Meet Educator Lee Hill
Founding Partner, Silent Solutions LLC
ICM: Lee, Tell us your story – What is your professional background?
Lee: My first and only “real” job – I worked as a Principal EMC and Systems Engineer at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Workstation Systems Engineering Group (WSE) in Palo Alto, California. I was hired by the design team to assist with the design of new high speed desktop RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computers) workstations that at the time were used mostly by scientists and engineers. WSE was a very small, independent design organization composed of some of the best and brightest from Stanford University and the University of California- Berkeley.
Prior to California, I worked for Digital’s Low End Product Regulatory group in Massachusetts, where the company developed many different high volume, lower cost products like video displays, network adapters, small desktop and floor-standing computers, and almost every kind of peripheral, cable, and I/O you can imagine. The EMC engineering group trained us to be EMC consultants, who in order to be successful had to develop interpersonal skills and form effective business relationships with many, many different people and design groups within the company. At the time I was there, Digital had over 125,000 employees, which gave me additional opportunities to work with gifted engineers within many different product design and research groups around the world. Even back in the ‘80s I was able to correspond with technical colleagues via a mature intercompany email network, which today is taken for granted, but back then was a rarity except for the companies including Digital that developed the original Ethernet standard.
Both jobs gave me a terrific background in the design, troubleshooting, and retrofit of high speed electronic products. Today it would be difficult to duplicate even a fraction of this experience since the design process for many types of high volume consumer products is now conducted and managed offshore.
Lee earned his MSEE in Electromagnetics from Missouri University of Science and Technology (MS&T)
ICM: What led to your commitment to becoming an educator in your field?
Lee: While I was an EE undergraduate student at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), I worked as an academic tutor in math and science for the Office of Special Services. I also worked as a tutor/counselor for an inner-city Federal program (Upward Bound) that promoted tutoring and on-campus activities with the goal of getting more inner-city youth interested in and successfully enrolled in higher education. Along with my childhood home near the city of Hartford, CT, this experience helped me develop skills and enjoy success in teaching a very diverse population, from the most privileged to the most needy.
My commitment to becoming an educator certainly originated from a family and cultural emphasis on education that was groomed by a few standout professors, most notably Dr. Paul Wilson at RIT, and of course my thesis advisor at the Missouri University of Science and Technology (MS&T), Dr. Tom Van Doren. I earned my MSEE at MS&T under Tom’s guidance. He is the epitome of an ideal educator, he is kind, extremely competent, economical in his use of language, and is able to bridge academic concepts with real life education and technical demonstrations. His instructional materials reflect his ability to condense complex material into elegant, incredibly simple concepts and illustrations. Watching Tom teach has inspired me to never stop learning and developing new ways to teach and delight our class attendees. My commitment to education was also inspired by the excellent instruction I received from Dr. James Drewniak and Dr. Todd Hubing at MS&T. The 1990s were a very exciting time in EMC research and teaching, and MS&T was absolutely the best place on the planet to learn. Being surrounded by teaching excellence at MS&T cultivated my natural curiosity to learn and share that knowledge with others around the world.
ICM: What do you hope attendees will leave your class having learned?
Lee: I’d quibble and say that we don’t “hope” they learn, we want to be certain that students leave with a mastery of key concepts. We constantly change our material to find ways to elicit as many “ah hah!” moments as possible during a class. Then we survey every single student to find out what they loved about the class and also to get ideas about what we could improve or change.
What do we strive to have them learn – that’s easy – we have identified the most important EMC concepts that are left out of most undergraduate programs, specifically a) the noise model and how to use it for design and troubleshooting, b) physical self and mutual inductance, c) common-mode current d) Ground versus Return, e) antennas.
We expose our students to a strong base of equal amounts of theory, application, and examples so that they leave the class able to think for themselves and apply the information to new, future design and troubleshooting projects.
The best compliment that we often receive from past students is “Lee, we are already using your class information to solve noise problems, and now we don’t have to hire your company (SILENT), sorry about that!”.
Silent Solutions LLC will be offering the following classes in May and October 2012. Check www.silent-solutions.com for actual dates and registration information:
- Circuit to Circuit
- Design & Retrofit
- PCB Design
- Mechanical Design
- Spectrum Analyzer
