Communication, Creativity, and Context
Gavin Huntley-Fenner ’90 is a managing scientist in Exponent’s Irvine, California, office in the Human Factors practice. Most of the cases he’s working on are confidential, but he was able to talk about one. “We’re doing work for a large rail company and looking at their safety systems, because it turns out that some folks get on the tracks and don’t notice the train is coming or they try to beat the train, and sometimes they are killed or badly injured. So we try to answer questions like, how can you prevent people from going on the tracks? What are the best systems to use? Should you use signs, lights and bells, or a physical barrier? Do people treat train-crossing signals like Walk/Don’t Walk signals at a crosswalk? Much of the work I do is related to hazard communications—everything from safety information in owners’ manuals to markings on industrial products to workplace training.”
Huntley-Fenner’s first research experience was in the summer of 1987, working on an URSI project with psychology and cognitive science professors Jan Andrews and Ken Livingston. He has the distinction of being the first—and maybe the only—URSI fellow who was also simultaneously an ET (Exploring Transfer) student. He graduated from high school in New York City at the age of 16 and went to the University of Rochester to study mechanical engineering. “I absolutely hated it,” said Huntley-Fenner. “Left in the middle of my freshman year, went back home and worked for a while, and then enrolled at BMCC [Borough of Manhattan Community College].”
Even in high school, he had been interested in the various disciplines that intersect in the field of cognitive science—linguistics, philosophy, artificial intelligence—and had read some key books, like Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. But it wasn’t until that URSI summer that “I finally had a name to put to my interests—cognitive science.”
The project involved designing a series of experiments to test category learning. Huntley-Fenner was involved “from soup to nuts—designing stimuli, entering data, helping to run subjects.” He transferred to Vassar and became “seriously involved” in the cog sci department and research. “I spent every single break—spring break, summer, usually not Christmas but sometimes part of the Christmas holidays—conducting research.”
He worked not only with Andrews and Livingston on campus, but also with computer science professor Nancy Ide, working on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language) at the research laboratories of the Groupe Représentation et Traitement des Connaissances (GRTC) of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Marseilles, France. “I must have received something on the order of $2000, and I had to pay my airfare and live off of it for two months in Marseille,” said Huntley-Fenner. “Needless to say, it was not enough. It was quite a struggle. But you rarely get compensated for doing what you really love.”
He put himself through Vassar on scholarships and student loans, graduated with honors and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, earned his PhD at MIT and was awarded a postdoc fellowship and research grant from the National Science Foundation, and then accepted a tenure-track position at the University of California, Irvine, where he founded the Infant Cognition Laboratory. “On a daily basis, we’d have anywhere from three to eight parents coming in with infants to participate in studies. I was looking at children’s earliest understanding of numbers and quantity and what infants know about objects and non-solid substances like sand.”
At UC-I, Huntley-Fenner published papers on infant cognition, language acquisition, and mathematics development and taught hands-on research to over a hundred students, which he considered “the highlight of my time there.” But some things were missing. “I wanted to work in a more team-oriented environment, and I wanted to work on a greater variety of projects. This harkens back to my liberal arts background. I took a wide range of courses at Vassar—anthropology, math, computer science, and a lot of philosophy. I like knowing about lots of different things, and I didn’t like the sort of blinders you have to wear when you’re building an academic career in science. And I also like working on projects with varying time scales. In my academic research area, many of my projects were very long range—a year to five years between conception of a project and actual publication. As it turns out, I get those three things at Exponent.”
So how important is it, exactly, for a research scientist with a major consulting firm to have a liberal arts background? “Personally and intellectually, I’m very much in favor of a broad education,” said Huntley-Fenner. “I think it makes for a better person. My life is richer because of it. But it’s also important because of what I call the three Cs—communication, creativity, and context. Scientists need to be effective communicators, both in writing and speaking. And creativity is essential. There are times when you have to fly without a net. You don’t know where the research is going to take you, and you have to take risks in order to reap some of the great rewards of research. That requires not just analytic skills but also creativity.
“And the final C has to do with science policy. The Manhattan Project is a great example. Scientists are often involved in research that will take them into areas that have implications for policy, and it behooves them to take a step back and look at what they’re doing. It’s not enough to ask, well, will this get me a publication? You also need to ask, what does this work really mean? And where does it fit in the context of human endeavors? I think the liberal arts background helps to give you that context.”