22 IEEE Spectrum | February 2005 | NA

STE

VE

MA

RS

EL

“When I first got here, I was designing a data-base. I didn’t even really know that JPL had roboticsuntil I started talking to people. Then I realized allthese spacecraft, like the Voyager probes, wererobots,” she recalls. Howard kept working at the lab-oratory during summers, nurturing her growinginterest in artificial intelligence. After graduatingfrom Brown, she earned a master’s degree and thena doctorate in electrical engineering from theUniversity of Southern California, in Los Angeles,while working at JPL.

What Howard likes best about her job is inte-grating diverse hardware and software elementsinto a working robot. “Problem shooting with adevice that you have to touch and interact with is

the hardest part ofdeveloping a robot,but it’s the most ful-filling,” she says.

Howard is workingtoward an MBA as shelooks beyond her daysas a nuts-and-boltsengineer. “I have a big-ger vision in terms ofwhat I want to do whenI’m 50,” she says. “It’sbeing an administratorat NASA headquartersor being president of amajor university.” But

even in her current job, she says she feels the MBAtraining is giving her an edge. “They teach you softskills which, as engineers, we don’t really master.Things as simple as dealing with people,” she explains.

“It’s about being strategic in what you want todo. Who do I need to talk to so that my technologywill be adopted for a mission? It may not be the pro-gram manager that’s directing that mission. You mayneed to go to the chief technologist. Everything is aweb. You’ve got to understand the web.”

Howard also mentors disadvantaged girls and fre-quently addresses elementary and high school stu-dents, often in poor neighborhoods. Although a lackof computers and other resources can be a big prob-lem, she finds that simply showing up and explain-ing that you can make a good living as an engineercan widen a child’s horizons. “They haven’t talked tosomebody who’s a professional, except for teachers,”Howard says. “They look at TV, and it’s all acting andsports, so that’s what they want to be. But when youmeet children, it’s surprisingly easy to get themexcited about engineering.”

Howard may be shortchanging herself as a moti-vator—her own excitement is palpable as she talksabout engineering. She once decided to try some non-engineering-related hobbies, but found that they “feltlike work,” she says with a chuckle.

“My hobby is my job,” she adds. And if the firstmission to use technology she invented departs forMars early next decade, as planned, Howard will beamong the select few who count exploring planetsas one of their hobbies. —Stephen Cass

AYANNA HOWARD (SM)

AGE: 33

WHAT SHE DOES:

Develops autonomousrobots

FOR WHOM: NASA’s JetPropulsion Laboratory

WHERE SHE DOES IT:

Pasadena, Calif.

FUN FACTORS: Her robotscould end up exploringMars and beyond

THAT LIGHT TOUCH: Fritz Morgan

lights up the world, putting intelligent

LED-based fixtures on the sides of

buildings, in airports, even on the stages

of Broadway and Hollywood shows.

For most of its 125-year history, thelighting industry has been about aslow-tech as technology gets. Until

the last few years, that is, when beautifulblue, green, and purple light-emitting diodesstarted flooding the market and showingup in everything from traffic signals tovideo billboards.

Nowadays, they light up huge bridges,add pizazz to casinos, and illuminatehighly stylized interior spaces. And that’sjust the beginning. To see how LEDs aregoing to be used tomorrow, you have tolook to engineers like Frederick M.(“Fritz”) Morgan. As vice president ofengineering at Color Kinetics Inc., inBoston, he has conjured up revolution-ary lighting installations from Hollywoodto Hong Kong.

He recalls his first day at the com-pany, in August 1998. “We had just movedinto a new warehouse space. Ihor Lys,one of the founders of the company,pointed and said, ‘Your computer is some-where over in that corner. Get yourselfset up. Oh, and get yourself a ticket forNew York for tomorrow. You’re meetingwith Sony/Loews.’ ”

The cinema chain, part of Loews Cine-plex Entertainment Corp., in New York City,wanted to erect a new kind of sign on aflagship movie theater in Times Square.It would spell out “LOEWS” vertically, sixstories tall, using 534 printed-circuit boardscontaining nearly a quarter of a millionLEDs in all. As it turned out, the projectwould take more than a year to complete.It had a hard deadline—the end of the year1999, when at least 2 million people wouldflood into Times Square, where the famousball-drop would mark the new millennium.

“I remember standing up in a buckettruck, 150 feet in the air—it must have been10 degrees,” Morgan recalls. “I was mak-ing the last electrical connections thatwould get the sign working. It was so cold,a union electrician was standing next tome with a heat gun. He’d wave it in the airnear my fingers, or else they got too stifffor me to do anything.”

“When we finally got the sign running,it was one of those moments that just bringsgoose bumps to your skin,” he says. “I wasso excited that I just stood in the middle of42nd Street staring at it for 10 minutesstraight, not saying a word! It was muchmore impressive than I ever imagined.” Thesign, still a fixture in Times Square, shim-mers with waves of intense color, whileminute white strobes flash in a seeminglyrandom pattern from within the letters.

FRITZ MORGAN:LEDs Into Gold

DJ

05

Morgan had a much more comfortabletime of it a couple of years later and afew blocks away. Inside Broadway’s NeilSimon Theatre, he helped theatrical light-ing designer Kenneth Posner and scenicdesigner David Rockwell create a back-drop for the hit musical Hairspray.

“Rockwell’s company designed a gridpattern of 600 fixtures, with individualcontrol over each one,” Morgan says. Theywere programmed to continually changethe backdrop into different patterns andshapes, each one recalling a pattern froma decades-old toy called Lite Brite. “It wasa very dynamic part of the set that changedfrom scene to scene to create the moodof the show at that moment.”

Founded in 1997, Color Kinetics wasone of the first companies to combineprinted-circuit boards with solid-statelighting devices. Marrying computertechnology to lighting opens the door tosomething Color Kinetics calls “showauthoring”—programming a light showon a computer and then downloading theprogram to a controller. The controllerthen plays the show back to power sup-plies that energize arrays of colored LEDsin dazzling sequences synchronized tomusic or dramatic action, or simply toalter the ambience of a room.

In turn, show authoring lets you rethinklighting—a US $79 billion global indus-try—entirely. Morgan has mounted radi-cally new installations on movie marquees,at airports, on theater and television stages,and on the sides of buildings in Asia,Europe, and North America.

Nowadays, he works less on individ-ual lighting installations and more on over-seeing the company’s engineering effortsin Boston, and in China, where ColorKinetics works with other titans of the LEDworld, such as Cree, LumiLeds Lighting,Osram, and Sylvania, to turn individuallights into programmable fixtures. In 2003,he spent fully one-third of the year in China.

An average day back in Boston findshim in the office by 6:30 a.m. and homearound 6 p.m. He puts his kids to bedand then “talks to China for a couple ofhours.” He still gets to visit clients fromtime to time—to oversee, for instance, thebuilding of a new set for Sony PicturesTelevision’s “Wheel of Fortune” gameshow. But as a family man, he now leavesthe bucket-truck gigs to his staff.

Electrical engineering is somethingMorgan was born to. His grandfather,Millett Morgan, founded the radiophysicsdepartment at Dartmouth College, inHanover, N.H. His father, Granger, is headof the engineering and public policydepartment at Carnegie Mellon Uni-versity, in Pittsburgh. (Granger is alsoan IEEE Fellow and is a member of IEEESpectrum’s board of advisors.)

Fritz was also uniquely trained for thetheatrical side of his job. He loved lightingup school productions in high school andcollege. For 10 years, he worked on schoolproductions and community theater. Heeven spent a summer at the prestigiousPennsylvania Governor’s School for theArts, in Erie, a selective program for bud-ding theater techies and performers.

“I liked it,” he says of his diverse youth-ful theater experience, “but I didn’t seehow to make a career of it. When ColorKinetics came around, I thought, ‘It’s tech-nology, it’s a career, it’s theatrical stuff,it’s artistic stuff—it’s pulling it all together.’”

Morgan went to his father’s school,CMU, for a master’s in electrical engi-neering, but his undergraduate degree wasa B.A. from Clark University, in Worcester,Mass. “I wanted a liberal arts education,”he says. “At Clark I was able to do theater,and computer science, and geography,and history, and psychology, classes I mightnot have gotten to take at CMU at the time.”

In high school and college, he alsoworked on autonomous vehicles and otherrobotics projects during summers spentin Pittsburgh. He returned to roboticsfor his master’s work, done under the leg-endary Takeo Kanade, then director ofCMU’s Robotics Institute.

If the purpose of a robot is to enhancehuman capabilities, Morgan is still doingthat at Color Kinetics.

When Morgan showed the staff of“Wheel of Fortune” the new, program-mable wheel that’s now the centerpieceof the long-running game show, the show’slighting designer couldn’t contain herexcitement. “She told me the wheel couldnow do things she’d been dreaming aboutit doing,” Morgan says. Then she gavehim a big hug. —Steven Cherry

MATTH

EW R

OH

AR

IK

February 2005 | IEEE Spectrum | NA 23

How did a Russian who worked his way throughan institute of the Russian Academy ofSciences in Moscow, earning degrees in elec-

trical engineering and hydrology, end up working inOhio as the drilling technology specialist for theworld’s leading research group in the field of tropi-cal and subtropical glaciers? What was it that got thisson of a World War II submariner into the businessof climbing some of the world’s highest peaks to drilldeep into fast-disappearing glaciers?

Victor Zagorodnov remembers the critical momentwell: leading a Soviet drilling expedition in 1980, hewas out on the ice of the Svalbard islands, Norway’snorthernmost territory, in the Arctic Ocean, help-ing extract ice cores that the team hoped would shedlight on Europe’s post-medieval Little Ice Age. Ashe looked at a glistening, translucent cylinder com-ing out of the drill tube, it suddenly struck him thathe was looking at snow that had fallen when theVikings were raiding the Baltic coasts. He was hooked.

Zagorodnov would go on to get a doctorate in earthsciences from the Academy of Sciences, making himwell equipped to understand and further the art andscience of teasing information about the world’s past

VICTOR ZAGORODNOV:Getting High on Glaciers

GLEAMING: Victor

Zagorodnov, standing

in the Byrd Center’s

refrigerator, admires

an ice core containing

clues to earth’s past.

FRITZ MORGAN (M)

AGE: 33

WHAT HE DOES: Researches anddesigns LED-based lighting systemsfor theatrical, architectural, retail, andother clients

FOR WHOM: Color Kinetics Inc.

WHERE HE DOES IT: Boston

FUN FACTORS: Works with top the-atrical designers and architects allover the world to create novel lightingeffects and one-of-a-kind installations