Sample Biographies
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Robert A. Bjork Wendy Castleman Robert Hoffman Mark McDaniel Gregory E. Monaco |
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Helga Noice Victoria Romero Ann Speed Gordon Willis Dan Wright |
Ann Speed
Professional Biography: Ann Speed received her PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Louisiana State University in 1999. She is currently a Principle Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories, a Department of Energy Laboratory. Her current major area of research is in computational modeling of the neurophysiological mechanisms of human analogy-making. She is also involved in research on text processing, physical security, and counter-terrorism at both the Laboratory and national levels. She also does a non-trivial amount of business and program development.Personal Statement: There is more to what I'm doing and how I'm using my education than just my research. I am part of a department that includes people who have PhDs and Masters degrees in fields such as electrical engineering, computer science, cognitive science, mechanical engineering, and robotics, to name only a few. My boss is a computational physicist. I am able to do work that includes computational neuroscience, developing new MEG technologies, developing systems that monitor physical facilities as they come under attack, and counter-terrorism. I am hoping to get into the cognitive science aspects of energy and critical infrastructure issues in the near future. The program I am a part of is involved in a wide variety of efforts, including projects for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research. In other words, I'm part of a tight, truly multidisciplinary team that works on very compelling problems. I learn new things everyday - some are about cognitive psychology, but most are about other disciplines (although I'm not quite qualified as a sideline engineer yet!). Needless to say, it is a very challenging environment, but very dynamic and very fun!
I don't think I necessarily "chose" applied research as much as I fell into it. Toward the end of graduate school, it became abundantly clear that a basic research career in academia was not a viable path for me for a number of reasons, even though that is what I was trained to do. So, rather than get on the post-doc treadmill, I decided that I wanted to live in Denver. I paid someone to develop my resume (as opposed to a CV) and I moved there. Once there, I applied for a number of jobs and started making cold calls to training companies, marketing my expertise in analogy-making, memory, and learning as something they could leverage to better develop their curricula and training methods. After thinking I might become known as "Dr. Waitress," I landed a job with a small web-based training company and worked there for 18 months until they folded in 2001 (in the midst of the dot-com bust). Via a somewhat circuitous route, I wound up working at Sandia in November of 2001 with a small program that was standing up a computational cognitive modeling effort. This effort was (and still is) aimed at improving human performance in various domains that mostly involve rapid decision-making, decision-making in high-risk environments, and/or decision-making in situations with gigantic amounts of data. When I started, there were three of us in the group. Now, our core group is around 40 people. Sandia itself has about 65 people working in these general areas, and we have or have had partnerships with over 100 folks in academia, industry, and other areas of the government. Needless to say, I have stayed at Sandia because of the wide variety of compelling, real national security problems I have been able to work on from both basic and applied research perspectives.
Advice? Be open-minded. I have a job that could not be more perfect for me simply by being creative in how I marketed my degree and expertise and by being open to (and actively pursuing) opportunities as they presented themselves. Sometimes, the very best situations arise from sources you would never consider a priori.
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