Dr. Zhong Lin Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology (Podcast and Interview Transcript)

Lisa Padilla: Hey Dr. Wang, what kind of phone do you have?

Dr. Wang: I have this Samsung phone, my cellphone, yeah this one.

Lisa Padilla: Samsung is a great company.

Dr. Wang: Yeah.

Lisa Padilla: You like your phone?

Dr. Wang: I like it very much and it has so many fascinating features but to me I don’t use that very many features, I just use the basic talking, messaging and sometimes check emails.

Lisa Padilla: I am looking forward to one of our episodes on the next UI and it being voice activated services and such that are not quite there yet. What do you think about that?

Dr. Wang: Excuse me I didn’t catch you.

Lisa Padilla: Yeah I was just asking what do you think about the sort of voice automation systems and voice recognition technologies that are coming that might make utilizing those advanced features on your phone a little bit easier because I know the menu on the UI in the phone is just ridiculous I mean you know it still looks like a walkie-talkie almost you know.

Dr. Wang: Right. I think the voice recognition is truly outstanding and revolutionary technology and if it can recognize voice, if it can recognize some tone movement and it can tell you what you are saying, this can have a lot of impact, voice recognition. And I think this can make our efficiency of working much higher than it used to be because today if I think something I have to use my fingers to key in and if I speak and they can follow what I say and record those into text, that will save me a lot of time and I think this is an outstanding technology.

Lisa Padilla: Yeah great. Okay, and I am sensitive to your time, but let me also ask you this question about education because I have got a daughter who is in junior high and she switches back and forth between having aptitude and interest in language arts and math. And for some reason when she is excelling in math, I really want to push her harder because I feel like there is some room for women in science and I have always been interested in the reason why there aren’t more women in science but maybe in general in the US and if you have thoughts globally about this, that would be great too. But let me maybe ask you a last question about the opportunity and challenges for the youth in entering the science field and biomimicry or material science in general. Can you answer that?

Dr. Wang: Yeah. Let me answer your questions, basically you have 3 questions. Number 1 is why I am so excited about what I am doing as a teacher? As a teacher I feel I have several important responsibilities; number one, I teach the next generation, it is my responsibility to inspire their interest in science technology, it is my responsibility to mentor them to be a scientist, to be a great person, and to be a person who knows how to do research. And I love my job a lot because I have the opportunity to influence those young girls and young men and it’s a great feeling if I can influence their future lives using my own experience. So as a professor, I always take students as my family members, I care for them not only from the scientific career but also care for their personal life, their future careers and I think ahead for them such as how they can be a successful scientist, how they can find a next job, how can they do the next paper very well. So I feel that I have a great job that is to be a professor, to teach the next generation young scientists. The second, coming up to second question is the women in science in a global range. I think overall, I noticed this may not be a good representation across the board, I personally feel the number of students in US who study materials is getting less in the last few years and I mean lower in numbers not only for girls doing this but also for boys and young men. And this has caused me quite a bit of concern because we have such a strong society and a strong technology leading the world in many aspects, we need our next generation scientists to be trained properly to continue to lead the world in such a case that we should do whatever we can to strongly encourage our students, our kids to study science technology. I do the same thing as you do, I have daughters too and I try to teach them calculus, physics, I want to influence them why don’t you go to science. I still have the same question as you do. They are thinking for field in medical sciences, in laws and since they show less interest in science, particularly material science because they watch what I am doing and they think I don’t want to do materials related to something. But I think give them opportunity, mentor them in the right way I think they will find interest in science overall. So now let’s look at the global range. What are the future challenges our students face? I think the challenge is that their challenge is globalized because today’s technology, job market, economy is globalization okay it’s globalized so is education; we need to diverse the culture, diverse our students’ background in many areas. So the first challenge they face is global, international competition. They second one is diversity of culture because when you have a global economy, you involve people from various cultural backgrounds. We need to stress our students’ cultural background to learn how do people in other countries think, how do they do business, how they do science so then we can form really a partnership team and then I think this can really prepare ourselves to rebuild channels.