BlackboardEngineer Pursues Science in Paradise
It can't be said that a degree from the Florida A&M University-Florida State University College of Engineering won't take you places. Just ask Craig Nance.
"There are certainly worse places to live," said Nance, a College of Engineering alumnus (B.S. '91 and M.S. '94, Electrical Engineering) who has served as facility engineer for the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii since 2001.
Located on the 14,000-foot summit of Hawaii's dormant Mauna Kea volcano, the Keck observatory probes the deepest regions of space with the world's largest optical and infrared telescopes. Each telescope stands eight stories tall and weighs 300 tons, yet operates with nanometer precision. Keeping both of them in perfect working order is Nance's responsibility.
"The meat and potatoes of my work is the telescope machinery - such things as the telescope cooling systems, power distribution, hydraulics, pneumatics, domes and shutters, cryogenic refrigeration, vacuum chambers and thin-film optical coatings," he said. "I supervise a crew that performs maintenance, repairs and improvement to these systems.
"The other half of my work involves ongoing upgrades to the observatory."
The education he received at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering was "essential" in preparing him for his career, Nance said.
"My undergraduate education provided an understanding of core engineering principles - mechanics, forces, electricity, optics, mathematics, thermodynamics, and so much more," he said. "Some things in the engineering curriculum I thought I would never use in my career turned out to be important things to understand. For example, I never imagined I would use thermodynamics as I have. We use a lot of vacuum chambers and cryogenics in astronomy.
"Second, the college's educational demands taught me to be diligent and methodical, and to ensure that I understand things in a deep way," Nance said. "These are good traits for an engineer to have. Graduate school taught me what it takes to become expert in a technical area quickly. Much of what we do in astronomy has never been done before.
"And as a graduate student, I had the opportunity to teach undergraduate labs and classes. This taught me how to communicate technical information in a logical, and hopefully entertaining, way. The ability to communicate is a powerful skill for an engineer."
Nance cited several examples of hands-on research he was able to participate in at college that were directly applicable to his job at Keck. Among them: "I worked with professors Leonard Tung and Bing Kwan on a project involving lightning strikes and grounding of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in St. Petersburg," he said. "At the time I considered it an interesting thing to study but doubted it would be relevant to my future. However, since telescopes sit on tall mountains and are subject to lightning strikes, what I learned during that project has been used regularly in my over 10-year career in astronomy."
