Joseph Mait
Editor’s Note: Today, OPN Careers begins a new regular feature called “Journeys in Optics.” In this interview series, we’ll talk with members from across the optics community at a variety of career stages to learn about their paths and share their advice.
In the first installment of Journeys in Optics, OPN spoke with Joseph N. Mait. Mait received his BSEE from the University of Virginia, USA, and received his MSEE and Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA. He started his career as an educator with roles at the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland, College Park, USA, and Duke University, USA.
He later transitioned to the US Army Research Laboratory and, after 30 years of federal service, retired in 2018 as a Senior Technical Researcher (ST). He now works part-time for the University of Delaware and teaches optics as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland and the University of Rochester.
Mait has received numerous awards, including the Presidential Rank Award in 2014, two ARL Commander’s Awards, and the ARL Award for Lifetime Achievement. He is a Fellow of Optica and SPIE, and a senior life member of IEEE. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of Applied Optics. In 2024, he received Optica’s Stephen D. Fantone Distinguished Service Award.
What have been the main driving forces throughout your career?
My career has been driven by four forces: understanding how technology evolves from physical principles to design to mass production, a personal desire to turn science into engineering, clear and concise communication, and mentoring students and junior staff.
Can you talk about how you came to work for the US Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and about your role there? What did you learn during this time about leadership?
I started my career as an academic. However, the university was the wrong place for me at the wrong time. Between my youth (I was just shy of 26 when I started) and resistance from senior faculty in the small department to accept optical processing as part of electrical engineering, I sought new opportunities during my fourth year. Although I looked at other academic institutions, because I had had an ongoing collaboration with the Harry Diamond Laboratories, I decided to make a major change—not just a change in university.
After 10 years focusing on my research in applied optics, I started a cycle of moving between administrative staff positions and technical positions. A three-year detail at the Department of Defense’s Center for Technology and National Security Policy (CTNSP) gave me an especially broad view of technology within the DoD.
Two things I learned at CTNSP that served me well as Chief Scientist were to know and accept my weaknesses and, as a corollary, that I do not have to be the smartest person in the room.
When I returned to ARL, I was selected for an ST “supergrade” position, that is, beyond GS-15, which is the highest position to which a US federal civil servant can be promoted. My experience at CTNSP played a critical role in my selection. In addition to performing research, STs also advise senior leaders on science and technology matters. While an ST, I was asked in 2013 by the then laboratory director to serve as the organization’s Chief Scientist.
Without question, being Chief Scientist was the best position I had in my federal career. My responsibilities allowed me to satisfy the four driving forces I identified in the first question.
Two things I learned at CTNSP that served me well as Chief Scientist were to know and accept my weaknesses and, as a corollary, that I do not have to be the smartest person in the room. I do need to know who the smartest people are and ensure they are present when important discussions take place.
In these situations, my role was less to dictate than to moderate to reach a consensus. I did this by posing questions then listening to responses, categorizing them, and, if possible, synthesizing them. Typically, I also had to assert my authority to keep the discussion focused.
Being Chief Scientist allowed me to exercise and refine my talents to the laboratory’s and the Army’s benefit. One of my legacies is identifying the lab’s Essential Research Areas, which provided a structure for planning personnel, facilities and equipment, and support.
How did that experience compare with your academic appointments?
Although my role as Chief Scientist allowed me to “mentor” the entire technical staff, it kept me away from the personal connections that result from teaching. Thus, I sought adjunct positions to provide me those connections.
The starkest contrast between academia and a government lab is the degree of collaboration. Academics, so long as they can procure funding, can pursue their research independently, especially from their departmental colleagues. My perception is that government labs engender a more collaborative environment, where everyone is committed to the organization’s mission.
Are there any interactions or partnerships that have stood out across your career as being especially meaningful?
The starkest contrast between academia and a government lab is the degree of collaboration.
I remain close to the young engineers I hired into my research group in the 1990s, including Dennis Prather (named professor at the University of Delaware), Greg Behrman (professor at the Catholic University of America), Tristan Tayag (professor at Texas Christian University), Joe van der Gracht (cofounder of Holospex and part-time employee at MITRE), and Gary Euliss (now retired from MITRE). Ravi Athale was a continual adjunct to our group as he moved from faculty at George Mason University to DARPA program manager, to MITRE Group Leader, and to ONR program manager. He is now retired.
In 2013, I participated in a cross-government panel to address the photonics initiative published by SPIE and OSA (now Optica). The panel consisted of technical staff from across the US federal government, for example, the DoD, DoE, FDA, NIST, NASA, and NIH. We met one day a week over a summer to discuss optics and its future. Our panel’s recommendation for an optical foundry eventually led to an optical manufacturing initiative supported through the DoD. The AIM Photonics manufacturing institute founded in 2015 resulted from this recommendation. It was one of the most rewarding experiences I had in my career.
However, the civil service is a large bureaucracy, one that Congress and the public love to hate. In 2012, after bad press about extravagant spending by federal agencies, Congress decided that it needed to improve its oversight of federal employees attending any meeting. Thus, restrictions on conference travel by all federal employees began. Congress established its own approval bureaucracy that effectively kept federal scientists from participating actively with professional societies.
I organized a group of representatives from across federal agencies and professional societies like IEEE, SPIE, OSA, ACS, AGS). We worked for two years to mitigate the effects of the de facto travel restriction. We were moderately successful and, again, the cross-agency and society interactions were enlightening and collegial. Congress eventually turned responsibility for conference travel approval back to the individual agencies.
I would be remiss if I did not also mention my volunteer activities for Optica, the bulk of which focused on publishing. Through Optica Publishing Group staff and society editors, I learned an incredible amount about reviewing, editing and publishing.
What advice do you have for students and early-career researchers?
While working on my doctoral degree, I knew I wanted to be an academic. But, as indicated, after only four years, I left academia for the civil service, and my professional life turned into a mix of assignments focused on technology but with variable apertures. As in computational imaging, the mix of aperture sizes improved my overall resolution.
Although my career path was nonlinear, it provided me with a multiplicity of experiences. These helped me discern my strengths and weaknesses and improved my skills as an engineer and a technical leader.
Although my career path was nonlinear, it provided me with a multiplicity of experiences. These helped me discern my strengths and weaknesses and improved my skills as an engineer and a technical leader. Bottom line: Through my experiences, including publishing, I learned that criticism and adversity are necessary for growth.
Has your career or research taken any unexpected turns? And how did those experiences affect you?
I had many unexpected turns, all of which helped me grow as technical professional. The best example of this is, when I first returned to ARL from CTNSP, I was placed in charge of a large program to develop small (hand-held) robotics platforms, both crawling and flying. I had zero background in robotics, terramechanics and aeromechanics. I had to rely on others to educate me in these areas, while also corralling and cajoling academics from disparate universities to work together.
This experience helped me realize I could be a quick study, and that my consensus approach to management could be effective in creating the collaborative ethos necessary for the program to be successful.
What was working as the editor-in-chief of Applied Optics like?
As a topical editor for Applied Optics, I learned the intricacies of soliciting reviews from busy researchers, synthesizing independent points of view, making decisions that I could justify, and communicating to authors in a constructive manner the reasons I was rejecting their manuscript. My goal was to leave their dignity intact even when saying “no.”
I found my workload as editor-in-chief less than that as editor. I did not have to manage papers or make publication decisions. Instead, I was confronted with that 10% of manuscripts that are difficult to manage due to an author, reviewer, or, on rare occasions, an editor.
The bulk of issues I dealt with concentrated on interpreting or establishing policies that impacted manuscripts submitted to Applied Optics. This included, for example, defining clearly for authors, reviewers and editors what I felt constituted a publishable manuscript, letting editors know I cared more about them receiving quality reviews than on reducing the time to publication, or establishing that I supported editors rejecting manuscripts without review so long as they provided adequate justification to the author. This required knowledge of the journal and what distinguished it from the society’s other journals.
As editor-in-chief, I could also impact the journal’s content. For example, through my outreach to T.-C. Poon for a special issue on three-dimensional imaging and display, Applied Optics became the technical home for this community. I identified an eager champion for the field who took full advantage of the opportunity.
From your involvement with academic publishing, do you have any advice for early-career scientists beginning to navigate publishing their research?
Early-career scientists and engineers should be willing to review the work of others and to be reviewed by them.
Reviewing develops skills necessary to discern the differences in approach or significance between a manuscript and published work. It also helps an early careerist glean examples of well- and poorly written explanations and presentation.
Submitting manuscripts for review provides feedback that identifies faulty assumptions, logic, or derivations; poor explanations; or missing prior art. As a young assistant professor, I vividly recall initially reacting to a reviewer’s comments with anger and frustration that they were not sufficiently intelligent to understand my work. As I matured, I realized that if a reviewer did not understand my work, it was my fault, not theirs. Consequently, I improved my pedagogical skills and learned how to explain simply what I was trying to do. I was able to do this by putting myself in the role of a reader.
Reviewing develops skills necessary to discern the differences in approach or significance between a manuscript and published work.
What part has community played in your career? Do you think engaging with societies and volunteering are important for students and researchers?
Participating in my community through professional societies, such as SPIE and Optica, played a significant role in my career advancement.
At ARL, I developed a presentation for staff that explained the mechanics of the promotion process and provided tips to increase the likelihood of one’s promotion. One of my recommendations was participating with professional societies as a volunteer.
Yes, volunteering takes time. However, it allows one to see trends in technology and interact with individuals outside one’s organization. This provides personal insight into perspectives from other organizations, including international ones.
Over time, participation provides a venue to promote one’s own agenda. For example, OSA provided me the opportunity to organize new topical meetings. The most successful of these was what became Computational Imaging.
Volunteering also provides a low-risk opportunity to develop soft skills for leadership. Opportunities provided in one’s workplace come with the risk that mistakes can hinder the potential for future opportunities. As a society volunteer, mistakes may raise the ire of staff and other volunteers, but the consequences are less than those in the workplace and enable one to improve management and leadership skills.
Yes, volunteering takes time. However, it allows one to see trends in technology and interact with individuals outside one’s organization. This provides personal insight into perspectives from other organizations, including international ones.
With such an accomplished career to look back on, is there a particular achievement you feel most proud of?
I have two. One is the sense of pride I have in defining and expanding a field of endeavor in imaging and seeing how broadly the term “computational imaging” is now used.
The second is the creation of AIM Photonics because of our recommendation in the OSTP report for a photonics manufacturing institute. I am proud to have been a member of the group of scientists from across several federal agencies that came together to develop a vision for the future of photonics.
When OSTP and NIST first asked the DoD, the Department leadership was initially hesitant. They were concerned about the costs and effort required to lead the source selection and did not understand how the DoD might benefit from having access to the technology. The OSTP asked me to make the benefits clear to senior leadership.
On the day that then Vice President Joe Biden announced AIM Photonics in New York, I received an email from the OSTP staff member who led our group. He thanked me for my behind-the-scenes efforts to convince the DoD to lead the program source selection.