Simin Feng
US Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division, USAFor groundbreaking scientific and technical leadership in metamaterial transition and in creating a paradigm shift in active denial technology.
Simin Feng was a curious child who frequently asked her engineer father about the world. Once, she asked her father what light was, suggesting at only six or seven years old that light had to be a stream of tiny particles because she could see it. Her father replied, “You’re half right.” Puzzled, Simin tried to figure out what that meant, half right. Much later, when she was in school, she learned about the wave-particle duality of light, and finally, she understood what her father meant. Looking back on this memory, Simin is impressed by her own intuition at such a young age.
As she started to build a career, Simin continued to follow her curiosity and developed her math and science skills to pursue science professionally. In her undergraduate, she was amazed by the beauty of Maxwell’s equations and spent a lot of time to deep dive into the meaning of the equations and develop intuitive feelings. Later in her graduate studies, her intuition led her to discover the connection of Gouy phase shift in wave beams with the Uncertainty Principle in quantum. During her PhD studies, she met a postdoc researcher at Lucent/Bell Labs who was looking for someone to help with simulations of the research in terahertz technology. Simin joined the group and utilized her intuition and fundamental optics to simulate the propagation of single-cycle pulses in the optical system. Her simulation results matched the experimental results, which led to a rewarding collaboration. She joined Lucent shortly after and worked there for three years. At Lucent, she worked on developing an ultra-long-haul fiber optical communications system until the telecommunications bubble burst in the early 2000s.
Lacking a clear path forward, Simin considered multiple options following the telecommunications crash. She submitted her resume far and wide for academic and industrial positions. One day, she received a phone call from a Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division representative, offering her a government position. Simin was surprised by the offer but attracted by the opportunity. Not only could she qualify for tenure sooner than most academic positions, but she would also have a lot of freedom to work on what interested her. She was interested in metamaterials and plasmonics and began her research.
As her research progressed, she was approached with an opportunity as Science Director to work for the Office of Naval Research Global, where Simin would, in addition to her permanent position, be able to travel to research bases outside the United States. She seized the opportunity to travel to Japan, Australia, and other countries to foster international scientific collaboration and expand her research career. Simin looks back on these experiences, grateful that people helped her along the way and proud of the hard work she put in to find success. Today, she still enjoys the freedom of research that attracted her and appreciates that she can follow her curiosities as she did as a child.
Throughout her career, she thinks curiosity and self-learning have contributed significantly to her success. Without a mentor, she learns from everyone around her. She shares, “Everyone is a unique individual from whom I can learn a unique talent or perspective.” She is also very interested in how one piece of science connects with another. Simin has a lot of respect for optics because it has such a wide and varied network of applications.
Photo courtesy of Simin Feng
Profile written by Samantha Hornback
