Video Transcript – JoAnn Lighty

Donna Llewellyn: JoAnn, can we hear from you? Dr. JoAnn Lighty, the Dean of the College of Engineering.

JoAnn Lighty: Thank you.

First of all, welcome all of you to our virtual campus here at Boise State. We’re happy to have you here. And I am by training a chemical engineer here at Boise State. I’m in the Department of Mechanical and Bioengineering. My research pretty much for my entire life has focused on combustion and combustion systems with a lot of focus on air quality and air pollution from solid fuel combustion. I have been doing research a very long time.

And I think I’ll start a little bit where Leslie started in terms of undergraduate research. So I started at the University of Utah and was working off site was working in a department store selling purses, which was actually pretty fun. And, I got a discount on a whole bunch of purses. So, I really enjoyed that but really wanted to start thinking about how what I was learning in school really related. I was lucky enough to receive a full tuition scholarship from the University of Utah. And so I thought that gave me some leverage to perhaps go and start looking for a position in a lab as an undergraduate student. And so never being the shy person, I kind of started doing cold calls around the department when I was a sophomore and ended up in a research lab with my job being running a piece of equipment.

What I learned from that experience was attention to detail and reading instructions and working with graduate students. That was a really important part for me because I was the person running the piece of equipment and it was like the grad student wasn’t in charge I was and it really helped give me a lot of confidence. That I could actually be in a lab and do something.

So I did that for a while and then I ended up changing combustion groups. And moving to another group that was doing some larger scale work in terms of a furnace and a large combustion unit. One of the things that I learned there and we were just talking about this yesterday is.. the ability to really think through problems, but also to stand up for myself. We were talking yesterday about our Engineering Innovation Studio, a place where students can really come. And explore.

We have a whole bunch of lays, we have drill presses, and normally people like me whose father wouldn’t even let them mow the lawn because that was dangerous for a girl, don’t get this opportunity to work in a really hands-on environment. My best story as an undergrad working in that lab is the graduate student who was on the top of this furnace probably up about 10 feet yelling at me to get him various wrenches. Quite frankly, I had no idea what the heck he was talking about. He wanted the monkey wrench, then the crescent wrench, and then this wrench. And I just finally said, will you please, probably put some bad words in there, Will you please get down here and just show me which wrench you need and which ones they are. It’s not that I’m stupid, I just never have worked with wrenches before. And so I think it also came, and you know, I am a pretty straightforward person. But it also, again, gave me that confidence to say, “You don’t know what you don’t know and that doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It just means you can learn and grow.”

And so I worked in that lab for most of the rest of my undergraduate career. I worked as a real engineer as I call it for 2 years and then became a grad student. And. Yeah, I went through a lot of research, a lot of paper writing and all of the good things that come with that. And started to really think about what I was going to do beyond my career. And so I did apply to industry and apply to academics. And I can remember thinking that the most scary part about moving into academics for me was, what if I can’t think of any ideas? Like, what if I don’t know how to navigate the research space? And my advisor at the time was like, well, you’ve been doing it since you were an undergrad. And so I think it also gives you this confidence that you can take a problem, think about it, critically, and then go and solve it.

As an Associate Dean at my former university, I was really passionate about my experience and undergraduate research. And how much this means to students because it is giving you part of a community and giving you a really tight connection with a professor. And so the University of Utah is quite a large university and we navigated our way through actually forming an undergraduate research scholars program, which is very much like what you’re doing here, to bring people who are working in different labs into one place to form a community of researchers. And so as Dean, I have a big passion for undergraduate research because of the experience that I had. And our mission statement is with an unshakeable focus on learning, we empower all to think critically and solve the world’s complex problems. And if you look at it, it’s really hard to teach somebody to think critically. It’s sort of, you know, especially in engineering, sometimes we get really stuck on our example problems and we get stuck on homework problems from the book and all of that. But when you’re in a research environment where it’s changing every day and like Dean Durham talked about, that mode of failure in a class is very different than failure in research. Failure in research is like wow, now we have a real problem. Let’s try and figure it out. Where sometimes we take failure personally or internally as we’re going to flunk out, we’re not going to have the ability.

And that’s why I think research is so important. Because as I always told my grad students, I don’t know the answer. If I did, it wouldn’t be research and we wouldn’t be working on it. And so you get to explore these really untapped areas and use those critical learning skills. And develop those skills to really move on to your careers, whether it be in academics like mine turned out to be, or whether you go work for an industry or governmental agency, you’ll always take away this opportunity as Dean Durham said to fail and learn and move on and to do things that really in many ways nobody has ever done before and there’s no example problem like it in the book. And so thank you again for starting your journey with Boise State and with our professors in terms of doing research and my very best for a great summer.

Donna Llewellyn: Thank you, JoAnn.