Education and Early Occupation
Lang was born in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Lang attended California Institute of Technology for his undergraduate work in electrical engineering, where he met his wife-to-be, Diane. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Stanford in 1983, and returned to Caltech to pursue a Ph.D. in Applied Physics with a dissertation titled "Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties."
Lang began work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1988. Lang also worked as a research scientist for Spectra Diode Labs of San Jose, California, and then at JDS Uniphase, also of San Jose.
Lang has authored or co-authored over 80 publications on semiconductor lasers, optics, and integrated optoelectronics, and holds 46 patents in these fields.
In 2001, Lang left the engineering field to being a full-time origami artist and consultant. However, he still maintains ties to his physics background: he was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Quantum Electronics from 2007 to 2010 and has done part-time laser consulting for Cypress Semiconductor, among others.
Lang currently resides in Alamo, California.
Read more about this topic: Robert J. Lang
Famous quotes containing the words education and, education, early and/or occupation:
“Individually, museums are fine institutions, dedicated to the high values of preservation, education and truth; collectively, their growth in numbers points to the imaginative death of this country.”
—Robert Hewison (b. 1943)
“The legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
“... possibly there is no needful occupation which is wholly unbeautiful. The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it—whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company all day, and who will make us feel, at evening, that the day was well worth its fatigues.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)