other electronics in the lab for making connections to the lasers and devices, how we are going to bond wires to our really tiny devices that are either at the micrometer or nanometer scale even. So we're going to do that. We'll have different meters to measure currents and voltages. A lot of our experiments we perform at low temperatures, and so we have liquid nitrogen, and so we can cool things down that way. Now in a real world device, are you going to want liquid nitrogen? No. But we're trying to develop them and say, all right, how do they behave as the temperature increases and we get up to room temperature and can cool them efficiently? So we've got some really fun and interesting toys that you may or might not recognize as you walk in, but help us to measure the electrical properties, optical properties, temperatures, all sorts of good things.

Derek Smith:

Maybe you mentioned one there with the temperature, but what are some of the challenges in being able to put something together that is useful? I mean obviously if it's something that heats up rapidly and can't be cooled down with anything other than liquid nitrogen, that's a problem.

Linda Olafsen:

Exactly. That comes to some of the interfacing problems, too, saying, all right, how do we couple heat out of this? You'll attach a device to a copper block, for example, because copper's a good thermal conductor. So we'll attach our semiconductors to copper blocks and then that helps draw the heat away because we can attach that to something else that'll suck the heat away basically and conduct it away and help us there. One of the things that we're working on is integrating graphene in our materials. Graphene is a two dimensional layer of carbon. It's like having just a carbon sheet there. But you go, oh, how do I integrate a two dimensional material with a three dimensional material, whether it's putting the graphene on a semiconductor or putting a metal on that to be able to make those connections and efficiently couple heat or current into the material? So those are definitely challenges for us and those are the sorts of things that we measure and study. So you're trying to get to an engineering device, but you're also studying some of the fundamental science that goes into that in order to say, all right, how can we advance this field?

Derek Smith:

What are some of the research projects that you've been a part of that have been most meaningful or most interesting to you?

Linda Olafsen:

I love projects where I can tell people what the human impact is when they get done, and be able to tell my mom and my dad or my kids, here's why you care. One of those that I worked on back at KU was on glucose monitoring. So we were making semiconductor devices in order to measure glucose levels in the fluid that's just underneath your skin. So instead of doing a prick and getting blood, you can actually tell what glucose levels are also from the fluid that's basically just underneath your skin. When we announced that project and got funding from NIH for that research and stuff, I had people calling me saying, hey, my daughter has diabetes and how can we help and how can we participate in that? It really tugs at your heartstrings because you're wanting to help them and do that and advance things really quickly. So we work on that. It's always fun to set a record and say, hey, we set this temperature record. But records get broken, so you enjoy that and try and try to push the frontiers there. So that part is fun. Then we're working on some projects now with Baylor Scott & White where we're trying to help neurosurgeons or cardiothoracic surgeons to monitor or have devices to treat aneurysms or to detect the levels of oxygen in the brain during a surgery. Things like that. When we can make achievements and advance that, that's really exciting, because you know that you're helping the community and helping people's lives and improving their quality of life as you go forward.

Derek Smith:

So another application for that, as we talk about that, would be the health care field.

Linda Olafsen:

Absolutely, mm-hmm (affirmative).

Derek Smith:

Well, what does that mean to you? You talk about being at the BRIC, you partner with Baylor Scott & White, what's the environment like here where maybe there's those opportunities for partnership opportunities to find people here in Central Texas for those real world applications?

Linda Olafsen:

It is wonderful to have colleagues both in engineering, over in the sciences, can talk to folks in the BSB. As you said, other opportunities in Central Texas, love that. We're able to have better opportunities to seek funding, seek research, and all that because we have those collaborations. So that makes us more competitive as we seek funding from national or federal organizations, or we seek from industrial partners, things like that, in order to do that. I even got an email from someone in Temple yesterday asking about our research, a medical doctor, saying, hey, how can we advance this, or how might this tie into another field? So being able to be a resource here at Baylor is great, and then being able to partner with either our colleagues here or particularly medical ones are exciting, and Baylor historically has had a lot of interest in health sciences and linking to those sorts of projects as well. Particularly as a ministry.

Derek Smith:

This is Baylor Connections. We are visiting with Dr. Linda Olafsen, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. People have read into Illuminate a little bit, Baylor's strategic plan to see that material science is one of the five signature academic initiatives. I know that at Baylor, you and your engineering computer science colleagues really do a lot in that area. How does the research you're doing help people get a picture of what that is, fit into that broader material science picture?

Linda Olafsen:

Absolutely. What I do, I'm actually a member of the Materials Research Society, which sounds fun, but that's actually an international organization. So the material science is a very large and interdisciplinary field. There are a handful of researchers already at Baylor both in engineering and computer sciences in terms of electrical engineering and mechanical engineering and we're aspiring maybe to have some chemical engineering down the road as well, as well as over in physics and chemistry a little bit. So it really gives us an interdisciplinary opportunity and effort. Some universities have a materials science department, and sometimes typically it's an engineering, doesn't have to be, but it tends to draw on students or professors or people with backgrounds in all those different science and engineering areas. So it's not just the, hey, I'm a material scientist. When you go talk you're going to end up with a lot of different folks. So it was exciting to have Baylor realize that we've developed a core group and some expertise in that area and that that area is worth investing in and worth growing.

Derek Smith:

What does it mean to you and your colleagues when you think about that fact that material science is one of the five signature academic initiatives that was really identified as an interdisciplinary area to focus on some of those big strategic grand problems that are around the globe? What does it mean to you to see that as really kind of a priority in the university?

Linda Olafsen:

I'm excited about that and it gives me hope for building even more infrastructure. Baylor has built a tremendous amount of infrastructure through Illuminate and previous visions that have come up to to this point, and saying, hey, we're interested in making that investment. Growing that is important, because honestly it takes personnel, it takes equipment. So we have a clean room in the BRIC, which is great and has equipment, but it'll help when we have more equipment in there that helps us to accomplish those things. Then that also makes Baylor a resource for local industry and such to be able to advance that field. So we're excited to have those resources and potential resources or just that priority as we develop those resources going forward and then be able to apply that even to other initiatives as well.

Derek Smith:

The School of Engineering and Computer Science is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, so an exciting milestone. What are some of the ways you've seen that department grow since you arrived?

Linda Olafsen:

We definitely have more active research and we've just grown people. There's more people around, there's more faculty and staff that are working on important problems. But the BRIC has built out. Our floor, for example, wasn't completely finished through electrical engineering, and now the whole backside of our second floor at the BRIC is developed, and the mechanical engineers are developing more of their space. So you really see more labs developing, more research coming online, and probably more collaborations and things like that as well. So you just see that. Then there's more opportunities for the students to get involved in research as well, both undergraduates and graduate students. So while some of them will go off and do internships in the summers, others will stay and do research in our laboratories, and that certainly helps move things forward and the students get excited about that and having those opportunities as well.

Derek Smith:

Visiting with Dr. Linda Olafsen here on Baylor Connections. Dr. Olafsen, you've talked about that mission of helping others, the faith aspect. When you view your discipline and your work, how do you see that in that broader Baylor mission and certainly in your faith coming to bear in that?

Linda Olafsen:

I love that I can share my faith at Baylor. That was something that was exciting. When they ask you for a faith statement as part of your faculty interview, that usually, well, not usually, but can turn off a faculty candidate and they'll just stop their application, whereas I was so excited that somebody wanted to hear about my faith and such. So it is great for us to be able to share that with each other as a faculty, it's great with students, and that can manifest in different ways. It can just be encouraging the students. I sometimes will stop and before an exam, pray for the students. Sometimes they think that I made a really hard exam and that's why I'm making up, praying ahead of time. But it's an opportunity to show that to them and reach out to them. Then there's just some of the practical aspects of why does this research matter? So there are different opportunities in engineering for students to participate in humanitarian engineering projects or trips. Even some of the junior and senior design projects themselves, it's great to see the human impact and that you can can reach out. So it's kind of being the hands of Christ in some ways for students and for faculty to be able to develop these projects and apply them and then have something that helps others on top of just being able to talk to students about Jesus, which is great.

Derek Smith:

When you envision an R1, tier 1, Christian research university with an even broader impact in higher education, what does that vision mean to you?

Linda Olafsen:

It's important to me that that's an and and not an or. So what I mean, that we're Christian first, and we do high quality research, and that you don't have to give up your faith, you don't have to give up your academic standards, in order to do that. So we can have high quality research, we can do it the right way, we can do that with integrity, and hopefully achieve that in not a cutthroat atmosphere that some places will have because it's all about the money or it's all about the publications. While there is a strong push for that at Baylor, and that's an important push, being able to do that with the heart of Christ in there is really important. So being able to do that and influence the world, our students, and all for Christ in that process is really important.

Derek Smith:

Visiting with Dr. Linda Olafsen. Dr. Olafsen, looking ahead, what's next for your research? What are some areas that you're most excited to focus on or continue on?

Linda Olafsen:

So while the fundamental focus in our lab has been developing infrared materials for sensors and lasers and such, we're very interested in biomedical applications. So I mentioned teaming up with Baylor Scott & White, and neurosurgeons and cardiothoracic surgeons there with Dr. Keith Schubert, who's also in Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Dr. Jeffrey Olafsen, who I know from the physics department as well. We're able to collaborate and we're working on a programmable surgical wire. I'm interested, of course, in attaching infrared sensors and such to that. But the idea is that we would be able to navigate arteries and be able to do sensing or deliver medical treatment devices for treating aneurysms, for detecting oxygen or other important chemical species of things like that, in the brain, near the heart, different ways. So we're excited about that because you have this biomedical application. We're working on different sensing mechanisms for that so if we can program it, we're not flooding people with X-rays. Not just the patient, because the patient, they're kind of in a critical thing, it's a onetime thing, but for the doctors, they're getting prolonged exposure to X-rays as they do this imaging. So we're working on a device that navigates more readily and more easily, can deliver the tools that are needed in order to perform treatment, and then also can image. If we can do that, you can also think about imaging in a battlefield or imaging in a remote location, which would also be a great service because you could have a more economical imaging modality for folks, and even maybe be able to do remote treatment. Because you could say, all right, let's do this over some video connection, and be able to provide treatment in that way.

Derek Smith:

Well, that's exciting. We look forward to seeing more about that and the great work that you and your colleagues are doing in the ECS and throughout the BRIC.

Derek Smith:

Dr. Linda Olafsen, thanks so much. It's been great to have you here on the program.

Linda Olafsen:

Thank you very much.

Derek Smith:

Dr. Linda Olafsen, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, our guest today here on Baylor Connections. I'm Derek Smith. A reminder, you can hear this and other programs online at baylor.edu/connections. Thanks for joining us here on Baylor Connections.