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In this episode of Buff Innovator Insights, meet Dr. Iain Boyd, H.T. Sears Memorial Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences and Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at CU Boulder. We’ll hear about how Dr. Boyd followed his early interest in math from Scotland to England, and then to the U.S., where he’s now regarded as pioneer in hypersonics and a key figure in deploying computation and technology to solve our most pressing challenges.

Terri Fiez

Hello, I'm your host Terri Fiez, Vice Chancellor for Research & Innovation at the University of Colorado Boulder. Welcome to Buff Innovator Insights. This podcast features some of the most innovative ideas in the world. I'll introduce you to the people behind the innovations, from how they got started, to how they are changing the future. Today we'll meet with Dr. Iain Boyd, H.T. Sears Memorial Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, and Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives. His research focuses on hypersonic aerothermodynamics, electric propulsion, rocket plumes, and computation of non-equilibrium gas and plasma dynamics.

Before joining CU Boulder, Dr. Boyd worked at NASA Ames Research Center, held a faculty position at Cornell University, and served as a professor at the University of Michigan. During today's podcast we'll hear about the values his family placed on formal education, which he carried with him from Scotland to England, and eventually to the US. We'll also learn about how Dr. Boyd's interest in math and science guided his educational decisions, and led to opportunities at NASA and the world's leading research universities. And he explains how computation and technology can be applied to solving our most pressing problems, including national security, and improving people's lives across the globe. Let's meet Dr. Iain Boyd.

Hi Iain, thanks for joining me today for this conversation.

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, Terri.

Terri Fiez

So as our listeners may have noticed, you weren't born in the United States, you were born in Scotland and lived there until you were 13. Tell us about your early years in Scotland.

Dr. Iain Boyd

Well, they were very happy, I had a great childhood there, and I wish my Scottish accent was stronger than it is now, but there's still a little bit of it left.

Terri Fiez

And then your family moved to England when you were in your early teen years, which I know can be challenging for kids at that age. What was your experience?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah, at 13 is certainly an age where there's a lot going on for a kid, and we moved because of my dad's job. And the thing I remember most about being a challenge, first of all, was people not understanding me from my accent, I guess I had a very strong Scottish accent at the time, and I would talk to people on the first few days at school and they were just look at me quizzically and really not understanding what I was saying. And so that was the beginning of the end of my real Scottish accent, and I've moved around quite a bit since then, and I'm not really sure what my accent is now.

Terri Fiez

Okay. Now you said you moved for your dad's job, you have an interesting story about your dad and his educational past, do you want to share that?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah, definitely. My dad, he left high school before completing it, and he joined the Navy, the British Royal Navy, and he ended up being a mechanic on airplanes, on an aircraft carrier. Yeah, after he came out of the Navy he got into an engineering position, and over many, many years worked his way up in his career path to become a professional engineer in the end. But I think he always definitely regretted having left school early, in hindsight. And so I remember all the way through my childhood my dad going to night classes, and very slowly, really over many years, he did eventually get himself a bachelor's degree, and I think he was probably in his forties when that happened. And so he definitely emphasized to me and my sister the importance of getting your education done as quickly and as efficiently as possible, because it's really, really challenging to try and hold down a full-time job, and be supporting a family, and trying to further your education.

Terri Fiez

So I'm guessing that might have influenced some of the subjects you were interested in, but what subjects were you interested during school?

Dr. Iain Boyd

I was one of those kids that just really loved school. I went through the Scottish, and later English, educational systems, and in that system when you're about 16 you have to make a very important decision to either go in a direction of studying the sciences and math, or going the direction of the arts, like literature and history. And when I got to that point I was really torn because I really loved all the different topics that I was studying. And this is where I think my dad was an important influence that he pointed out that, "You've got a more likely path towards, and obvious career opportunities, on the science and math side." Maybe these days I might argue with that a little bit, but that influenced me, I think, to go down that particular path of math and sciences and engineering in the end.

Terri Fiez

That's interesting. So then how did you decide where to go to college and what you were going to major in?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Well, I decided first what I was going to major in, and that was math because, like I said, I found a relatively easy, so I guess I was being a little bit lazy there, but I just enjoyed it. And again, in the British system, you typically choose five universities to apply to, and you're strategic about, you've got ones that are harder to get into, and easier, and so on. And the one I liked the most was the one I went to, which was the University of Southampton, and partly it was because it had a very, very flexible program in math, that you could focus on really pure theoretical mathematics, or you could look at applied mathematics. And by the end of the time I graduated, certainly I'd studied all the core math classes, of course, but I'd also studied a wide range of things, from relativity theory, and electromagnetic theory in fluids, and astrophysics, and computer graphics. I mean, just a very broad range of things that did have overlap with math.

Terri Fiez

So what kind of activities do you like to do outside of your schooling?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Well, in Scotland and in Europe, soccer, or we call it football over there, is a very big deal. And so from a very early age I used to play soccer with my dad and my granddad, so soccer was big, and a lot of other sports, like tennis and track and running, you still do a lot of running here in Boulder, it's obviously a great environment for that. A little bit of music, so I was in band, played not a tuba, but the next lowered down in size called a euphonium, but it's a big brass instrument.

Terri Fiez

Okay. So you went to undergraduate, and then you immediately followed that with graduate school. How did that occur? Because I'm sure you had lots of job opportunities.

Dr. Iain Boyd

I came across this opportunity to do a PhD at the same university in Southampton, but in aerospace engineering, and I just really liked the sound of that better than any of the job opportunities I had, so I applied for the position and ended up getting it. And like I said, I had done a lot of really applied mathematics courses in my undergrad degree and realized that's where I was more interested, was not in the generating proofs or lemmas, and things like this that they do in theoretical math, it was in using mathematics for something useful.

Terri Fiez

And useful you have done, from finishing your PhD you landed a job with NASA in US. How did you do that?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah that's, to be honest, in my field of aerospace engineering, even from the UK, to work for NASA is really the peak of what you could hope for. So as I was doing my doctoral research in England, I was interested in collaborations, and had a lot of collaborations across Europe and France and Germany, and so on, and written collaborations in the US. And so in my final year of doing my PhD I came across to US to a couple of conferences, and I talked to some people from NASA centers who were working in the same area as I had been studying for my thesis. And it took a little bit of back and forward, and it was slower in those days because I don't think I even had email at the time, but we made a connection, and so I ended up coming over to the US with my wife to NASA Ames Research Center, which is close to San Francisco.

And for us that was going to be a big adventure, that we were going to come over to the US for a couple of years, see California, I'd work at NASA, and then we'd go back to England or Europe. And of course, like a lot of people, we just never went back. It was just too much fun and too many opportunities here to look back.

Terri Fiez

So from NASA you went to Cornell, and then to Michigan. So I know in your 20 years at Michigan you had an opportunity to participate in a Department of Defense program to really learn about how it works, and how the researchers interact with that. Can you talk about that program you were involved in?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah, this a program called Defense Science Study Group, and it's run by an organization called DARPA that is part of the Department of Defense, and it's a two year program that's designed specifically to introduce university faculty from across the country to the challenges of national security and homeland defense. And what they do in the program is they take you around a wide range of facilities around the country, so we went on ships, and we went in planes, and we went in tanks, and we went to CIA headquarters, and we visited hospitals and training facilities, met just a tremendous amount of people. But also the program has what they call mentors, so retired four-star generals, leadership from, again CIA and other parts of the national defense infrastructure, and it really did teach me a tremendous amount about those challenges that government leadership faces.

And sometimes it could be very humbling because as a professor of engineering, I mean, I think that everything revolves around technology, and for many of the problems that these people are dealing with, there may be a technology element to it, but it's only one aspect of information that informs decisions about these complex matters. And so I really loved that program, and one of the things they tried to do at the end of the program is place some of the participants on advisory boards, and I was fortunate to be placed on what was called the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and so there you are interacting with the secretary of the Air Force, and with other leadership in the Department of Defense. And again, I would say I was very fortunate that I talked to my College of Engineering leadership in Michigan into doing an experiment with me where I stayed in DC for a couple more years, working on government relations as a faculty member, and again, I just really enjoyed that, and that was a perfect introduction to the role I have here now at CU.

Terri Fiez

Talk about the role that you have in the National Security Center, and what drew you to this role?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah, so we have the Center for National Security Initiatives, NSI, here at CU, and I'm the director of it. And it has the overall goal of increasing our campus's engagement on national security challenges, and that involves a number of different things. It involves increasing the opportunities for our faculty to work on research challenges that come up in national security endeavors, and simultaneously it is helping to address what's called workforce development. But basically helping to train and ensure that we have the technically savvy workforce that is needed to use new technologies to help address national security challenges.

And I think that people don't always realize that the State of Colorado is the second largest aerospace and defense economy, by State, in the country. And so at CU, as a public institution, I think it's an important part of what our university should be doing, along with many other things, but with that focus already within the state in this sector, it's really important that we have the educational opportunities available to our students to pursue careers in the State of Colorado in this area, if that's what they want to do. And so these are all some of the most important aspects of our center. Ultimately I think if we're successful in those directions what will come out of it, which is another desire, is national recognition that CU is one of the leading universities in the country for national security research and workforce development.

Terri Fiez

So we've been throwing around this term national security. What kind of research problems fall under national security?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah, that's a great question, and it's a terminology that can be misunderstood often in a very narrow sense, where people think of weapons and guns and bullets, and certainly that, of course, that's part of the way that wars are fought, and maybe our nation would have to be defended. But in our activities, we're taking the broadest possible interpretation of what national security means. And so some of the areas that people don't always think about are things like space, that we all use things like the GPS satellites all the time without really thinking about it for driving directions, but now those GPS satellites are so ingrained in our lives that it's estimated that the US economy would lose about a billion dollars a day if it went down. And so that's an aspect of national security, which is protecting key assets that are needed to maintain the economic health of the country.

Another example that probably is surprising to some people is climate. So climate is really a critical concern in national security. One really good example of this is in the Arctic, that there's been a lot of ice melting up there, so much that places that were previously not accessible to ships now are. The other area I'll mention for today is cybersecurity. So cybersecurity is really a challenge, outside of national security, for all kinds of things, from our banks, to safeguarding food supplies, and water supplies, power supplies, to our own personal information. And it's a real difficult challenge because hackers are smart people, I'm going to say, unfortunately, and so the nature of what they can do is always changing, never sitting still, and if you're addressing cybersecurity, you're just basically putting out one fire after another. Well, you won't be surprised, to think that cybersecurity is also a really big challenge in national security, and that's an area where we're hoping to expand some of the capabilities we have at CU through our Center for National Security Initiatives.

Terri Fiez

Thank you, that's very helpful, and I'm sure there's many more examples that you could give us, but those are very interesting ones. In addition to your role as director of the Center, you also teach classes. What kind of classes do you teach?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Yeah, so I'm a professor of aerospace engineering, and so I tend to work in fluid mechanics, so I teach classes in that area. The classes I've always enjoyed teaching the most are the fundamental ones. And so I've taught a course at the sophomore level, second year level in universities, on introduction to gas dynamics, it's called. And it's usually the first class that aerospace students take to start to understand how air flows around airplanes, and out of rocket engines, and so on. But it's really challenging to teach those fundamental courses because that's where you're trying to imprint the very, very basic ideas that apply to many, many things in the particular field you're working in, in my case aerospace engineering. And so trying to get over in an effective way to the students, at just their second year, I always found to be a challenge that I like to take on. One of the things I enjoy is really getting myself that very deep understanding of these subjects that we were teaching and researching on.

Terri Fiez

So what are you most proud of in your career, and what would you like your legacy to be?

Dr. Iain Boyd

I think at this stage what I'm most proud of is all the doctoral students that I've worked with and that have graduated with me as their mentor. It's a great thing to be able to see them having successful careers and doing well, and being promoted and leading projects. They've done it almost all themselves, but I'll be happy to take a little bit of credit for it too. I think from the point where I sit today, something we haven't talked about is that I'm leading a new NASA Institute here at CU, it's going to start in the fall, called ACCESS. So the idea of ACCESS is that future NASA missions, some of them, have incredibly high reliability requirements, and the example I like to use for this is something called the Mars sample return mission.

So on Mars sample return, just like the name implies, the idea is you'll fly, nobody, but a robotic spacecraft, will fly out to Mars, scoop up some Martian dirt, fly all the way back, enter the Earth's atmosphere, land on the ground, and people will be able to study it in detail. Well, when you come back from Mars with this soil, and you don't really know what's in it, and you're entering the Earth's atmosphere at incredibly high speed, you absolutely want to be sure that that spacecraft does not break apart and that Martian soil is distributed in our atmosphere, in case there's something we don't want in it. And so the reliability for that spacecraft coming back from Mars, it's allowed to fail one in a million times. And today we have no way of certifying a spacecraft at that level. And so this new institute, ACCESS, is supposed to take on that challenge. And if we're successful, then I think what's exciting is that it will open up many new opportunities for risky, exciting space exploration missions.

Terri Fiez

So as you think about the next decade or two, what are you optimistic about, and what's your hope for the future of the work that you do, and the breakthroughs that will be found?

Dr. Iain Boyd

Broadly speaking I'm optimistic that that technology is going to keep moving forward, and that it's going to continue to improve people's lives. Even with our recent downturn with COVID in many ways, if you look over 100, technology and science advances have greatly improved people's lives, and their health, and their access to basic resources. Yes, there's a long way to go to make the benefits that maybe we enjoy in the US and the west more broadly available, but the only way I can see to make them more broadly available is through further technology development, and I think a lot of that is going to be on the back of computers. We see that in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and things like that.

So I think this is a very exciting time for science and technology research, and I think computation is going to play a huge role in our continued progress. There's going to be ups and downs, but I think that, like I said, from my perspective, the only way, or the best way forward for us as a species, is through continuing to try to solve our problems with the aid of technology.

Terri Fiez

Thank you, Iain, this has been a fun discussion, thank you for joining me today.

Dr. Iain Boyd

Thanks again, Terri, for the opportunity.

Terri Fiez

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Iain Boyd, Professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, and Director of the Center for National Security Initiatives. To learn more about Dr. Boyd, or for more Buff Innovator Insight episodes, visit colorado.edu/rio/podcast. I'm your host and Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at CU Boulder, Terri Fiez. Thanks for joining me for this episode of Buff Innovator Insights, we'll see you next time.