[Conn folks, this one's for you.] It’s been a crazy month and a half for Dockside Web Design. Partnerships and projects have sprung up left and right, and lots of progress has been made on all fronts. Today I finally had a chance to breathe, and got to reading my alumni magazine.
Last year I was involved with the hiring process for a new professor in the Physics department. I distinctly remember everything about my interaction with a certain candidate–and he was the feature this fall! I knew his story was incredible, but wasn’t sure if I had exaggerated the details. I hadn’t and here is the inspiring story in full. From the magazine:
“When Diagne arrived in America from Senegal on Dec. 15, 1993, he was what is termed in sports “a walk-on.” No one had asked him to come, and no one was waiting for him when he arrived. But Diagne is a problem-solver of the highest degree. He soon landed a job and started sending a portion of his paycheck home to his family.
His big break came on a sunny day when he was watching a soccer match in Central Park. A player was injured, and Diagne offered to play in his place. His skill landed him a spot on the squad and, even more important, a place to live, with one of his teammates. In the fall he enrolled at Westchester Community College, where several fellow students urged him to apply to a school of higher education called UConn. Being unacquainted with the local collegiate scene, Diagne first rang up another institution altogether.
“I think this is the best thing that happened to me,” he says. It was a felicitous happenstance all around. He was accepted for the spring semester of 1995 and graduated with honors in just two and a half years with a double major in physics and math. In his spare time, he helped to lead the varsity soccer team to the Division III NCAA tournament, a first for the Camels.” [Full Article]
He went on to get a PhD from Brown in Physics and now works at the MIT Lincoln Lab developing lasers for the government. He researches VCSELs [Wikipedia] there, which are tiny, tiny lasers. I can’t find a link to his research, it may be classified, but as I remember he sort of forms these things through a crystalization process–something crazy like 1,000 per square CM (I might be off by several orders of magnitude in the too-big-direction–might have been closer to a million.) Anyway you take this tiny array of very accurate lasers, shoot them off something like an airplane, and have the ability to track it virtually no visible light. They can track tiny changes, even a single photon, and could have potentially huge applications. He works mainly on making them more powerful, as I recall. Eitherway, it’s remarkable.
