Work hard, weigh choices, ignore stupid comments, have faith

Zelda Gills’s mom always told her she would grow up to be a doctor. She did, but not a medical doctor like her mom, a nurse, was priming her for—including teaching her medical shorthand and Latin names for diseases from the time she started kindergarten. Instead, a PhD in physics put the ‘Dr.’ in front of her name.

Gills’s achievement is especially impressive given that, as a young child she was doing so poorly in school that some of her teachers thought she was mentally retarded. She remembers falling to her knees and praying, ‘God, please make me smart so I don’t have to be poor.’

In hindsight, Gills thinks she was slightly dyslexic. In any case, with her own hard work and her mother’s relentless tutoring, Gills did well. By the time she reached high school, she wanted to trade her academic magnet school for ‘a normal high school experience, with a band and cheerleading. I wanted to run for homecoming queen.’ Her mother, who was raising her alone, agreed—on the condition that Gills not only excel at her new school’s curriculum, but also keep up with math and science classes at the magnet school.

After high school Gills majored in physics at Southern University and A&M College in her home town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As an intern at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Allentown, Pennsylvania, following her junior year, she says, ‘I got the bug to do optics and lasers.’ She went on to earn her PhD in optical physics from Georgia Institute of Technology and then embarked on a career in industry. She has been at Lockheed Martin since 2003.

Much of what she works on now involves avionics engineering and defensive systems. ‘Generally,’ she says, ‘working the technical solution isn’t nearly as difficult as managing the team interactions and politics. Whenever you are working with high-performance people, the personalities are extremely strong. It’s not like herding cats. It’s like herding saber-toothed tigers. Everyone is sharpening their teeth.’

Physics Today spoke with Gills by phone in early summer.

PT: Tell me about your early life.

GILLS: I was always inquisitive. I spent a lot of time dissecting things and taking apart clocks and various household appliances and putting them back together. My mom was tolerant of my doing that. She encouraged it. She bought me books. She put mentors in place for me. And it continued to fuel my passion for discovering how things worked.

My mom always told me I would be a doctor. I never had a concept that I would be anything less than that. But eventually I realized I didn’t want to be an MD because I wasn’t particularly interested in examining people’s body parts, or blood, or remembering long Latin names.

I like to start from concepts, and understand what boundary conditions and constraints I need to put on concepts in order to derive solutions. I was more intrigued by that method of thinking. [As an] undergraduate, I started off as an electrical engineering major.

PT: Why did you switch to physics?

GILLS: The physics department [at Southern University] found out about me from my SAT or ACT scores—to have a high ACT score from a high school like mine was an anomaly. The department head and his deputy came and sat on my mom’s couch like I was an athletic recruit. They explained to her why I should go into physics instead.

It was southern culture. If you want someone’s child to take a different direction, you have to come and explain to the parents. Especially the parent of an only child.

PT: What convinced you to study physics?

GILLS: I went, wow, they came to my mama’s house and answered her questions to her satisfaction. The level of effort they exhibited convinced me that they cared and had compassion, and that they were going to see to it that I succeeded.

The engineering department offered me a scholarship, but the physics department went way above and beyond. They had not only a plan for scholarships and financial coverage, but also a plan for me to get experience doing research during summers and during the school year. They had it all laid out, how they would support me for my entire undergraduate career.

PT: Did they follow through?

GILLS: Yes. I did an internship each summer. And they prepared me to have the foundational information as well as the level of rigor that I needed to have for critical thinking. During my internship at MIT Lincoln Laboratory after my freshman year, I was in the presence of students who were engineering majors at various stages of their matriculation. I had planned to double major in physics and engineering, but I saw that physics was giving me the tool set to be competitive against science and engineering majors, and I thought, ‘I don’t need to waste time memorizing equations.’ I did only enough engineering classes for a minor, but my passion stayed with physics.

PT: Why did you choose to go to Georgia Tech?

GILLS: At the time my mom was going through health issues, and I wanted to be close enough that I could drive home. I wanted a school that had a strong optics and lasers program, and I wanted a school that had a track record for graduating students in a reasonable amount of time. Those were my top three criteria.

PT: After earning your PhD in experimental optics, you went directly into industry. Did you consider an academic career?

GILLS: Yes. It was on the table. But I had gotten married and had my two oldest children while in graduate school. And I was discouraged about academia. I had seen my advisers work weekdays, nights, and weekends. For the level of compensation, I did the math. It was very low. It was nearly minimum wage. It was not compelling for me.

PT: Did you like moving to industry?

GILLS: It was like christening by fire. I had perfected the way my peers in academia spoke and communicated ideas. When you go to industry, you have to make a sales pitch, as to why should my customers spend money on this product—and you have to do it with the bottom line up front. You don’t have the time to develop a novel.

My first job straight out of graduate school was at AT&T Bell Labs in Norcross, Georgia. My work was technology maturation and marketing solutions for telecommunications service providers. We were trying to sell lots of optical fibers at a very high premium. It was during the dot-com craze.

PT: What were you working on?

GILLS: I was doing analysis. I used to evaluate our products against the performance metrics that our customers required. I had to get the data from the folks that actually had the labs in the Holmdel Facility [of Lucent Technologies]. I got frustrated very quickly with the level of support they were able to provide—they had their own projects.

So, I went to my manager and asked for permission and funding to build my own lab so that I could do the technical substantiation that we required.

I bit off a lot. I was too naive to know it was a big chunk. Like I did with having kids while in graduate school. I got this idea, and I didn’t have any fear. So I was able to do it. When I look back on it, I think, oh my goodness, it was crazy.

PT: What about now?

GILLS: I was lured away from Bell Labs by a startup company, where we were developing optical switching products. I had a lab evaluating their high-speed electronic products over fiber networks.

When I moved here to Lockheed Martin, I took more of a systems engineering role.

PT: Can you elaborate?

GILLS: I started off working on a medium-sized military transport aircraft, with engines and systems of the Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules. Lockheed Martin at the time was developing some of the specific mission systems for the aircraft. They hired me to develop the solution for the communications and radar systems. They leveraged my expertise in management and developing a methodology for risk reducing the integration approach.

PT: You’ve been at Lockheed Martin for 10 years; are you still working in risk reduction? And what kind of risk?

GILLS: Yes. And I also do some prototyping for risk reduction. When we get requests for proposals from a customer, there is always some risk in the solution, or there may be hidden issues.

PT: What’s it like being a rare minority woman in your position of leadership?

GILLS: I am used to it. Even when people tend to be insensitive, I ignore it. I think that’s why I have stayed. I am immune to that ridicule. I just keep going.

PT: It sounds like from your own experience, you know how valuable mentors can be. How do you find mentees?

GILLS: Yes, I had people mentor for me. And I do enjoy mentoring others.

They typically find me. One of my latest came through my son. He’s majoring in mechanical engineering, and my son volunteered me. I’d say I spend about two hours a week mentoring. The arrangement for some is, ‘call me anytime.’ For some, I am picking up the phone, saying ‘I haven’t heard from you'—I leave a voicemail, and I know they are available because I just saw them online.

PT: What do you do besides work and mentoring?

GILLS: Church is a very important part of my life. Before I leave for work, I set aside 30–45 minutes for grounding. I saw an article on Jim Gates, a physicist at the University of Maryland. I share his sentiment that faith enables his understanding of science. And when I went to research the renaissance scientists of the past, like Einstein and Faraday, I found that I shared their ideals. I receive epiphanies the same way that they receive [them]—we call it epiphanies for lack of a better word, but what it really is is access to the wisdom from the Creator. I don’t believe I would have the capacity to understand without that.

PT: What are your aims for the future?

GILLS: This season I am still really enjoying what I am doing. But for the long term I see myself exercising my gift in teaching. I don’t know if in the next 5 years or 10 years, but somewhere in that range I see myself teaching at the college level. I will be an empty nester. And I will have a new set of kids that keep me alive and energetic in the academic community.

PT: Is there anything else you’d like to mention?

GILLS: Yes, I have a fabulous husband that I married while in graduate school. He gave me room to be selfish while I was pursuing my degree—I never had to choose between my boyfriend and my studies. I was passionate about two big things in my life—family and work—and I didn’t want to sacrifice either of them.