Dr. Erin M. Elliott

Optical Engineer

I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Erin M. Elliott and get an insight into the start of her career and how life experiences, a touch of serendipity, and even a love for magazines led to a successful career and involvement in very cool and interesting projects.

The school years

Erin, a native of North Dakota, is now an expert in optics and a Principal Research and Development Engineer at Ansys. Ansys is a company that develops engineering simulation software for many industries.

Her path to this job started with a degree in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota and then a doctorate in optical science from the University of Arizona in 2002. She then joined Ball Aerospace, where she got involved in the Wavefront Sensing and Control software for the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), software used to align its 18 primary mirror segments. In 2010, she took a position as a Senior Astronomical Optical Scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), which eventually would become the Science and Operations Center for JWST. While there, Erin mainly focused on test planning, project reviews, and working on the optics for various testbeds for JWST. She also supported the optics modeling for the Hubble Space Telescope’s Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (HST/COS) instrument. This powerful spectrograph on board HST had many challenges due to a loss of sensitivity after constant observations of bright sources. Erin collaborated with the COS team on improving the data analysis, increasing the fidelity of the data processing, and supporting studies of optimal grating positions that would lengthen the lifetime of the detector.

A few years later, Erin took a short break from technical work and started a Master’s in writing at Johns Hopkins University. However, realizing she missed technical work challenges and math, she joined Zemax (now Ansys) in 2016, where she has held different positions.

How did all this start?

I wanted to know if there was something special she had to share about the way it all started, and she did.

Even though Erin grew up in a farming community in Minnesota with good schools, she feels that her family had an important role in helping her become a scientist. “They loved to read about everything! – Erin said,  – so one of the things that really influenced me, and this is funny, is just reading a lot of National Geographic. It really got me hooked on science and at a pretty young age.” She recalls an enlightening article that impacted her and eventually landed her in physics at the University of Minnesota. “In seventh grade, I read this article about stars having lives [and] it just blew my mind …  Stars have lives? They are born, and they age, and they get old, and they die? This is incredible.”

She believes that other exposure to physics also helped her realize she could get into physics and probably study the stars. For example, Erin’s uncle was a radiation physicist at the hospital, and her aunt and cousin did optics at 3M. After hearing about her aunt’s area of work, I wondered if that motivated her choice to focus on optics for her Doctorate. Erin said it didn’t. In her case, it was more her experiences while in college. Erin tells the story about how it happened, “I did work with my undergraduate advisor on putting a radio telescope on top of the physics building, and although it never worked because we didn’t get the antenna right, we had a lot of fun, and it kind of drew me into the world of astronomy instrumentation.”

Also, she saw in this field a practical aspect that made her feel she was building a more secure future for herself. Erin said, “Growing up in a farming community, there’s not much money around and it was important to me to be able to support myself. Even at that age, I knew that that was important. And so instrumentation and optics just seemed more practical.”

You don’t need to be a genius to do something great

Building the antenna that did not work as well as an internship at 3M, helped Erin to realize she didn’t need to be a genius to do science and become part of something great. “I thought that everybody in science was a genius, like Einstein, and nobody needed help, and nobody needed to study and learn from other people. I thought it was just some magical thing that you are born with. But working at 3M convinced me that not everybody in science needs to be a genius; they are just trying to figure out the problems. It convinced me that it was something I could do. I can go in and try to figure out a solution.”

One of these great things was her contribution to the JWST project. Erin emphasizes how her work was just a piece of the contributions from many teams. “It’s important to say that thousands of people worked on JWST and in different aspects. I was just one tiny, tiny part of it. I was working at Ball Aerospace at that time, and it was really fun to work with the team that developed the alignment software. It was really challenging … a new set of problems.”

Erin highlights her formative years at Ball, when she focused on JWST. Making things happen and figuring out how to accomplish things within the constraints of the mission required an incredible amount of creativity and exploration. Erin added that given its size and requirements, JWST pushed simulation technologies forward — “all the simulation tools that we were using were really being pushed to the edge of their capabilities, including the ray trace software.” Zemax and Code V were the dominant optical design software at the time, and she used both. Erin mentions that the flexibility provided by Zemax allowed her to work more easily with the segmented systems. She was so impressed with the software that, when searching for opportunities and finding they were hiring, she jumped at the chance to become part of the Zemax team.

Optics as a research field

When we think about optics, we usually don’t think about research or the need for complex software to simulate how the optical system will behave. However, this is very important, more so when sending an optical system to space, and it is critical to ensure it will work. Erin explains that because JWST has 18 segments, these need to be perfectly aligned to become the eyes of the telescope. “A lot of people think about optical engineering as the design part, but in fact, it’s just this tiny, tiny piece of what optical engineers do […] we have to get the whole thing put together and operating and meeting the performance specifications.”

Many people worked with the optical software to align JWST’s mirrors. Erin was using the simulation tools to explore all the alignment steps for the segments and ensure they all worked. This was done on the ground using a testbed telescope with flight-style actuators on the mirrors to move them. They explored the alignment, especially in the worst-case scenarios. They had everything interconnected with a tool called Live View, running an alignment experiment in Zemax and then trying it on the lab equipment. All this was happening at the same time that other teams were building and testing the mirrors. Erin felt very proud of her contribution when she heard that the Wave Front Sensing Team used one of the workarounds she added to the software.

Teamwork

Erin repeatedly emphasized how important it is to work as a team on any big undertaking, including science. “Teamwork in science is so important nowadays, there’s nobody really doing things by themselves in a garage anymore, right? … Having that big team of people and the experts that you need and having good communication between them is really integral to being a successful scientist now.”

Support for early career engineers

I asked Erin about obstacles in her career. Although she agrees that she found some, Erin recognizes she is not alone. Instead of focusing on the negatives, she told me how many people supported her when she started and was still learning. They answered her questions and debated things with her, something Erin thinks is positive. Also, she saw the positive in working at fairly male-dominated companies,  “they tended not to forget who I was.” However, she also accepts that as she became more senior, things became more problematic. Sometimes, people didn’t assume she was in charge. “They assume that maybe you don’t have the leadership or the status to make decisions.”

We continued talking about work in the engineering field and how sometimes people think that if they have a problem, they should not bring it to their managers. “When you’re a young engineer, there’s a lot of fear … that you might … mess up or that people might yell at you.” Erin emphasizes that it is not the truth, “One thing that’s always true, is [that] everybody is just people, right? And management is usually thrilled to hear that there’s a problem and you have an idea for how to fix it.”

Nowadays, young people receive a lot of support when starting their careers, but for it to work, they should be open to discussing problems with others. Erin advises junior engineers to speak up, “communicate clearly about what is happening and what you need to make it work. …. People think that we are born … smart people or something, but our job is to go in every day, figure out how we messed up and how to fix it … that’s what engineering really is.”

Doing research in optics

In her current job at Ansys, Erin works, among other projects, with the research and development of the Zemax ray trace software. She enjoys her current job because she can be super creative and spend time on design work. Optical engineers in the field need these tools, and she likes to talk to customers and see how these products work for them. She looks for ways to address their problems and find the quickest way to build something they can prototype and try out. She has enough freedom to make this job into something she loves to do.

Different people like to do different things, so when younger, she recalls agonizing about the kind of job she needed to take. Now she knows that the job itself is not important, as in every job you can find what you are good at and want to do, and then focus on getting those things out of that job. She believes you can turn a job into something you love, if you have some type of freedom in it.

Work can be a hobby

Actually, Erin accepts that one of her main hobbies is her work. Although sometimes she takes road trips to see new things and plays piano, talking with customers and writing technical documents about the tools they develop are things she enjoys too. Also, even if she didn’t finish her Master’s in Technical writing, while there, she learned that she likes to write creative fiction.

It was a delightful interview that concluded with talking about the beauty of math. Erin confessed that she missed it when trying a writing career; she recalls telling her family, “I really miss geometry.” There was a lot of geometry in optics, and she enjoys spatial reasoning that comes with it. Erin knows that not everyone sees beauty in engineering and math, but she does and thinks it is a special beauty. Erin concluded by saying, “In engineering, you can look at an assembly drawing or even certain plots and graphs, and you can see if they’re right based on whether they seem beautiful, like, especially hardware assemblies … if it is super ugly, there’s usually some kind of technical problem there.”