William Satzer is a Senior Research Specialist at 3M working in the New Products Department of the Industrial and Consumer sector. His primary role is to lead a small group in developing new materials for bonding and adhesive applications. His group includes physicists and electrical engineers, who work closely with chemists, chemical engineers, and materials scientists. Although Bill has worked on large-scale computational problems at 3M, his current task is to exploit a new 3M material technology and to help 3M bring several new products to market.
At 3M, applications of mathematics occur in many areas including computational chemistry, optics, coating and deposition processes, statistical process control, fluid mechanics, and in many different aspects of chemical engineering. "Mathematics appears in many different contexts," Bill says, "but always in the guise of supporting some stage of product development." One clear example of the contribution of mathematics to the success of a product occurred in the course of developing and optimizing a class of materials. "Special purpose optimization algorithms developed at 3M gave us the capability to identify very promising material designs computationally and to verify their relative insensitivity to variations arising in manufacturing," he notes.
Bill has been at 3M almost seven years, joining the company at the "experienced Ph.D." level and was recently promoted. He came to 3M with the desire to work with a variety of scientists and engineers on real and tangible products. Before 3M, he was a Senior Engineer at BBN Laboratories where he worked on underwater acoustics, signal processing, simulation, and computer network design. His first industrial job was at Logicon where he worked on incorporating speech recognition into training systems such as one whose goal was the training of air traffic final approach controllers.
Bill has a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of St. Thomas, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Minnesota with dynamical systems as his area of specialization. After graduate school, he taught one year at Colgate University, and then made the decision to go into industry. "I believed that an industrial career offered more options and more flexibility in my career," he says, "and that I would enjoy working with engineers and scientists from other fields. Both of these, I think, have proved to be true."
In the areas of mathematics he knows, the courses he has found useful include numerical linear algebra, Fourier analysis, probability, and statistics. He would also recommend a course in signal processing for anybody bound for a career involving the collection and analysis of data. Familiarity with electromagnetics at an advanced undergraduate level has also proven to be very useful. More broadly, Bill says, "I'd recommend an education which emphasizes breadth and flexibility - not just in scientific and engineering disciplines, but also in economics, finance, management and accounting. Technical managers need skills to plan projects, develop budgets, and manage people. Most are now trained - more or less - on the job, but a prior acquaintance with these (perhaps previously scorned) disciplines would be very beneficial."
For anyone considering a career in industry, he recommends doing an internship if at all possible, and using this internship to explore all phases of life in the industrial world, including meetings, broad interactions with management, and customer contact. "Much of my work as an applied mathematician in industry is 'para-mathematical'," Bill admits. "I believe it is important for anyone considering a career like mine to understand that while mathematics per se occasionally provides the critical tool, a broad mathematical background is valuable every day."
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