Brown brings wide experience to AIP’s top job

How often does one get the opportunity to lead “a supremely important organization?” That’s the exuberant attitude Robert Brown brings to his new job as CEO of the American Institute of Physics (AIP). He says his experience prepares him for the job, which he describes as “a level of position I was interested in being challenged by. Everything I have done in my past lives comes together for this position. I need to know about publishing. I need to know about theory, computational simulations, experimental work across many disciplines, engineering of science into technology and products. For me, it’s the perfect confluence at this time in my life.”

Brown is from the UK, where he earned his physics bachelor’s degree and engineering PhD and spent a great part of his working life. Over the course of his career he has worked for a government lab, private industry, universities, and the UK’s Institute of Physics. The constant threads of his professional life have been “photon correlations and technology transfer.” He moved to the US in 2005 and became a citizen in 2011.

The 84-year-old not-for-profit AIP has 109 employees and an annual budget of $25 million. AIP Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary, publishes 18 print and 3 online journals. AIP is a federation of 10 physical sciences societies; it is the publisher of Physics Today.

Brown succeeds Fred Dylla at AIP’s helm. In mid-June, about two weeks into Brown’s tenure, Physics Today‘s Toni Feder chatted with him about his past experiences and his plans for AIP.

PT: What attracted you to physics?

BROWN: I am just very curious about how things work. Even at a very young age, and I am talking six, seven, eight, I was always getting junior books on optics, lenses and light, and things like that.

PT: Was either of your parents a scientist?

BROWN: Not at all. But my parents understood my technical bias from early years. Thank goodness they did something about it. I went to a specialist science and technical high school, so my education was somewhat deficient, shall we say, in classics and the arts, except for music. I have a real interest in that as well.

Also, a great-uncle was one of the members of the Robert Watson-Watt team during the invention and development of radar in the late 1930s and early 1940s for the defense of Britain. He was an influence in my choice to become a physicist and always with more of an applied bent.

PT: What did you do in university?

BROWN: I went to London University and studied with Samuel Tolansky, a professor of optics there. He was one of the very few recipients of Moon dust from the first Moon landing. NASA sent him samples. He hooked up an interferometer with a TV camera attached and showed the nation what he was measuring with samples of Moon dust particles. Working with a guy like that, when you are 17 or 18 years of age, is very exciting. It was a lot of fun and very motivating.

I did undergraduate work with him, and I decided at that time that I did not want to study as a postgraduate. I really wanted to get out into the real world and see how the physics I’d been learning was used in practical applications.

PT: Describe your career arc.

BROWN: I went first to an electronics company in Essex for a couple of years. We looked at sensors for guided missiles and things of that kind. But I very rapidly moved to Malvern Instruments in Worcestershire. And then rapidly moved from there to the Royal Radar Establishment, the UK’s premier electronics research and development center for military applications.

My great-uncle was there, and he was again an instrumental guide to me, in that he said, Why don’t you come work with the best people in Britain in science and technology? And he was absolutely right. Many of the leaders there had worked at Bell Labs. And they came back to Britain and were leading research teams in lasers, liquid crystals, single photon detections and correlations. Professor Roy Pike recruited me as an extremely young scientist to his photon counting, photon correlations, dynamic scattering, and laser spectroscopy labs. I stayed there 12 years. It was an unbelievable experience working with Eric Jakeman, Peter Pusey, Roy Pike, and all the other big names of that era as my colleagues.

I was part of the team, but I also was very much allowed to go my own way. I developed miniaturized light scattering technologies. My love of technology came out, and I filed my first few inventions in avalanche photodiodes, optical fibers for dynamic light scattering, stabilization of laser diodes, and statistical measurements.

I earned my PhD as an external student at the University of Surrey whilst conducting the research at the Royal Radar Establishment. My topic was photon correlation laser velocimetry in fluid dynamics.

PT: What were the next steps in your career?

BROWN: There comes a time when you want to branch off and do different things. Shortly after I left the Radar Establishment, I was offered the opportunity to assume the position of head of optoelectronics research and general manager at Sharp Laboratories of Europe, in Oxford. This lab had not been built yet. It was going to be the European development company for the Sharp Corporation of Japan, which at the time, I think, was the third-largest electronics company in the world. It was a vibrant and exciting time. In the 10 years I was there, we did a lot of work in diode development, on red light, blue light, gallium nitride, and liquid-crystal materials and devices development. Those were all key to Sharp’s core products at the time—the DVD laser diode, DVD player, and liquid-crystal television. They were fundamental technologies that went into products we now take for granted.

It’s a bit of a mantra of mine. I tell everybody that every single technology you use, every electronic device you are using, is just filled with physics of the 20th century.

I went from Sharp Laboratories to be the editorial director of the Institute of Physics [IOP] of the United Kingdom, the sister society of AIP.

I had a very steep learning curve [at IOP], rather like I have here [at AIP]. What I was trying to bring to the business of that time was to review and develop the operations of the journals from the point of view of an active, practicing physicist, and not from the point of view of a publishing company. It was a different approach.

PT: How and when did you get to the US?

BROWN: After the Institute of Physics publishing activities, I was recruited to Northern Ireland as director of nanotechnology, and professor of nanotechnology at Queen’s University in Belfast. I was cochair of four Optical Society of America photon correlation conferences. And during those conferences, I met my wife, who was the conference photographer at two of them. We had to make a big decision: Do we live in rainy but gorgeous Belfast with lovely Irish people all around us? Or do we live in sunny southern California? It didn’t take too long for us to decide to live in Orange County, California. That’s how I ended up in the United States.

PT: Did you have a job to come to?

BROWN: I came without a job. There are some great universities in the area, and with all those wonderful places, I felt that I would find somebody who was prepared to allow me to do research. But that’s not the way it turned out. Instead, a small startup company wanted a chief technology officer in photonics and displays, and I was recruited. I was there for three or four years. But working for a small company wasn’t something I had done before, and I wanted to get back into larger research programs. So I joined Rockwell Collins. I wanted a greater variety, and greater responsibility. I had a wonderful four years working with Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Labs.

PT: What was your role there?

BROWN: I was essentially leading sensor research, primarily focused on nanotechnology, using nanotechnology and nanophotonics to create ultrasmall, ultrahigh-resolution, ultrahigh-sensitivity sensing devices across the electromagnetic spectrum, from millimeter waves to the ultraviolet. It’s a vast amount of spectrum, all using different materials and different nanotechnology approaches. So it was tremendous fun and very productive. I think I developed 40 intellectual property disclosures, which led to 25 patent filings, of which 9 have been granted in the last year.

PT: You are also affiliated with the University of California, Irvine, correct?

BROWN: I have an appointment as adjunct full professor at the Beckman Laser Institute and Medical Clinic. I’m interacting with people who are doing tissue optics and breast cancer research. The work is led by Dr. Bruce Tromberg, and it’s an array of a few dozen scientists and engineers—all the types of people you need to bring together to make instruments based on lasers for penetrating flesh, and looking at the light that comes back out from the flesh. We hope in the fullness of time to develop instrumentation which will allow us to noninvasively detect tumors, perhaps leading to earlier surgery and more successful interventions.

That’s something I do absolutely and only in my spare time, when other people take off and are playing bridge or golf or whatever. It doesn’t in any way detract from the job I am doing here. In fact, if anything, it augments it, because it keeps me at the cutting edge of physics in medicine and physics in corporate exploitation.

PT: What attracted you to AIP?

BROWN: The opportunity to lead and shape physics and the physical sciences. Physics is the basis of everything around us, and I really want to help lead and steer the ship and make it ever more effective.

PT: What plans do you have for AIP?

BROWN: There will be a renewed and reimagined emphasis on the member societies and how we build out the number of physical scientists who are members of AIP through their member societies. That is a huge emphasis.

And I’m already interacting with a team here to emphasize the need to deliver product output from AIP to young scientists and members of member societies, not just in paper form, but very much with mobile platforms, so everybody gets information instantaneously. This is also about recruiting and retention of scientists today.

PT: Can you elaborate on those two aims?

BROWN: Member societies are our lifeblood. It’s a continual struggle to educate and to feed accurate information out to the member societies and their individual members, and to retain students as our trained capital for the development of science and technology into the future. We invest a huge amount of money in training scientists and engineers, but the retention of those trained engineers and scientists in the profession is quite small. I would love to see more of them stay in the profession which they first chose.

It’s on my hit list to see if we can have effective and valuable interactions with virtual member societies. And to see if we can attract new member societies, both from the United States and other countries.

Information technology, social media, Web, mobile devices—all of us these days are just living on these devices. They have become the new mode of communication and engagement. I definitely want to be focused on building those out and enhancing, creating new ways of using those media to connect physical scientists, not only in the United States, but much more widely. I am starting to strategize about how we can develop electronics communications on a global basis to augment what we already do at AIP, and again for the benefit of the member societies. We can raise their visibility and their impact on a global basis if we have a really concerted effort to develop our e-delivery, our e-activities, in their very many forms.

I am an applied physicist, and many of our member societies are very strongly applied. But I don’t actually think that the applied side is particularly well served in the current suite of operations, and that’s a side I’d like to strengthen.

I see a number of new roles we might develop. We are starting to research whether these kinds of ideas are actually feasible or whether they are flights of fancy at this point in time.

PT: How will you go about implementing changes?

BROWN: I am creating task forces so that my colleagues at AIP can contribute their imagination and their creativity into these potential developments—so that they have some skin in the game. I want them to have buy-in, and I want them to put into practice what they have helped invent. We are a team here.

PT: What do you see as the main challenges facing you?

BROWN: The biggest challenge is always coming up with really convincing arguments that we actually should be doing new things, that we should be investing our limited resources to try new things. Changing hearts and minds is always difficult for any organization.

PT: Is there anything you would like to add?

BROWN: After two weeks of extreme intensity, I am remarkably excited to be in this position. I think there is an immense amount we can do, and I look forward to the next few years, and maybe even more, of being very creative.