Oral-History:Kathleen Amm
About Kathleen Amm
Kathleen M. Amm earned a Ph.D. in Condensed Matter Physics from Florida State University in 1998 and a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1993. Her primary research areas include: MRI and medical applications of superconductivity, superconducting electric machines, high-temperature superconductivity, material properties at low temperatures, and permanent magnets. She has more than twenty-five years of experience in superconductivity and magnet development and design, MRI, management of research and development and project management.
Since 2018, Amm has been the head of the Superconducting Magnet Division at Brookhaven National Lab, where she works with her team to deliver innovative accelerator and high field magnet technology. Previously, she worked at GE Research for twenty years, holding various posts including: project manager, Magnets; technology leader, MRI technologies and systems; and Lab manager and physicist, electromagnets and superconductivity.
Amm is a member of several professional societies and is a Senior Member of IEEE. She is an active volunteer in the IEEE Council on Superconductivity and has served as Assistant Treasurer of the Applied Superconductivity Conference since 2008.
About the Interview
KATHLEEN AMM: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 17 November 2017
Interview #786 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
This manuscript is being made available for research purposes only. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the IEEE History Center. No part of the manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the Director of IEEE History Center.
Request for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the IEEE History Center Oral History Program, IEEE History Center, 445 Hoes Lane, Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA or ieee-history@ieee.org. It should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Kathleen Amm, an oral history conducted in 2017 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Kathleen Amm
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 12 November 2017
PLACE: Warrensville, Illinois
Early life and education
Hellrigel:
Today is November 12th, 2017, and this is Mary Ann Hellrigel from the IEEE History Center. I'm with Kathleen Amm
Amm:
That's right.
Hellrigel:
We are recording her oral history for the IEEE Council on Superconductivity [IEEE CSC] in conjunction with the Fermilab milestone. We are in Warrensville, Illinois.
Amm:
That's right.
Hellrigel:
Welcome.
Amm:
Thank you. No, it's a great honor to be able to participate in this oral history. I've been very impressed with the project that you and Peter [Lee] have been working on for a number of years, so it's my great pleasure to be here today to do this.
Hellrigel:
Well, thank you. You are groundbreaking, as I pointed out, because you are the first woman interviewed [for the IEEE Council on Superconductivity’s oral history collection], though Alvin [Tollestrup] mentioned this woman, Helen Thom Edwards. I have to see if she is still alive because she did a lot of magnet work. [Edwards (1936-2016) was the lead scientist for the design and construction of the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.]
Amm:
Yes. She was recognized for the Tevatron back in the day, big time.
Hellrigel:
Usually, we start with a little bit of background, so if you could tell us when and where you were born, if you are comfortable with that.
Amm:
No, absolutely. I was born in 1971 in Boston, Massachusetts at the Brigham Women's Hospital. It was called the Boston Laying-in Women's Hospital at that point in time. I was born while my father was studying at MIT doing his Ph.D. in geophysics at that time.
Hellrigel:
Then you grew up in Boston?
Amm:
Actually, I moved all over the place. I was in Boston for my first two years and then we moved to Houston, Texas; then to Calgary, Alberta, Canada; back to Houston; then to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Bakersfield, California; and back to Houston.
Hellrigel:
Was your dad an academic or in industry?
Amm:
He was actually in industry. He started out in research geophysics and later went into offshore exploration geophysics. Then later on in his career, after I got off to Canada to undergraduate [studies], he actually moved to Paris, France and was doing negotiations in geophysics. He has sort of had three different phases to his career, but all in industry.
Hellrigel:
Do you have any siblings?
Amm:
Yes. I am the oldest of four children. I have twin brothers who are in the middle. One is a doctor, and one is a lawyer. I have a younger sister who does taxonomy, so a lot of things around medical research, online research and coding for that, and developing software for that.
Hellrigel:
Is your mom a physicist?
Amm:
No. My mother is an English major and she was a stay-at-home mom who did a ton of volunteer work and spent a lot of time raising us four kids. She is just a very, very smart lady, too, and very pragmatic. It's a really nice blend. I always like to say that when I'm talking to younger folks that it's incredibly important to have a balanced understanding of things, doing not just mathematics and science. You've also got to be able to understand the world around you; understand what's going on out there, the history, the literature; and you also have to be well-written and able to clearly communicate. To me, that was a great balance growing up, and it was very important to my success.
Hellrigel:
At what age did you tend toward the sciences?
Amm:
Very young. I was very much inspired by my father because I saw that he had this career in industrial science. I can remember going into his office when I was a kid and seeing all the maps that were colored with colored pencils back then. They were printed out on a printer, and then you would color in the different colors for what they were finding in terms of the geophysical data on things. I just always found that really cool. I thought that I enjoyed math, and I enjoyed science, and I saw my dad had a really good career in it. So, I thought this would be a great opportunity for me. I always was sort of geared towards going more towards industrial science because that was what I was familiar with, but I certainly have a lot of connection into academia, and I have a great deal of respect for that as well.
Hellrigel:
It's a different road to take.
Amm:
Yes. It is a very different road, absolutely.
Hellrigel:
Your dad was your mentor. Did you have any other mentors before college?
Amm:
I had a number of mentors. Certainly, my father was one. I would say my mother was one as well. I am very fortunate because I had great parents.
When I was in high school, I actually had a speech and debate coach that was a really good mentor, too. I was also involved in public speaking, poetry reading, and debate club. I learned a lot from him about how to communicate, and also how to get out there and go to different events and meet people. He was a good mentor for me. I also had an English teacher in high school who was a wonderful mentor to me. With a number of the girls that ran the Advance English class, we used to do reading clubs, book clubs over the summer which was really great. I also had some mathematics teachers that were also mentors, especially in my junior year. She was a great mentor and she involved us in the math club and such as a high school student.
Hellrigel:
My high school even had a math team to compete against other schools. It might seem a little silly and geeky, but it was an honor to be selected for the team. I was on the team at least two years.
Amm:
They still do it. They still have it. They have honor clubs, too. My daughter just got inducted into her high school honor club for mathematics. It's still in existence today. It's a great opportunity.
Hellrigel:
Was there any subject you disliked at that time?
Amm:
Well, not really. Maybe I wasn't terribly fond of gym, but I didn't hate it. I wasn't an athlete, let's put it that way, but I still think it's really important to exercise and be fit. I'd say it wasn't my strongest suit.
Hellrigel:
Did you have any jobs growing up?
Amm:
Yes. When I was in high school my first job actually was just working at a summer camp for a couple of weeks. It was sort of a nature camp, and you did crafts and things. That was my first summer job. Then later on I was a hostess at a restaurant down the road. It was a steak restaurant if I can remember. I also did some volunteer work at the library as well as, not so much a paying job but volunteer work. And I also had a job in my last year of high school working as an intern at my dad's office, sorting various piping files for some case they were doing. They were doing pipes and drilling offshore of Louisiana.
Hellrigel:
Oil and gas.
Amm:
Oil and gas, yes.
Hellrigel:
So, you got a little bit of an entrée into it.
Amm:
Yes.
University of Toronto
Hellrigel:
Why did you select the University of Toronto?
Amm:
My parents are Canadians. They both went to the University of Toronto and met there. I applied to a number of different schools, and I just decided that I hadn't lived in Canada except when I was about four years old for thirteen months, so I wanted to see what Canada was like. I had a fully paid scholarship to go there as well, which was nice. They also had a very good mathematics and physics group there, so I thought give it a try, see what Canada is like, and major in mathematics and physics.
Hellrigel:
Yes. They also have a good history of technology and science program.
Amm:
Yes, they do. One of my electives that I took was actually in the history of science which was an incredible class. I really enjoyed that a lot. And art, and art history, too. There are some really nice art history classes there I took as well.
Hellrigel:
When you were in college did you have any lab experience?
Amm:
Yes. Plenty of lab experience. We certainly did our normal undergraduate labs that we would do as well, but over the summer I was fortunate enough to have an undergraduate scholarship in Canada called NSERC Fellowships. I was able to get one of them each of my undergraduate years. As a freshman, I worked in the computer science lab working on parallel programming, so I was writing little routines for undergraduate students to test things on. Then the next year--these weren't so many labs the first two years, but the second year I worked in the atmospheric physics group working on some Fortran codes to simulate weather.
In my third year I really got into a lot of lab work. This was when the superconducting supercollider was still up and running. And the group, the physics group, was working on a certain type of scintillating detector. And it was a liquid scintillator, because the idea was, they would have the liquid change out so that it wouldn't deteriorate the plastics like it would in some other scintillators. But the problem was the professors there had done stuff on the cheap end, so they did not order stainless steel things for the scintillator to flow through and they were rusting. Luckily, we poor undergrads got to sandblast and clean these things out with oil to try to get this darn thing to work. It was kind of interesting.
We had more fun trying to get a part, a Picoammeter, to do some sensitive measurements off of. I had to procure it and it was the first time they shipped it to Canada. So, I had to deal with Customs and all kinds of interesting things and then program it to take data. That was kind of interesting.
Hellrigel:
Yes. This would come from Fermilab?
Amm:
Well, this was just a commercial tee flight thing, but we were working with Fermilab or with groups in the U.S. on the SSC. They were one of the teams helping with the scintillator development at the University of Toronto.
Hellrigel:
In the early 1990s, they were getting sensitive.
Amm:
Yes. That was kind of towards the end of it. I think they cancelled it my senior year in undergrad because it was in 1992 when I was starting my senior year. That was the summer right before they cancelled it.
Hellrigel:
Wow. At what point did physics--well, your dad was a physicist, the physics of superconductivity attract your attention? How did you get drawn into that subfield of physics?
Amm:
Well, in the late 1980s there was the discovery of high-temperature superconductors, and I thought that was really interesting. I also thought there was a ton going on in solid-state physics in that period of time. I thought that something that was an applied solid state physics degree would be good. And as the high-temperature superconductors were a very big topic at that point in time, it was very interesting and there were a lot of opportunities to go and study in that space. That was sort of how I chose it.
Hellrigel:
Were there many female students in your program?
Amm:
Well, it was interesting. When I was a graduate student I actually--I was married very young. I'm now divorced, but I was married very young. I was married for a long time. I only was divorced a few years ago. I followed my now ex-husband [Bruce C. Amm] to the University of Illinois where he was going to work for Justin Schwartz.
Hellrigel:
Oh.
Amm:
Schwartz was a very young professor at the time, an associate professor. He had taken on my husband [Bruce C. Amm] as a graduate student. I had always been interested in superconductivity, so this kind of worked out. When I got into the University of Illinois, I joined the group as well. Schwartz had a very interesting group because his very first graduate student was female, and of his first three graduate students, two of them are female.
Hellrigel:
Who were they?
Amm:
Sobestially [phonetic] and Shiming Wu were his first two female graduate students. Then he had some other students, two male graduate students, and my now ex-husband [Bruce C. Amm], and then myself and another lady who was Japanese, Sawako Nakamae joined the group.
There were quite a good number of women in his team. And he kind of just continued that. He's had a larger percentage of women in his team than I think a lot of professors have. I was very fortunate to work with Justin, because he was a really great professor to learn from because he really taught you to think for yourself and be self-reliant. He was a great professor, and it did not matter whether you were going to have a great career in science, go into academia or go into industry. He didn't leave you on your own. You could always come and talk to him, but he would give you a problem and say go work on this. He had good post-docs, too, so you could go talk to them and talk to him. However, you were expected to step up and figure out your problem and ask questions about it, which was great.
I can remember, after my first couple years at GE I said to Justin, thank you so much. Thank you for all you did because you taught me how to think for myself and how to step up and ask the right questions and not be hand-held through everything. Sometimes, professors are well-meaning, but they may be a little bit overbearing on their students. They may try to micromanage them. Justin was very good about not micromanaging his students. We still had a weekly meeting, but he wasn't on top of you saying you need to do this or do that. You weren't micromanaged and I must say this was phenomenal for me in graduate school.
Hellrigel:
Were you allowed to select your own topic?
Amm:
Yes, absolutely. Justin had a number of different research areas going on in the group, so you selected amongst those different topics. And if you found something that was more interesting to you, you certainly could go and pursue that as well. The other thing that he did that was very nice was we were able to publish very early. A lot of times, professors may be very restrictive about students publishing. He was outstanding about that. I was published as the first author on a paper very early in my graduate studies. And many of the papers I was first author on helped make up the bulk of my thesis. That was really great.
He had a great impact at Florida State in sort of shaping the excellence of that lab down there, the National High Energy Field Laboratory. He also has a diverse group of people, both males and females, and a variety of people from around the globe working as a team, too, which was really cool.
Hellrigel:
So, you went from Toronto then to--
Amm:
Well, we went from Toronto to the University of Illinois, and then Justin moved to Florida State University. Halfway through my first year at the University of Illinois Justin asked if I wanted to come with him or get another advisor at the University of Illinois.
I remember we drove down. It was funny. It was myself, my husband [Bruce C. Amm] and another graduate student, Earl Burkhart, and we decided we were just going to drive down on the Friday night. The guys were taking turns driving and sleeping overnight. We got down there in the morning, and it was homecoming weekend for FSU, so all these people dressed up in their FSU regalia at the hotel.
The lab was just amazing. It was just at the beginning of being opened, but you could see the facilities were phenomenal and they were going to be even more phenomenal as they came together. The opportunity to set up a whole lab from scratch and really make a mark on that was really cool. At that point I said we have got to go. It's a really great place to go to, so we decided to take that leap and go down there.
Hellrigel:
It makes sense. It's an excellent program. They seem balance the industry and the academic sides, so why not see what is going on in the neighborhood down there?
Amm:
Absolutely, and even more so now. We were there at the beginning.
Even in those early days there were a lot of companies, startup companies and more developed companies, working on HGS that were sending us samples or coils to test. I would say the other thing that was amazing about being at a big test facility like that, where you have researchers from around the world coming to test their materials in the highest magnetic fields, you would get so many great talks. We had a weekly seminar, and you'd get the best researchers from around the world in various high field magnetic areas, which was just phenomenal. It was a great collaborative place to be at that point in time. It was very exciting.
Hellrigel:
That's a factor a lot of the people that I've interviewed pointed out, about a team.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Collaboration. Even Alvin [Tollestrup], the gentleman I spoke with this morning at Fermilab talked about collaboration, global collaboration.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Sounded very important. You went straight then from undergraduate to graduate school?
Amm:
Right. Yes, I didn't work in industry in-between.
Hellrigel:
Then you finish graduate school pretty quickly.
Amm:
Yes. I took about four years to finish graduate school. I probably finished a little bit quicker than I would have, I would say, because my husband [Bruce C. Amm] got a job with GE. He was hired into the research center into the team of Trifon Laskaris. Evangelos Trifon Laskaris is his full name, but everybody calls him Trifon. This guy is a giant in the MRI magnet field. He was one of the guys that has many of the patents on superconducting MRI magnets, superconducting generators. Again, he's a very quiet man, very unassuming, and he's Greek. He only gets really excited when he's at a big technical debate with people or discussing financial markets or politics or something. He is a brilliant guy. He was recognized by the National Academy of Engineering and for being awarded more than 300 patents at GE. He’s a pretty cool guy. He retired from GE in 2017. He hired my husband [Bruce C. Amm] for his team. Then I followed my husband because I didn't want to be stuck down there writing my thesis. So, I got everything together and finished it up in a couple of months. I might have stayed on another year if he hadn't had a job offer from somewhere else. He ended up at GE.
I actually spent a year at another company in the area working on developing cryogenic insulation because GE wasn't quite sure that they wanted me there at first. But then they figured out that he was doing a good job, and they saw that I could work on more than one thing. I wasn't just a materials person. I also could do all of the thermal analysis of in-thermal insulation and everything. Seeing that, I think, they realized I was somebody who could really broaden my skillset, so they brought me into the team there.
GE and MRIs
Hellrigel:
How long have you been at GE?
Amm:
I've been at GE since 1998, almost eighteen years, a long time.
Hellrigel:
Yes, almost, around the corner to twenty.
Amm:
Around the corner to twenty, yes. It will be nineteen this year and then twenty next year.
Hellrigel:
I understand you have three patents.
Amm:
No. I have more patents than that.
Hellrigel:
More patents?
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
How many patents?
Amm:
I'm trying to remember. It's probably around twenty or so.
Hellrigel:
Twenty.
Amm:
Something like that. Yes.
Hellrigel:
I guess part of the deal is you sign the rights to GE.
Amm:
That's right. Yes. And some of those patents were from before I was in GE as well, some of them from graduate school. Some of them are from when I worked at Lydall and Cryogenic Insulation and--. I can send you my list. I can’t remember exactly how many.
Hellrigel:
Please send me the list and I will include it in your biographical entry. I was looking up your biography GE’s communication people prepared. Sorry, I misspoke. GE notes thirteen patents and seventeen peer reviewed publications.
Amm:
That's probably right, then. Something like that.
Hellrigel:
Sorry about that.
Amm:
That's okay, no worries.
Hellrigel:
Yes. That's quite a few.
Amm:
Yes. Well, a lot of them are with collaboration. You are part of a team again, so I'm not the only one inventing what's there. I work with a team on it. A lot of our patents come out of good brainstorming activities where we are all discussing what we think the best ideas are going to be.
Hellrigel:
You are based in Albany?
Amm:
Yes, outside of Albany in Niskayuna, New York. It's a suburb of Schenectady.
Hellrigel:
GE corporate moved to Boston?
Amm:
Yes. Just recently. They were down in Connecticut before that.
Hellrigel:
Currently, you are working mostly on MRI medical applications?
Amm:
Until the beginning of this year [2017] that was the case. I was working mainly in the MRI space. I have recently moved over to the power space and I'm working on some applications of superconductivity in the power space. However, I can't talk too much about those, other than just saying that, because it's new stuff.
Hellrigel:
Well, from talking to people it would be sort of like the Holy Grail if you can produce electricity through superconductivity because the resistance would be so low.
Amm:
High efficiencies. High efficiencies are a really big deal.
Hellrigel:
But it's expensive.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That's what the issue is because as long as we still have coal and natural gas and wind and such. The other application is the high-speed trains in Japan.
Amm:
Yes, Maglev, yes.
Hellrigel:
Are there any other applications?
Amm:
Well, basically MRI and NMR are the two really big ones, and then high energy physics is a very big application. Even though it's in the science area, it's a significant amount of superconductors. If fusion ever takes off, certainly they'll be needed in fusion.
Hellrigel:
Yes. One of my neighbors, a physics professor, is waiting for fusion. And he's in his mid-eighties now and he's still working on it.
Amm:
Fusion is a hard thing. I am really impressed with the people who work in that field. There's a lot of interesting things going on in fusion right now with a number of large portions of the community starting to look at more micro fusion machines. They can get really high efficiency out of some smaller scale, not just the giant sizes like ITER. It's kind of interesting.
Hellrigel:
In terms of the MRI, how long has GE been producing them?
Amm:
Since the early 1980s.
Hellrigel:
Have they become more energy efficient; better imaging, too?
Amm:
The first MRI magnet was actually made by Oxford Magnet Technologies for GE in the 1980-1981 timeframe. The very first magnet we ordered was supposed to be 2 T (tesla), but it ended up having a drip problem. It was much better to work at 1.5 T and that became the industry standard. There were 1 T, 4 T, and a variety of different fields in the early part, but 1.5 T really became the work horse for many years.
Then in the early 2000s, 3T entered the marketplace, and there were a number of challenges in going to 3 T. Even though you could get higher image resolution, because the wavelength produced that the frequencies you are talking about in imaging started to become on the scale of the human body at 3 T, you get some weird dielectric effects in imaging. You get sort or shading in the body; there had to be a number of things that people did with RF coils, with different correction techniques to overcome these problems.
I would say towards the end of the first decade of the century, they resolved a lot of these, so you were able to get very high image quality now at 3 T as well. And, certainly, for some applications like brain imaging and breast imaging; 3 T certainly is the high end now. But 1.5 T still is a very strong workhorse for the field.
On the research end 7 T, I think, is the standard for research. There are ones like the ASOL magnet at 11.5 T. They are building one in Korea that I think is kind of field strength or higher. Those are super high end ‘research’ magnets, and they are very big magnets that require a lot of room shielding. One of the things that recently has happened at 7 T is that, Siemens actually built its own magnet that was actively shielded and they got FDA clearance so that doctors can use the 7 T magnet for the first time to actually be reimbursed on it, not just do research on it. They could put regular patients in it.
Now, that being said, 7 T magnets, you actually feel an impact of the field when you are sliding into a 7 T magnet because of the currents that flow around in your brain when you are going in and out of it. And some people get migraine headaches from it. Some people get nauseous. You've got to kind of be cautious in using it with patients at 7 T still. It's safe, but there can be some physiological effects that people feel. We'll have to see whether that goes anywhere commercially or not.
Hellrigel:
No human levitation yet. [Laughter.]
Amm:
Not yet. That would require a pretty high field. I've seen people levitate frogs at 45 T, but you can imagine how high a field you'd have to do to levitate a human being. That's pretty impressive.
Hellrigel:
Yes, it is. Well, it's just surreal. I cannot image the force of that magnet. Today, MRIs have all the safety rules; take off metals, etc.
Amm:
Yes. You get eddy currents in metals. If you have like a wedding ring on or something--
Hellrigel:
It might burst?
Amm:
Well, it can heat up. I had a colleague who told me he forgot to take his wedding ring off going into an MR system and he could feel it heating up while he was getting scanned. This happens because you have a very high AC field going with the gradient coils in there, so it can really heat things up. The other thing with ferromagnetic, it's incredibly dangerous because ferromagnetic objects become magnets, and they get sucked into the board of magnets. If you are in-between a ferromagnetic object and the board, you can be very seriously injured or even killed. There have been instances. You have to have very special bottles, oxygen bottles and beds to take people into MR suites. Sometimes people make mistakes in hospitals and that's a big safety thing right now to make sure that you follow all the right protocols to make sure that doesn't happen in hospitals.
Hellrigel:
I've heard stories about flying canisters.
Amm:
Yes, there have been, absolutely. There are stories of all kinds of crazy things happening like that.
Hellrigel:
This is just fascinating because it's all invisible.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Are you doing what you thought you would be doing career-wise?
Amm:
I don't know if I ever really had a career plan, some people have a very specific career plan. I just knew that I wanted to go into science and industry because it just seemed like a really good fit. It would be a good place to have a career and have a family; and have that balance in life. It really has done that for me I would say so.
WIE, SWE
Hellrigel:
Well, that's fortunate. I understand that you are also very involved with women's organizations in engineering, physics, and science.
Amm:
Yes. That's a passion of mine, to have more diversity in science and engineering. We have so few people going into the field in the world today that we need more people going into the field. Especially here in the US we have fewer and fewer people going into science and engineering careers. We really need to fill that gap and have the best possible solutions. We found in the world that having diverse teams and diverse groups of people solving those problems enables you to come up with the strongest and best solutions. That's really been a passion of mine.
When I was an undergraduate, I was in the women’s physics group at the University of Toronto. I remember Millie Dresselhaus coming to talk to us and she spoke about how it was unbelievably hard when she was coming up. She basically had a baby and was back in the lab the next day because if she took a misstep, she might not be back in the lab. I feel like a lot of us stand on the shoulders of giants and we're really taking that forward, encouraging women to pursue careers in science and engineering and stick with it.
One of the challenges we now find is that many women go into the field but then they leave the field because they feel isolated or they have better opportunities outside doing product management or doing a different career, sales or something. So, there's been this great outflow of mid-career women in science and engineering. I spend a lot of time inside of GE and outside of GE working on this problem.
In GE, we are very fortunate that we are celebrating the twentieth anniversary of our women's network, which started shortly before I started at GE. We work very hard on keeping women in the company, networking with each other, helping each other out, and looking for initiatives going forward. Especially in technical areas, we still do not have as many women in senior roles as we would like to. We still have the leaky pipeline. We're continuing to work on this. We have mentorship programs for women mid-career, trying to help them through that stage.
I also do quite a bit of work with IEEE. I just recently took on the IEEE Council on Superconductivity.
Hellrigel:
The WIE [Women in Engineering] post.
Amm:
Yes, the WIE post. It has been very interesting to meet with all these women from around the world to talk about these issues. Certainly, Kathy Foley and I have been doing quite a bit in the superconductivity community to have women come together, learn from each other, and help each other out.
Hellrigel:
When do you meet, a few times a year?
Amm:
Yes. We have teleconferences every two months and we sponsor regional meetings around the globe. There are two big meetings in the US. There's a really big one every year in San Jose, that's the WIE International Leadership Conference. I've been to that before. I did not get to go this year because it conflicted with our GE women in science and engineering symposium that I organized. I had to help host the GE symposium. The WIE International Leadership Conference is a great conference, and I really encourage people to go whether you’re a man or a woman. It's an amazing conference to learn about all kinds of things in science and engineering and how to enhance your career. Another group comes together at the end of November in Baltimore, and I'm going to be heading out to that one, because I can make that one.
Hellrigel:
Yes. You could take a train down if you wanted to.
Amm:
Exactly. Yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I think it's the one out West, I proposed a paper to teach people how to conduct oral histories and how to write first-hand histories. The latter enables people to write a personal account, a memoir.
Amm:
Oh, that's great.
Hellrigel:
They can write about one project, their career, or …
Amm:
Right.
Hellrigel:
They can document their efforts and contributions. If I recall correctly, thus far in terms of first-hand histories, we have zero women.
Amm:
Really. Wow.
Hellrigel:
We have a large collection of oral histories from women, but zero first-hand histories. I don't know. I have been with the IEEE for two years and this has been the year of the woman from the History Committee, but it's still difficult to get that momentum going. I know a number of people at WIE and then the Society of Women Engineers, SWE.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
They are quite active.
Amm:
Oh, very active, yes. We do a scholarship at GE for SWE every year. We raise funding to help with some scholarships that SWE puts out as well.
Applied Superconductivity Conference
Hellrigel:
You are also involved with the Applied Superconductivity Conference.
Amm:
Yes, I am. I've been involved with that for a number of years. I was on the Board of the conference, and then the last ASE Conference, I actually was the President of the Board for that conference in Colorado. And that was just a fantastic experience. We have an incredible, incredibly good group. It's a small group. It's a tight group in the superconductivity community. Everybody knows everybody else. Even amongst competitors we all know each other in the MRI industry. It's a small world, but we have a really great talented group of people that are really dedicated and really do a great job organizing these events. And so, it's been a real privilege to learn and work with all of those folks over the last decade.
Hellrigel:
I know they have continuing education training at the ASC (Applied Superconductivity Conference). Are you involved with that?
Amm:
Yes, they have these courses on the side. I haven't taught one of those. I've just done some women sort of seminars during the conferences. While I haven't actually taught one of the courses some of my colleagues have. And it's very rewarding, especially for the younger folks in our community. They get a lot out of going to those courses. It's very beneficial.
Hellrigel:
I noticed it was quite international, including a lot of people from Asia.
Amm:
Yes. It's a very international conference now. Over half of our attendees come from outside of the U.S. now, so it's extremely international.
Hellrigel:
You also are involved with a number of other organizations, like the ASME, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That was a different venue or because you work with the metals?
Amm:
I am a member of the society (ASME). I'm not on the ASME board or anything. I've managed and led many engineers, mechanical engineers, and also electrical engineers over the years. I thought it was important to understand both things. Magnets are very much mechanical and electrical because we have very big forces that these magnets see. You have to keep them constrained so that they don't stop being superconducting, because it's not much energy that it takes to—
If it moves a little bit, they quench and don't work anymore. Well, they will come back to working, but you have to cool them back down again and it costs you helium, time, and money.
Hellrigel:
Yes, a lot of helium.
Amm:
Yes, a lot of helium.
IEEE
Hellrigel:
That's fascinating. I also noticed that you're a Senior Member of IEEE.
Amm:
Yes, that's right.
Hellrigel:
How important is IEEE to your career?
Amm:
Oh, it's been very important from the earliest days. Many of my early papers were published in the IEEE Transactions on Superconductivity. My advisor was the editor for many years, and he was very active in the Council on Superconductivity in IEEE. I saw the importance of IEEE from an early time. It was very helpful. He introduced me to a lot of leaders through IEEE, and I made those connections.
Early in my career it was very helpful to (A) get published and (B) be able to go to these amazing conferences that IEEE is a major contributor to, like the ASE, like the magnet technology conference. Those were very beneficial to me in my early career and as I grew in my career.
I was very fortunate when I first became the manager at GE because I had a manager that said we needed to go and recruit the best and the brightest in superconductivity since I was building up my team at the time. My boss said to me you need to go and get yourself involved in the community. You need to get yourself on the Board. You need to really work to grow your reputation in the community so you can attract the best talent. So, I took him at his word, and I went, and I worked at it, and then they nominated me to be on the ASC Board.
I ran for the ASC Board, grew a lot of connections, and met a lot of people that way, as well, in the superconductivity community. I got to know who their students were, and I got to know some of the best and the brightest that way. I also got to know people who were much more senior in the area. I even recruited a few folks from competitors through that. I have one of my good colleagues who was at IGC and then Phillips for many years. They came to work for me through that connection because we were both working on the conference together. It has been very beneficial to my career and continues to be so. I love working with this group of people and I learn new things from them every day. It is an amazing way to network. It is an amazing way to learn and an amazing way to continue to enrich the field of superconductivity, so it stays vibrant and rich.
Hellrigel:
In addition to presentations and publications, camaraderie, as you pointed out, is a big part of what goes on as ASC.
Amm:
Absolutely.
Hellrigel:
At the Fiftieth Anniversary meeting in Denver, some of these, mostly guys, the older generation, had been there from ground zero.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
It was almost like you are a 49er in California at the beginning of statehood.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
That sense of community was actually fascinating. What else would you do with IEEE? You are involved with superconductivity. Are you a member of other societies?
Amm:
I'm also a member of the Biomedical Society. There's lots of interesting work going on there as well that I like to keep abreast of in the medical arenas.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Do you find that it takes up a lot of time?
Amm:
It takes up as much time as you want it to. When you have the time, you can give a lot and get a lot out of it. There are times when you are busy and you are not quite as involved, and that's okay, too. But that's what is great about IEEE. There are just so many opportunities to be involved in, so many different ways that that's a pleasure. Nobody is judging you when you do have to take a step back, when you are just too busy, but they are also glad to have you there and contributing when you do have the time to do it.
Management
Hellrigel:
When you are a manager, how many people are you in charge of?
Amm:
I'm not a manager right now. I am a project manager. It has been really nice because I've been able to get back more to the technical work. Just managing a program also means not having as many people. However, I love people and that was why I became a manager in the first place.
Part of the reason I stayed at GE for so long is the people are absolutely phenomenal growing up there. When I was a first line manager, I had the pleasure of managing anywhere from fourteen to twenty people depending on the period of time and how many people were in the team. Some of the brightest physicists, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, I've ever met that I got to lead. It is funny because I can remember when I was hiring people again, the first guy that hired me as a manager, said to me, make sure that you hire people that are smarter than you because, otherwise, your group will have the lowest IQ in the world. It's true. I hired people that were way more brilliant than I am or ever will be. It was a joy to work with them, and as the manager and the leader, to help them, to help them see the bigger picture and to help them connect with the right people when they are doing their research project. If you have to go outside the team to get the right materials or person or a machines expert or an MRI expert for the magnet guys, it's just great to be able to connect all those people together and make it happen. When I became a manager of managers that was a whole new thing. I was teaching some folks who were new to being managers about how to be a manager.
Hellrigel:
Skills.
Amm:
Yes. I had some really great guys that were totally brilliant engineers who were new to management. I feel like I made an impact and really helped them to become a good manager over time. That was really very satisfying to them and very satisfying to me as well. Then, I also had the pleasure to work with some of the most brilliant minds in the superconducting field. One fellow is a bright young guy and at some point, you guys should choose him for an interview.
Hellrigel:
Who?
Amm:
Kiruba Haran. He's at the University of Illinois. He is a brilliant electric machines guy and brilliant superconducting electric machines guy who worked at GE for many years. Now he is a star at the University of Illinois doing amazing work. Just a brilliant guy. I had the privilege of working with him, managing him for a while and helping him to really launch his career. I felt really proud about those kinds of things when I can help somebody who is just amazing and doing incredible things, to get moving forward. That's sort of what I see in a management role. It's all about that. It's all about helping people and that's also why I like these things where I've helped to develop the next generation of scientists and engineers in the superconducting field.
Hellrigel:
Do you have summer internships?
Amm:
Yes, we do. I want to say its juniors and seniors and then into graduate school students we have as interns. It's not high school or lower-level undergraduates at this point at the research centers.
Hellrigel:
That's important so that they can understand what the work world is like before they get there.
Amm:
Absolutely. It makes a big difference because you can decide what do you like and what don't you like. Do you want to be in academia, or do you want to be in industry? You get a flavor of that. It's so important.
Hellrigel:
Right. I asked other interviewees about work-life balance. I told them when women are interviewed, they are asked about work-life balance, family responsibilities, and related issues, but men are infrequently asked those questions. So, I ask everyone those questions. When I asked the men about work-life balance, many said, “Well, of course, my wife had more of the children and family responsibilities.” However, some made it home at 6 p.m. for supper, and then they might return to work or retreat to a home office and put in a few more hours. Does GE consider the work-life balance issue important, perhaps, as part of its retention program?
Amm:
Oh, it's huge. It has come an enormous way since I started at GE. I was very fortunate with all three of the first managers I had at GE.
I was actually hired into another group in Trifon's when I first joined the center. My manager at that first group; he was very understanding, and then Trifon was amazing.
I can remember when I was nine months pregnant with my son, my first child, he let me work from home, even though in that day and age it wasn't that often that you did that. I actually had my own big heavy laptop at home so I could do some work. We were telecommuting right up until I went into labor practically. I was in a review and I'm still in bed because he let me work from home. I had an incredibly supportive manager after that too.
I'm the kind of person that likes to do my job and I like to work, so I think I would have gone crazy if I had stayed at home as a mom. I took six weeks of maternity leave, and I went back to work with both my kids. I did breast feed them for a year. GE was supportive of that, and we had lactation rooms. It is even more widespread now. Before you had to go up to medical services, but now they have them in every single building on the campus at the research center, and I know it's a big deal. They even have things where women, who are traveling while they are breast feeding, can send the milk home. There are programs for that. There's lots of great stuff they do. Now GE has paternity leave programs as well as maternity leave. They are very supportive of that. We have so many technology tools that we really can work with wherever we have to manage that.
They, of course, have the family medical leave stuff as well. You have that flexibility and part time schedules if you want to go to part time. I know many people will do that for many different reasons. So, really, it's very flexible. It's great and nobody—.
I feel like initially there was more judgment peer to peer when I first started. I used to freak out about it. Oh, are my peers going to judge me because I'm doing whatever, but I feel like that's gone away a lot. It's really just about getting the job done. We are measured on outcome, not on, are you physically there.
Hellrigel:
Hours sitting at the desk.
Amm:
Yes. Because it really is about outcome. When you are in a job where you're thinking and if you need to be in the lab, you need to be in the lab, okay? So, there are going to be days when you are in the lab [because] you've got to be in the lab and do your experiment. But when you are not doing it, when you are just doing analysis on your computer or whatever, you can do that anywhere. It makes it a lot easier; I think. The technology really helps a lot today, too.
Hellrigel:
These days do you still spend much time in the lab?
Amm:
Well, right now I'm not spending too much time in the lab. I didn't as a manager. Right now, I'm not doing hardware on my project. We're still in the paper study phase, so I'm doing a lot of that, a lot of paper writing, and a lot of proposal writing and things. We've been doing a lot of that and analysis. But I'm hopeful that next year I will be back in the lab once we get over this analysis phase of the program. Then we will actually be doing some testing of things. That will be exciting.
Hellrigel:
Some of the people I talk to say, oh, there are two groups; the people that can build things and the theorists.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Are you in either or both?
Amm:
I would classify myself as more of an experimentalist, but I'm not a theoretical physicist, no. I can do the calculations on the computer. I know how to program and stuff like that, but I'm more of an experimentalist. I've grown up more in the lab than theoretical computation.
Hellrigel:
Well, you've only been there a short period of time compared to some of your colleagues.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What would you like to do next? Would you go back into management, get your own lab, or --?
Amm:
Well, right now, I'm happy with the project. I love my manager. She is like the most amazing woman in the world. If you are doing something on electric machines, she's a great lady. She would be wonderful to interview. She's the most humble person I've ever met. She's also named Kathleen.
Hellrigel:
What's her last name?
Amm:
Her name is Kathleen O’Brien. I say to her, you're the reason I'm still here because there's been, you may have read in the papers, there's a lot of turmoil and change going on in GE and having a phenomenal leader like my boss has been very helpful. It's a pretty big change for me in GE. Going from a senior management role back to a project management role is a huge change for me. She's been incredibly supportive and respects me as a leader that I am and recognizes me for that. I help her in her role with all the changes with these giant flat organizations now. It's pretty challenging to be leading that many people, especially through a time of very tumultuous change. It's a big transformation time for GE. It's exciting yet scary at the same time.
Hellrigel:
Is there much left in Schenectady?
Amm:
Yes. We still probably have, I don't know, a couple thousand people in the research center there.
Hellrigel:
I don't read much science fiction, but I like Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano.
Amm:
Yes. He had a lot of Schenectady in his books. Yes, I guess you are thinking about the days when we had the big headquarters there and downtown. No, that's a lot smaller than it was, because it's gone all over the world. It is no longer concentrated in downtown Schenectady. There are definitely fewer people. I work at the research center, so it's different from downtown, but yes, it's smaller than it was. But in a way it's bigger because it's everywhere. They are in Greenville. They're in France. They're in China. They are all over the world.
Hellrigel:
Do you travel to those other places?
Amm:
I have. I definitely have in the past. I've spent a fair amount of time in Shanghai, China because I used to work with a team there. I ran a group in Munich, Germany for a while so I spent a fair amount of time there as well.
Hellrigel:
They are working on other aspects of the technology for medical applications.
Amm:
Yes. They were working on MRI and the group in China was working on magnets. We had a team there working on magnets. In Munich, Germany, we had a team working on MRI applications research.
Hellrigel:
It is spanning the globe.
Amm:
Yes. That also plays an interesting role in work-life balances as well I would say. It makes it challenging sometimes with those late-night phone calls, especially with Asia.
Hellrigel:
Right. Teleconference at 2:00 in the morning.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Occasionally you can all round up at some of the conferences.
Amm:
Oh yes. That's always been great. We've done that quite a bit I would say. The conferences are great. Great opportunities to see everybody and get together.
Hellrigel:
In university there's a lot of pressure to publish or perish. Do you have pressure in industry to patent or perish, or maybe, publish or perish, too?
Amm:
It's not just patent or perish. We're more restricted on publishing because of trade secrets and things like that. The biggest thing in industry is you've got to get stuff done that's going to go into a product and get out the door to make money. Ultimately, you've got to pick the technologies to work on that are going to be successful in going into a product rapidly and making money for the company.
Hellrigel:
Do you have the numbers crunchers that try to do the big data thing and figure out what's going to commercialize quicker?
Amm:
We are doing all kinds of interesting stuff now. There is this really great initiative right now that has started over the last couple years. It's called product management as a science. We actually have a lab in the research center that works on product management, and they are looking at scenario tools. They look at how whole ecosystems will change such as looking at the healthcare ecosystem or looking at the power ecosystem or looking at the transportation ecosystem. Power is really interesting because it's all intertwined with all kinds of interesting things.
They are modeling these things using data, using trends, [and] saying okay, well, what if suddenly we have twice as much solar power, what does that do to our gas turbine business? What does that do to our transportation business because we aren't hauling as much coal? They are looking at questions like that. You can throw these into different scenarios, and kind of go beyond just thinking about it yourself. You are looking at models of what do these things mean; what are the big trends; where are they going; what type of products will we need; and what type of industries are we going to need to be in in the future to be successful.
I find that really fascinating because it's really helpful for senior leadership in the company to look at some of these things and use them to help their strategizing in the different things. It even helps us in our things as we consider if we are working on the right things; should we be doing something different; should we be working on a different technology; or should we stop working on a something because it doesn't make sense anymore and work on something else. It’s very dynamic and very exciting. Yes, big data is huge, is really huge right now.
Then, of course, we have our whole internet of things because we are a very strong, hard core industrial company, but now we are also a software company. We're using those software tools to make our existing products even more efficient. For example, how can we help a customer and share in the profit of that customer to make their gas turbines run more efficiently? How do we tweak that? How do we learn from the data? How does the gas turbine teach itself, so to speak? It's pretty interesting stuff. Same thing with the windmills.
Hellrigel:
Right, the windmills. Yes, and solar power. At what point do you stop companies from drilling and using oil because you cannot make a profit on it.
Amm:
Yes, and things like that.
Then even in the MRI, how do we make our scans more efficient? How do we make the whole patient workflow experience better for the patient [and] better for the doctor? How do you make it more efficient so you're getting more productivity out of these incredibly expensive MRI scanners that people are buying? That's a big deal too for our customers. We are helping them by being a solution provider, and not just telling them we're going to sell you a system. It's really how do we solve your problem that you have today in terms of productivity.
Hellrigel:
IEEE and the IEEE Foundation are involved with global humanitarian projects. Given that the MRIs are so expensive, how much work is being done to reduce their costs? Perhaps some consider making the technology more affordable as part of a humanitarian effort?
Amm:
Yes. There's a huge amount of effort going into trying to reduce the cost of MRI systems. There is a global need for people to have MRI in places they can't get to today. But, also just in terms of overall medical costs, it's a big deal. We also have price pressures in our marketplace. It's to the point that we're really focused on the hardware and how we can reduce the cost while keeping the performance the same or improving it. It's a big challenge with MRI systems. There is a lot of pressure for us and all of our competitors to figure out how we make the cheapest MRI magnet possible. It also puts a lot of pressure on the wire makers and everything else in the industry. It's a tough time right now. It's commoditization, so you have got to figure out how to make it as cheap as possible.
Hellrigel:
Right. You have to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, too.
Amm:
Yes, there is all that. Everybody is always trying to figure out what everybody else is doing.
Hellrigel:
Yes. It's an industry that seems to move pretty quickly.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
And that is so expensive. It's almost like buying a generating plant 100 years ago. These guys in these small towns would be spending $50,000 and they had to have some faith in knowing that it's going to work.
Amm:
That's right. These things have got to work, day and night, 24/7. It's important for the patients and for the doctors.
Future plans
Hellrigel:
Perhaps we are at the point when I should ask a few questions about the future. Do you always see yourself working? Alvin [Tollestrup], who I talked to this morning, is ninety-three years old, and he is consulting and working with a group. Does GE have that flexibility for you?
Amm:
Oh man. We've had people work for as long as they wanted to. I've been very fortunate to work with--actually, I managed employee number one of the MRI business, John Skank. He was the first employee hired into GE to go look at MRI back in the late 1970s. He just recently retired. He was in his late seventies, and he wanted to retire. It wasn’t that anybody was saying John, you need to retire. You definitely have the flexibility to work as long as you want. Trifon, again, was also in his early seventies when he retired. So, we greatly respect and acknowledge our long-term employees. Jim Bray is still working. I don't know how old Jim is, but Jim has been around a long time. Jim Bray would be another good one to interview when you're up in the area because he was a student of [John] Bardeen.
Hellrigel:
I just read the biography of Bardeen.
Amm:
Jim Bray is an amazing guy. He's like one of those people that knows everybody and everything from across the research center all the years he's worked there. He's an amazing man. But, anyway, there's a huge amount of respect for all of these incredibly brilliant technical people we have, and we don't have enough of them. I'd love to have them work forever if they could. I think about myself, and I don't see the end in sight. I'm still excited with what I'm doing and if I can get another management role and work, but I want to continue to work in the technology space. Technology is very important to me, so whatever I do, definitely it will be in the technology space. So, whether it is a product management role or a management role or continuing as a project manager, like I am now, and working technically, to me, I'm excited by all of those things. It's just really a question of what opportunities come up and what makes the most sense for me at the time.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Amm:
But I love working in technology. I don't want to leave technology, that's for sure.
Hellrigel:
You said that there are not enough people, so are jobs going unfilled?
Amm:
Well, maybe I'm not saying it the right way. We don't have enough people with the deep set of skills.
Hellrigel:
Oh, the skillset.
Amm:
The skillsets. When you think about something like a generator or gas turbine or these things, these are incredibly complex machines, and it takes you years to get the deep expertise in the area you are in. And, we have so many giants in--we have a big bump with the baby boomers and a lot of them are retiring. We have a big gap in my generation, the Gen-Xers, and then you have the millennials coming along but that's a big expertise gap. Exactly.
So, that is a really big challenge and that's something certainly over the last several years. When I was a manager, I had John Skank working with younger people to pass on, and he was very proud of passing on his knowledge to the younger generation and teaching them as much as he could. That's such a critical piece right now across these highly technical industries. That's why your oral histories are so great and what the field is doing to teach, having these memorial sessions where we talk about the history is so important in superconductivity because it's going to be lost. If you don't teach it and you don't teach the younger generation, they're going to repeat mistakes that we've learned from over the years, so it's important.
Hellrigel:
You might not realize it because of all the competition in grad school, but you need to have the personality to work on a team.
Amm:
You can't solve today's problems without a team. Everything is team. It's team, team, team, because all of the problems that you could sit in a corner and solve by yourself are gone. The problems today are huge, hard, challenging, and expensive. You need multi-disciplinary teams of incredibly smart people to work together seamlessly. I guess one of the things I'm really proud of this year is I've got the dream team. I've got Jim Bray on it. I've got all these really smart people I've been talking to you about, machines expert, mechanical machines experts, superconductivity experts, all working on these cool power problems all together and just making amazing progress. It's really exciting.
Hellrigel:
I have worked on teams or at least on group projects. Sometimes I had to tell them to get along.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You've got to make it work because otherwise you waste a lot of time.
Amm:
You absolutely do. You waste a lot of energy. I find that getting along you have much more positive energy. However, it's always good to have good technical debate. There's nothing wrong with that, but don't make it personal. Don't make it personal
Hellrigel:
It seems industry almost creates an apprenticeship type program with Jim Bray and team members from other generations working together.
Amm:
It's a lot of--You have a lot of great leaders. I learned a heck of a lot from Trifon. We even had a really great mechanical engineer, a mid-career mechanical engineer, mentoring with Trifon before he retired because that knowledge transfer even from here to the mid years is still significant. It's like mentoring people all along the different paths of their career. Helping them along the way is really important. Keeping that in mind and thinking about what you can do at every stage is really important.
Hellrigel:
GE and other companies used to have apprenticeships. Now at the University we hear companies say the students don’t come in with the right skillsets. However, I would like the opportunity to remind them that at some point they used to have apprenticeships. You would hire them, bring them in, and provide training. A former student, a mechanical engineering and history double major, was hired at PSE&G, the utility company in Jersey. The company has a program where they'll hire a mechanical engineer and for five years they're being trained in all aspects of the company.
Amm:
We do that with the Edison Engineering Program. They have that at GE, and it is great. That's more of a leadership program, I think. We also have what we call our technical career path now. We make sure that our scientists at all levels once you're sort of a senior engineer. We have scientists, lead scientists, senior scientists, principal scientists, senior principal scientist chief. We have this whole path of people, plus experienced program managers, experienced people along the way and the expectation is once you hit—
(Siri phone: I just don’t get his whole gender thing.) Oh, my phone is going. Stop it. That's so funny. Yes, it's my Siri talking. I don't know why Siri was on. That's kind of scary.
Hellrigel:
Well, it's funny. I don't get that gender thing is an interesting statement.
Amm:
Yes, it's interesting.
Hellrigel:
I also teach women's history. Feminism has become the other F-word.
Amm:
Oh.
Hellrigel:
People don't want to identify.
Amm:
As a feminist, yes.
Hellrigel:
Right. In some of the projects promoting the careers of women in engineering and science, people are using questions with feminism. I said you're asking people questions about the impact of feminism, but they don't think they are feminists, so you've got to rethink it a little bit.
Amm:
That's been a huge challenge for us with our women's network at the research center. We have difficulty getting women to come to events because of that. They feel like I don't have a problem. There isn't a problem, so why do I need to be part of a women's network? It's very interesting, and it's very common for technical women in particular. They don't want to be singled out, differentiated. They just want to be seen as being recognized for their accomplishments. I certainly feel that way, but also, it's very important to have that camaraderie and help each other because men do it all the time. They are going out for beers together. They're pointing out opportunities for each other. I've had huge numbers of sponsors that are men. My biggest sponsors have been men. That's something women need to get comfortable with; it's okay to have a sponsor. Your sponsors are critical for your career success in science and in any field really. It's critical. That's sometimes where we lose out because we don't think about that. We don't think it is okay. We think, oh, we just have to work hard and make it on our own and be tough. It's like no. No. I mean, it is that is not what men do. That's not what men do we've got to learn something about that.
Hellrigel:
Right. Maybe by meeting other people you can learn from a community. In case a problem crops up, you’ll know where to turn.
Amm:
Yes. Exactly.
Hellrigel:
In regard to your career, so far, have you had second thoughts? In other words, are you content with your career right now or you should have done something else?
Amm:
Well, I think I am. These past couple of years have been a little bit challenging for me. I had a lot of life changes because I recently divorced. Two years ago, I was divorced. A while before that I had an opportunity to run the magnet team down in Florence, South Carolina, and I didn't take it because I was trying to fix my marriage. My ex-husband didn't want to move. I stayed here and didn't take that opportunity. I might be in a different position now if I had. I don't know if it would be better or worse, but maybe that's the only thing I sometimes second guess. Should I have done that instead?
I am very happy with my boss. It's a very tumultuous time in GE. I love the project I’m working on. It's great. But I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I don't know whether I've found it yet or not. I know what I like to work on. I'm continuing to explore that and figuring out how I can continue to grow in the scientific community and in the industrial world in a high-tech company like GE. I have to see where I go. I'm forty-six years old. You get to this point and there always are things you would have, could have, or should have [done]. In general, I've been very blessed, and I've been very fortunate in my career. And I have no complaints. I'm very happy to still be at GE and still have a great role there.
Hellrigel:
No second thoughts about not going into teaching.
Amm:
Well, the funny thing is I always think about teaching. The only challenge would be, could I get a tenured position, because I don't have as many publications as some of these professors. I always think maybe I could go back and do it after I educate my kids when I can take a pay cut and see if I can get something and teach. I do love teaching. I've always taught for many years, lots of things, both in the office and outside the office.
Hellrigel:
A couple of the gentlemen who recorded oral histories with me said that they would have liked to teach, but they had a family to raise. The reality is economics. After retiring from Bell Labs, one guy went to Arizona State to teach and run a lab.
Amm:
Exactly.
Hellrigel:
Then he could spend his winters out there.
Amm:
Yes. I'd love to be able to do that or go to Colorado. I would be able to ski in the winter and enjoy the beautiful weather.
Hellrigel:
I met quite a few people who work or have worked at the NIST facility in Boulder, Colorado.
Amm:
Oh yes. That's a great place. Great people there.
Hellrigel:
I've heard the cost of living is really obscene now.
Amm:
It is. That's the only problem. It's getting really expensive out there, but if I could live in a small apartment, downsize, that would be okay. Once you are done raising your kids, it’s a lot freer.
Hellrigel:
Do you think your two children are going to go into science?
Amm:
My son is a senior in high school, and he has decided he's going to major in computer engineering, so he is going to go into science. He likes computers and he's been working in the robotics club. What is it? Oh, what is it called, I think they're the ARC or something, an international group that builds these robots that go into competitions. He really enjoyed that. He's decided he really wants to do software engineering, which is a great career to go into these days.
My daughter is not so decided. She says I'll do a major in probably some kind of computer software thing, but I want to do two minors. I want to do one in music and one in--she's very broad. She loves art. She loves music. She loves literature. She likes computers, but she is undecided as to where she wants to go. Both my kids are really smart kids, and they really like technology. They are much better than me at figuring out all the things on the computers and the cell phones.
Hellrigel:
Right. Would you consider yourself mid-career?
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
What advice would you give people, the generation behind you, going to grad school?
Amm:
I would say learn as much as you can right now about data science, about data engineering, about being able to manipulate data with software, with programming software, and understand deep learning, understand these things. Have a basic understanding of these types of things because they are changing the world right now. No matter what area you're in it's still going to be very important to understand that because it's changing the world in all fields. All fields are being impacted by it. To me, that's a very important thing to understand no matter what area you are going into.
Hellrigel:
I kept you yakking for an hour and a half almost.
Amm:
Wow. I do like to talk so.
Hellrigel:
No. Usually we spend about two hours. Are there any topics we didn't cover that you would like to introduce? Is there something you'd like to add about your research?
Amm:
Oh, I guess one thing I should talk about is one of the things I'm most proud of. We had this amazing project at GE over the past, probably ten years, maybe more than ten years now, that we sort of launched a technology last year at Arson Aid. It's called the Freelium technology.
Hellrigel:
Freelium.
Amm:
Yes, Freelium, which means sort of “helium free.” The idea is it's like a completely self-contained MRI magnet, so all the helium is contained in it forever.
Hellrigel:
Really.
Amm:
Yes. It reduces the amount of helium you need in the magnet from 2,000 liters to 20 liters. It is two orders of magnitude change, so it’s a really big breakthrough. I led the team that developed that technology. I'm just so proud of those folks that did that. It was an amazing breakthrough. We think it's going to have many more applications in the future beyond MRI magnets, so it's pretty exciting.
Hellrigel:
It was a ten-year project.
Amm:
Yes. Big project. Big long project.
Hellrigel:
Were you there from start to finish?
Amm:
Yes. Pretty exciting.
Hellrigel:
Yes. In terms of reducing the use of helium, would reducing the helium also make it safer?
Amm:
Yes, I guess you could say that. It does make it safer because you don't have to worry about having a vent stack. It's all self-contained. It's all covered by the pressure vessel code, so I don't have to worry about all this helium being vented out of a hospital or having a problem with my vent stack and the helium coming back into the room and causing an asphyxiation hazard or something like that. So, yes, I guess you could say it's safer, too.
Hellrigel:
No people talking with squeaky voices.
Amm:
Or crawling around on the floor so they can breathe. All that kind of stuff.
Hellrigel:
That's just fascinating.
Amm:
Yes.
Reflections and closing remarks
Hellrigel:
Any other accomplishments that you'd put on a list?
Amm:
That one's a pretty big one. I'll just leave it at that. That one I'm really proud of, yes. I guess I'd already said it, but I need to mention all the amazing people I had such a privilege to work with at GE and outside of GE in the IEEE. It really is incredible. We have amazing giants in this field, and it's a real privilege to continue to work in it and continue to work with them.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I've been reading Bardeen's biography and he seemed to decompress on the golf course. I don't know if the younger generation coming up needs the advice, but do you have advice for them about decompressing and on the need to decompress.
Amm:
Well, I've always believed in getting good exercise and getting enough sleep because a lot of us don't get enough sleep and that really can impact us. I like doing yoga. I find yoga is very--just getting out in nature too, it's just nice to do that. So, I can understand what Bardeen is saying about decompressing on the golf course. You need to take time out. You can't just bang your head against the wall all the time. A lot of times, your best ideas come when you're not in the office. It's when you are decompressing that it will come to you. I can think about-- thinking about my own ideas when I'm just relaxing or in the shower or something. I always think about some of my mentors, like Trifon. Trifon would go for a walk every single afternoon just to stay healthy and he would come back with yet another brilliant idea. Hey, we need to change this or fix that or do it this way or do it differently. That's always where he came up with his ideas, too. So, a lot of great minds, just being out in nature and decompressing, you come up with your best ideas.
Hellrigel:
Charles Steinmetz used nature to relax and decompress.
Amm:
Oh, really, going--
Hellrigel:
In nature.
Amm:
That's interesting.
Hellrigel:
Yes. He would actually in the summertime go up to, I want to say the Adirondacks. He liked canoeing and the mountains.
Amm:
Yes. It's beautiful up there.
Hellrigel:
Yes. But, wow, Freelium. I guess GE is the only one using that?
Amm:
I know other companies are trying to work on it too at various variants of it, but nobody has done this completely closed loop thing that we have. We have IT on it and everything. There's a funny video. If you Google Freelium on the web, you'll see some of my funny colleagues in Florence, South Carolina talking about it. They did a Facebook live thing on it when they launched it last year, so it's pretty funny.
Hellrigel:
Well, your team must have been pretty psyched to be at the cutting edge of that.
Amm:
Absolutely.
Hellrigel:
I guess if there are other projects like that, you can't talk about them.
Amm:
I can't talk about the one I'm working on now, but it will be pretty cool if it goes. I'm excited about it and so far, so good.
Hellrigel:
Yes, that also means you can't give a paper on it at a conference.
Amm:
No, I can't, unfortunately. Not yet. Someday maybe.
Hellrigel:
Some day.
Amm:
Someday, but not right now.
Hellrigel:
Hopefully.
Amm:
In a couple of years when we launch it. I need to talk about it.
Hellrigel:
Well, yes. That's if you can cut the lead time down and publish it and then move on to another big great thing.
Amm:
Exactly.
Hellrigel:
Well, I don't know. We've covered a lot.
Amm:
Yes. We have. Absolutely.
Hellrigel:
I don't know if you would like to add anything.
Amm:
I can't think of anything.
Hellrigel:
Freelium was really cool. It didn’t show up when I Googled you.
Amm:
Yes. It probably wouldn't because it was sort of a tag name that GE Healthcare came up with. It is a trademark that GE Healthcare came up with for the technology. Other names we've used for it are low cryogen magnets, but Freelium is our trademark for low cryogen magnets.
Hellrigel:
Well, yes, cryogen. When the public hears that they think of frozen heads.
Amm:
They do. They are always calling Laurie Huget about that at CSA [Cryogenic Society of America]. It's funny.
Hellrigel:
And I guess that uses what, helium to keep them cold.
Amm:
Yes, I think it, or maybe even liquid nitrogen. I don't know--
Hellrigel:
Yes, liquid nitrogen. And when I go to these meetings, I'll go to the trade shows and the guys will have little trinkets to make fun of it. Well, thank you for your time.
Amm:
No problem.
Hellrigel:
We will probably do part two as your career progresses.
Amm:
Sure. No problem. I'll be happy to do it when I'm ninety.
Hellrigel:
This is a mid-year, mid-career, oral history. Normally I don't talk to anyone mid-career.
Amm:
No.
Hellrigel:
Late career, so that's an interesting perspective.
Amm:
Absolutely.
Hellrigel:
Peter [Lee] was quite astute at throwing you into the pool.
Amm:
Well, that's great. Well, I hope Peter has done one himself because he's having an incredible career. You need to do one of Peter. Peter is an incredible guy. He's done so much. Just make him do it. He's so--he's, again, one of these guys that is just so quiet and so reserved, but so brilliant. He's an inspiration. He's just incredible doing this thing. I feel really honored that he suggested that you interview me. You need to interview him. He's got an amazing story too.
Hellrigel:
Florida is one of the big graduate programs now.
Amm:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
Where are the other big programs?
Amm:
University of Wisconsin still has some people there, more cryogenics, I think. Certainly, Kiruba Haran has started one at the University of Illinois for electric machines, like great things on superconducting electric machines, but that's fairly new. They have always had good superconductivity at Illinois for a long time. MIT still has some very good students. Out west where Berkeley is, they have the magnet programs, so their graduate students work there as well.
Hellrigel:
Is Houston?
Amm:
Houston, definitely, yes. I was going to say Houston. It was the next one I was going to say.
Hellrigel:
It seems Houston and Florida might be two of the newest programs.
Amm:
Yes. They are the newer ones, because they're the younger generation. The big magnet lab moved down to Florida. Then, of course, there is Paul Chu and all the work he's done setting up Texas. And then, I guess, what the superconductor, supercollider helped to--there's also Texas A&M and University of Texas. There are still some people there too because of SSC [Superconducting Super Collider]. They moved down there and stayed. I think in the US those are the big ones, yes, that I can think of. Justin's group has moved around, but they are a materials group mainly. You know, they do the superconducting materials. They were at NC State and now he's at Penn State.
Hellrigel:
I guess they get courted by colleges to bring them in.
Amm:
He just got a big promotion. He went from being the dean of material science to being the dean of all engineering, like all the engineering departments. So, it's a big promotion for him to go to Penn State.
Hellrigel:
He can bring his program with him.
Amm:
Yes, he can. When you're a professor you get everybody moved with you. It's pretty nice. He's had an incredible career. Have you interviewed Justin yet? You must have.
Hellrigel:
No.
Amm:
Oh, you've got to interview Justin. He's a great guy too. Justin Schwartz. You must know Justin Schwartz. Everybody knows Justin Schwartz and that laugh. You can hear him from five miles away when he's coming down the hallway.
Hellrigel:
Yes. I'm going to ask about interviewing Justin. When I was at ASC, I went around looking at name badges trying to find who I was going to interview. I ended up talking with other people that knew them [the interviewees] because it is rather interconnected.
Amm:
Yes. There are just so many people, so many people. This is a good opportunity to come here because there are a number of really important people. I'm glad you are interviewing Hem Kanithi because he's an amazing guy and he's not far from retiring.
Hellrigel:
I have him tomorrow at 11:00 A.M.
Amm:
He's a great guy, too. I love working with him. He does great work in conductors. He was very helpful in putting my talk together, too. He gave me a lot of good advice and pieces of information. He had some really nice PowerPoint charts, too, that I'm going to use.
Hellrigel:
Well, yes. I think it's a two- or three-hour session of papers.
Amm:
It's going to be a lot of fun. I found out I was on a panel discussion, too. I don't know what they are going to ask me. They didn't send me questions, so I guess I'll be finding out tomorrow.
Hellrigel:
I hope they're recording it because it is something they need to preserve.
Amm:
I hope so. Usually, they do. Usually, they are pretty good about that. Yes, I hope they are, because I know Ellie [incomplete name] is really good about recording stuff, so hopefully he's getting it recorded.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Cool. We are finished.
Amm:
Thank you.
