User Portlet

I am a physicist by training (B.A., M.S. from University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D. from Stanford) who has worked at the intersection of physics and chemistry. I did post-docs in the chemistry dept. of the University of Washington and the chemical sciences division of Brookhaven National Laboratory, where I became involved in the physics and chemistry of the glow-discharge deposition of amorphous hydrogenated silicon for photovoltaic applications. After that I went into the photovoltaics industry, which is where I started using Mathematica for designing deposition systems and modeling charge transport in solar cells. Eventually I found myself supervising process development at the company and decided I needed to know something about management. I went into an MBA night-school program at Temple University and specialized in operations management., as that was the most quantitative specialization. That led to my interest in optimization. When solar energy became too chaotic for me, I went to work for Lockheed-Martin, doing the uncertainty analysis for the launch risk assessment for the Cassini Mission to Saturn. After that I worked on supply chain optimization at a small company and then retired. My interest in optimization also led me to work with Janos Pinter in developing a Mathematica interface to his LGO global optimization software, MathOptimizer Professional.