Oral-History:Andrea Goldsmith
About Andrea Goldsmith
One of the most prolific researchers in communications and information theory, Andrea Goldsmith has profoundly impacted the design principles of modern wireless communications systems. She determined the Shannon capacity of time-varying wireless channels, which she later extended to find the capacity and capacity regions of time-varying multiple-antenna (MIMO) channels, multiuser channels, and cellular systems. In addition, Goldsmith pioneered practical adaptive modulation and MIMO techniques based on her capacity results that achieve close to these fundamental bounds. These results helped shape the adaptive modulation, MIMO, and multiuser MIMO techniques in current cellular and Wi-Fi standards. Her capacity analysis of ad-hoc and cognitive radio networks led to novel strategies for mitigating or exploiting interference between users. Goldsmith founded two companies to commercialize her ideas, whose products have been adopted by major service providers worldwide.
Andrea Goldsmith received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley and is the Dean of Engineering and Applied Science and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. Previously, she was the Stephen Harris Professor of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where she is now Harris Professor Emerita and on the faculty of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. She is the 2020 Marconi Fellow in recognition of her work in wireless communication, a Fellow of IEEE and Stanford University, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Goldsmith also co-founded and served as CTO of Plume (formerly Accelera, Inc.) and of Quantenna Communications, Inc. and held industry positions at Maxim Technologies, Memorylink Corporation, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. Her research interests are in information theory, communication theory, and signal processing, and their application to wireless communications, interconnected systems, and neuroscience.
About the Interview
ANDREA GOLDSMITH: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 2 February 2022
Interview #871 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.
Copyright Statement
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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
Andrea Goldsmith, an oral history conducted in 2022 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ, USA.
Interview
INTERVIEWEE: Andrea Goldsmith
INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel
DATE: 2 February 2022
PLACE: Virtual via WebEx
Early life, family, education
Hellrigel:
I'll get started. Today is February 2, 2022. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel from the IEEE History Center and I'm here with Dean Andrea Goldsmith. We're here to record her oral history and we're doing it via WebEx. I'm at my home in New Jersey and the dean is at her office in Princeton, New Jersey.
Goldsmith:
I’m actually at my home on the Princeton campus, the Wyman House, which is next to the glorious Graduate College right behind me.
Hellrigel:
Cool. It's a very nice place.
Goldsmith:
It's spectacular. It's even more beautiful than it looks on Webex.
Hellrigel:
We're going to start. Currently, you're Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Princeton University. You've had these posts since September 2020. [In addition, you are the recipient of the 2020 Marconi Prize, so you are a Marconi Fellow.] We'll get into your career in a moment. I'd like to start with a little background family history. For example, what year were you born and where were you raised?
Goldsmith:
Sure. I was born in 1964 in Berkeley, California. I spent the first five years of my life in Berkeley, California. My mom [Adrienne Goldsmith (1933-2012)] was a flower child, so I went to marches around the Berkeley campus when Ronald Reagan was governor. The National Guard was called in to quell the unrest of the students on the Berkeley Campus. As a kid, I remember seeing soldiers marching on the flowers of People's Park and tanks traveling down Telegraph Avenue. I had a wonderful childhood those five years in Berkeley. Then around age five my mom and my brother [Steve Goldsmith] and I moved to Los Angeles. My mom had been a cartoonist and my parents had divorced, so she moved to restart her artistic career in Los Angeles and that's where I grew up. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley. I'm a valley girl. I was there until the age of seventeen when I left and spent a year in Europe.
Hellrigel:
You are a product of the public education system?
Goldsmith:
Absolutely. My dad [Werner Goldsmith (1924-2003)] was a professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley his entire career. but I didn't grow up with my dad. I lived with my mom, and I went to the public schools in Los Angeles. They were terrible. I dropped out of my high school in the middle of eleventh grade. Well, I didn't actually drop out. I took the proficiency exam and started taking classes at the local junior college, which was fantastic, L.A. Valley College [Los Angeles Valley College].
I had some of the best teachers I'd ever had in the junior college. It was the first class I was taking at junior college that sparked me to go to Europe for what would have been the summer before my senior year of high school. I went for a one-month long French program, and I didn’t come back for a year. I spent the year, that would have been my senior year of high school, travelling around Europe.
Hellrigel:
What did your folks make of that?
Goldsmith:
Well, it's interesting, my dad was on sabbatical in Greece that year. I hadn't spent a lot of time with my dad because I'd grown up in L.A. and my parents were divorced. He and my stepmother and my little sister Remy were doing a year-long sabbatical in Patras, Greece and I met them in France. We drove together down to Greece and then he started his sabbatical at the University of Patras. and I ended up starting a Greek singing career.
I was travelling through Greece, I was running out of money, and I was about to come back to the States and restart junior college. I'd applied to college from Greece. That's a whole other story. I'd just met this girl who was British and Greek. She was singing in the Greek night clubs, and she said why don't you try singing in Greek Bouzoukia, which are nightclubs that specialize in Greek bouzouki music? I said I don't speak Greek, I'm not Greek, and I don't sing. Anyway, somehow, I ended up deciding to become a Greek singer. I travelled all through the Greek Peloponnese that year, which would have been my senior year of high school, learning the language and culture, living in little towns, and singing. Actually, it was a wonderful education.
When I look back at all of my education, I think that year living in a foreign country and learning a foreign language in a country that was so different from my own country, was incredibly educational. The people in Greece and their simple lifestyle, joie-de-vivire, and close-knit families really had a huge impact on me that continues to this day.
What did my folks think about it? I asked my dad much later if he was worried that I had left high school and I was singing in Greek night clubs. He said, "I never worried about you". I don't know if he meant that, maybe he did. But I actually think he knew that I was pretty independent and made good decisions. My mom was an artist and there was nothing she would have liked better than me singing in Greek Bouzoukia. I actually brought her over to Europe on my eighteenth birthday so after my year in Greece; she'd never been to Europe even though she was an artist and she studied European art. I brought her over to Europe and we travelled from France down to Greece, stopping at every museum and sculpture garden along the way. I think she was pretty thrilled about that year that I spent in Europe as well.
Hellrigel:
It was phenomenal. It sounds like you still have good memories.
Goldsmith:
It was transformative for me. It's interesting, there are many countries where young people are required to do military service before they go to college. I don't know that military service is the optimal thing for a young person to do, but I think having a year between high school and college to explore yourself and think about what you value and what you want to do after that year, in terms of the next stage of your professional career, is incredibly valuable. I'm sure my journey, my professional journey, and my personal journey, would have been very different had I not spent that year out of the country doing something completely different, completely unconventional and the experiences that I had during that year.
You might find it surprising, but I was quite an introvert before my year of being a Greek singer. Certainly, when you're travelling, especially when you're travelling by yourself, either you don't talk to anybody, or you have to be an extrovert and you have to strike up conversations. I think that year changed me in profound ways. I tell teenagers and their parents that the best thing I ever did was to drop out of high school and go travel for a year in Europe. Some people find that crazy to say or ask that I wouldn't share that with their teenage kids, but it really was transformative for me. Until this day, I think of that as an influential point of my life that really changed my outlook on the world.
Hellrigel:
Just for the record, your mom was Adrienne Goldsmith?
Goldsmith:
That's right.
Hellrigel:
And your dad, Werner Goldsmith?
Goldsmith:
That's right.
Hellrigel:
Okay, and you have one brother and one sister?
Goldsmith:
Yep.
Hellrigel:
Are your brother and sister also engineers?
Goldsmith:
No. Not at all. My brother, Steve Goldsmith, got a degree in political science from Berkeley, later on when he was many years past the normal college age. He's a free spirit, like my mom, so he did light shows for rock bands. You know, he kind of pieced together different entrepreneurial endeavors around community and around a lifestyle that values music and community and being a free spirit. My sister Remy got her degree in anthropology and in French from UCLA and she worked for Ellen Tauscher who was in the House of Representatives. She's worked for a number of non-profits and a hospital. She got a law degree. She's someone I admire very much for her convictions and the work that she does to make the world a better place in different dimensions, whether in government or non-profits or organizations like hospitals that really need people with the kind of talent and passion that she has.
Hellrigel:
When you were growing up, what were your favorite subjects and your least favorite subjects? I guess formal school or at least your schooling in L.A. annoyed you because you left high school early. High school didn't challenge you or keep you busy enough?
Goldsmith:
Yes. The problem with the public schools in Los Angeles, at the time that I was a student there, was that they really taught to the lowest level of kids in the class. I didn't find it challenging. Most of the teachers were also uninspiring so I wasn’t captivated by the material I was studying. I was never the best student in any class, either high school, college, or anything. I think what made me successful in graduate school wasn't that I was a straight A-plus student, but my creativity, my ability to think outside the box. I was a good student, certainly, but I wasn't the best student. I'm shocked that I got into Berkeley as an undergrad. I was even more shocked that I got into Berkeley as a grad student.
I liked every subject in that I studied in college even though I found the same subjects extremely boring in high school. It was interesting. I talked about how I had such great teachers in junior college. I remember studying history and math and political science and literature in junior college. In high school, I found these topics really boring. I remember the first English class that I took in junior college. The teacher said we were supposed to read the book before the class, and I did, fortunately. At the beginning of class, she asked if anyone had not read the book. A couple of kids raised their hands, and she said, “you can leave because you have nothing to contribute to the discussion.” I was shocked as that never could have happened in high school. But in college, we were going to have a real discussion about the book, and the expectations are, you are here because you want to be here, and you are going to contribute. My algebra teacher in junior college was one of the best math teachers I've ever had because he made math fun. He made it come alive, he made it interesting. I remember my history teacher in junior college talking about Christopher Columbus, saying the guy was a bumbling idiot. He had a mistress in Portugal. He just bumped into America by accident. These were stories I could relate to. These were ways of teaching that I found engaging for every subject. In so many ways, what makes a student interested in a subject is the teacher. If the teacher is passionate and can find a way to convey what they are passionate about to their students, they can make any subject fascinating and engaging.
For me, junior college was the first time that I was really engaged deeply in the topics I was learning, and I loved all of them, I loved French. I loved English. I remember I went back and reread Hemingway books when I was in my first year of college that I had read in high school, not because I was taking classes, but because I remembered reading them in high school and thinking, why do people like this guy? I found these books really unrelatable and boring in high school. However, I reread them in college, after I had travelled through Europe, and I had a very different perspective. I loved them all.
The interesting thing is that math and science, especially in my first year of college, were real struggles for me, in part, because I missed my senior year of high school. So, I was in college at Berkeley, a very competitive university obviously, and I had not taken the prerequisites for many of the science and math classes I was taking. I hadn't taken geometry or trigonometry. Many of the students in my classes had taken the exact same classes in high school, like calculus, and I certainly hadn't taken calculus. I hadn't even taken trigonometry.
Berkeley was on the quarter system. I was working full-time because I wanted to pay my way through college so that my dad, who had very much wanted me to be an engineer, would not have an undue influence on what I decided to major in. I was really overwhelmed that first year of college.
The math and science courses were the hardest because I didn't have the background for them. There was also a lot of implicit bias, and perhaps it was not so implicit. There were only a couple of women in my classes and dozens to hundreds of guys, I was doing poorly, and the sense I picked up from others was maybe I shouldn't be majoring in engineering. I should be majoring in something else. I can't say that I enjoyed my math and science classes. My first year I struggled through them, and my grades reflected that struggle: there was no positive reinforcement. I was tenacious, so I did get through them, but they were not easy, they were hard, and they weren't inspiring either. They were just a grind. They were just hard grinds. It was also unclear how I was going to apply the math and physics that I was learning. The topics taught were very abstract and very theoretical. What does this have to do with my major in engineering I thought? I wanted to do engineering because I thought engineering can change the world. You can build things that have a positive impact on the world, but when you're studying proofs of calculus, convergence theorems, it doesn't really relate well to what it is that you are motivated to study in college. At least for me that was the case.
Hellrigel:
I read that at one point you were torn between political science and engineering?
Goldsmith:
Absolutely. I came very close to being a political science major and the reason was my travels in Europe. I was travelling through Europe in 1981 and 1982. Not just Europe, but I also went to Israel, Egypt, and Eastern Europe. I was really seeing the world, at least Europe and Northern Africa, and it was so different from my own country. I'm a very proud American. Yet at the time America was very, very unpopular. Ronald Reagan was president. He was talking about limited nuclear war over Europe, so you can imagine how popular we were in Europe.
Hellrigel:
And space shields.
Goldsmith:
At some point, I just even stopped saying I was American because I realized what a terrible reputation Americans had in Europe. Reagan was part of it, but also America is a very big country with a very diverse set of people. We certainly didn't have a very good reputation. I sensed that Europeans thought we were loud, brash, arrogant, and uncultured. Now, when I went to Egypt, it was a month after Sadat was shot and killed. He had brought peace to the Middle East with Jimmy Carter brokering the deal at Camp David, so Egypt, they loved Americans. They credited America with that peace. It was seeing how America and Americans were viewed in different countries that I found fascinating. I found the politics and the history of the countries that I had lived in or travelled in fascinating as well.
When I started at Berkeley, my father wisely advised me to declare engineering going in. He said your grades are going to drop precipitously, so you should declare engineering going in.
Hellrigel:
Yes, get in the program.
Goldsmith:
Then you can always transfer out, but it'll be much harder to transfer in. He was absolutely right about that. I declared engineering going in. The classes that I enjoyed the most and that I did the best in were not the engineering classes. I was taking languages, I was taking philosophy and politics, and I loved the political science classes I was taking. They were the Theory of European History. A professor, Michael Rogan, I'll never forget because he smoked cigars in class while delivering beautiful and thought-provoking lectures. These were upper division classes, yet it wasn't like math where you can't take an upper division math class unless you've taken all the lower division classes. In political science you can take anything you want. I really enjoyed political science. In fact, I enjoyed all the non-STEM classes I was taking. They were interesting and I was good at them, so at the end of my freshman year, I'd struggled through the engineering classes. I'd not done that well. I took that summer to really reflect on what I wanted to do in college.
I think young people today, high school students and certainly college students, view college education as almost occupational. The degree that you get is your ticket to your career, so you should get a degree that gets you a great first job. I didn't think of college that way and I don't think a lot of my peers did either. We were there to get an education, and obviously we wanted to get a good education, but it wasn't like if you don't major in engineering, you're not going to get a good job. I think a lot of young people feel that way now: [that your college degree dictates the rest of your career, and since entry-level engineering jobs pay well, an engineering degree is the best ticket to the future. That is certainly true if you love engineering, but not if you don’t, as a broad liberal arts education along with any major that a young person is passionate about provides a solid foundation for so many wonderful careers]. For me I thought that if I major in political sciences there are all kinds of interesting careers. I can get a law degree, I could go into government, or whatever. I wasn't that worried about what I was going to do next. Now keep in mind, I was a high school drop-out who'd spent a year singing in Greece, so my family didn't have my whole career trajectory planned out and didn't think I needed to at that stage of my career.
That summer, I decided that I would do one more semester with engineering classes and other classes and then decide at the end of the first semester of my sophomore year what I would major in, because I couldn't really take my first year as indicative as to whether I could be successful in engineering or not. I thought I should give myself the chance to succeed in engineering now that I was caught up, so I ended up cutting back on my work hours a lot. Giving myself a chance to be successful in engineering didn’t mean I should do engineering, but at least it wouldn't be as much of a grind as it had been that first year. Berkeley also changed from quarters to semesters after my freshman year, which was a much better pace for me in terms of absorbing material in my engineering classes. I also decided I should take the lower division core courses in political science that fall sophomore semester, because that was going to be my major if I ended up not majoring in engineering.
Two interesting things happened that first semester of my sophomore year. On the engineering side, I took an algebra class with Professor William Arveson who was a wonderful teacher. He had a female math TA [teaching assistant], a female TA for that class, Elizabeth Strauss. That was the first female graduate student that I had seen in my year-plus at Berkeley. We became friends. I ended up acing the class. I got an A, or an A plus or something like that. But more than doing well in the class, it was having someone who was a woman who was passionate about math, who was a really fun interesting person that was a role model. It made me realize, okay, you can be an advanced STEM student or a professional and look like her, in the sense of being interesting and engaged and passionate about what she was doing.
That was a turning point for me. First, it showed me that I had caught up and I could do well in these classes, but also that there was a role model as a guidepost, too. If you end up going down this path there are going to be other people like you that you'll encounter later on in your career. Then the flip side was that the core political science class, I think it was a freshman, sophomore class on politics of Europe, was so simplistic. The whole premise of the class was that democracy diminishes as you move from west to east across the map of Europe. I'd traveled all through Europe, and I knew that things were so much more complex and nuanced than that. I remember being in Bulgaria trying to piece together a conversation with someone who spoke almost no English, and I spoke almost no Bulgarian, but, observing their family and the people that I saw in Bulgaria, it was just—I knew that things were so much more nuanced. I thought, okay, if I have to take boring simplistic classes that I don't find engaging, I might as well major in engineering because anything I can do with a poli sci degree, I could do with an engineering degree, but not vice versa. So, that was the turning point.
At the end of my sophomore year, I decided I would major in engineering. My major was a very interesting major, and I credit my dad for this, too. I had no idea what kind of engineering I wanted to do. None at all. I just knew I liked math, and I wanted to do something more applied than abstract math. My dad suggested I apply to an honors program in Engineering Math. It was a special major that was almost like a design-your-own major, so I could really take any classes that I wanted to within a very loose structure around engineering and mathematics.
I was very fortunate to have an advisor for this program who was an electrical engineer and a statistician. [Aram Thomasian] worked in coding theory and information theory. I didn't know what those were at the time, but he said to me, if you like engineering and you like mathematics, you should think about communication systems because they are among the most mathematical of the engineering disciplines, amazing advice. You know, it is pretty remarkable that I ended up going into communications and information theory. I think a lot of it was due to the advice of Professor Thomasian who was my undergraduate advisor through this program. It was a design-your-own major effectively in engineering, and I took a lot of math classes. I took a lot of probability classes. I took a lot of electrical engineering classes, but not the ones that I didn't think were relevant to what I was interested in. Ironically, one of those was electromagnetics because I thought, oh, that's not interesting to me. I now do wireless communications where everything is driven by electromagnetic theory, so I picked that up later on. My major was a great major, as I was able to take the classes I was interested in in engineering and craft my own major within engineering. It was mostly an electrical engineering degree with more math and probability than I would've probably done if I was an electrical engineering major.
I also continued to take classes outside of engineering. I'm at a university now [Princeton University] that is an amazing liberal arts university. Stanford, where I taught for twenty-one years, is also an amazing liberal arts university. I really think that all engineers need a broad liberal arts education. I got one, starting with my year in Europe. That was not a formal liberal arts education, but it was certainly a liberal arts education. Then at Berkeley I studied different languages, and I continued to take classes in political science. I also took other classes like philosophy. My motivation was, first of all, to get a broad exposure to ideas that are really important, and it is also broad exposure to people that think completely different from you, whether it was the professor or the students. I think that has made me a better engineer. It certainly made me a better leader and entrepreneur. I really valued that aspect of my Berkeley education because I was able to get a broad liberal arts education as well as an outstanding engineering education.
Hellrigel:
While working on your bachelor's degree what was that job you had? What did you do?
Goldsmith:
I was a waitress. There were a couple things that were great about that job. First of all, I learned how to deal with all kinds of people. The interesting thing about working in a restaurant and bar is that a lot of the people that work there are, like I was, working their way to something else. This is a job you can work at night and weekends while you're studying, or while you're doing an internship or something like that. Many of my friends today are from that period. The people I worked with, half of them were not on their way to anything else, this was their end job, but the other half were working their way to other things. The other amazing thing about that job is that I dealt with all kinds of people. If you're a waitress and you want to get good tips, then you have to figure out, how do you enchant people? How do you charm people? How do you get them to give you a good tip because they like the way you're interacting with them? I made more money in that job than my first engineering job. I was a very good waitress, but I also learned to deal with very difficult people situations and that both with the customers, as well as the people that I was working with. Those lessons were invaluable throughout my career. Even today, when I deal with difficult situations, as a Dean of Engineering or in my startups, when I would deal with difficult situations with my co-founders or with my employees, I harken back on the lessons I learned as a waitress on how to deal with difficult people. Part of it is just to assume people have the best of intentions, even if they don't, it's a good way to go into an interaction.
The other nice thing about that job is it was nights and weekends, so it didn't interfere with my studies, and it ended up becoming a large part of my social life. A lot of the people that I worked with ended up becoming my friends because that's what I was doing on nights and weekends, rather than going out and partying in the dorms—
Hellrigel:
Or the fraternities.
Goldsmith:
Exactly, yes.
Hellrigel:
Yes. When you were in high school, did you have any part-time jobs?
Goldsmith:
Yes, I was a waitress all through high school as well. In fact, I moved out on my own when I was fifteen years old and I became independent, so I was supporting myself from a pretty young age as a waitress. Again, it was a great job because it allowed me to continue in high school. I think the fact that I was living on my own and working was part of the reason I left high school because I just had nothing in common with the other students and even the teachers. I remember I was usually late to my first class because I was working until midnight, 1:00, 2:00 a.m. I got a D in that class. I think it was driver's education or something like that. I told the teacher, I said, look, I'm sorry I'm late. It's not that I want to be late, it's just that I'm working until late, and I can't get here on time. Is there something else I could do, like extra work or something like that? It was like, no, you're getting a D because you're late every day or you've been late three times or whatever it was. I just found that rigidity not conducive to the life I was living as a fifteen-year-old working almost full time to support myself and going to school.
I was a good student, but I never had an engineering job until I graduated college. Part of the reason that I didn't do any summer internships when I was in college was because I was making a lot of money as a waitress. And it was a fun job and a different carefree lifestyle compared with my studies, which were really hard. But the other thing is that I was worried that I might take a summer job and not like it, because I wasn't sure what would I be doing as an engineering intern for three months. Would I have any real responsibility? If I really did like it, that would completely demotivate me to finish the degree and keep in mind, I had been demotivated my first year. So, once I got motivated, which happened in my sophomore year and beyond, I didn't want to do anything to mess that up.
Hellrigel:
Stay on track.
Goldsmith:
Yes. I wasn't sure that engineering was going to be my long-term career. Harkening back to my decision to major in engineering, it wasn't because I was sure I wanted to be an engineer. It was that I thought the foundations of an engineering degree would serve me well, whatever it was that I wanted to do. At that time, a lot of people in the early 1980s said, if you get an engineering undergrad degree and then you get a law degree or an MBA, then you can write your own ticket. If I had a dollar for everyone who told me that, I'd have a lot of money.
It was an interesting exchange with my undergrad advisor, Aram Thomasian, when I told him that maybe I should go on for a law degree or a business degree after college. And he said, those people, they're the ones driving the white BMWs in the Berkeley Hills. Do you really want to be like them? He was completely poo pooing the idea of going on to get a law degree or business degree because he was passionate about engineering and, in the end so was I, but I didn't know that when I was an undergrad.
I really didn't see the creative side of engineering as an undergraduate student. I did see the promise of communications. And I really liked the engineering behind communications, particularly its mathematics, but I also liked the idea of communications, of working in communications. Now, commercial wireless was not anywhere in sight in the early 1980s. There were no cell phones or Wi-Fi or anything like that. Most communication systems were in the defense industry, but I was captivated by the subject of communications in my engineering classes that covered it. But again, that was later, towards the end of my undergrad degree. Looking back, I have no regrets that I didn’t do a summer internship as a student, as things worked out well for me. Maybe, I might have seen things differently if things had evolved differently.
Hellrigel:
Internships weren't a really big to do back when we were undergrads. You got a job in the summer.
Goldsmith:
Yes, I think that may be true. Again, keep in mind that I wasn't so well-connected with my fellow students in the same way as I might have been had I lived on campus or lived in the dorms or had more of my social life interconnected with other students. I didn't really know what other students were doing. I had some friends in my class, mostly women. I remember that there was a group of us, about four of us, and that's all the women that I knew in my cohort of electric engineering students. We did labs together and we did social things together, but I didn't really know what everybody across my class did in summers and stuff like that. I just wasn't that well-connected. And that's a function and not just my own situation, but also Berkeley was a school where many undergraduates lived off campus. It wasn't like Princeton or Stanford where the undergrads to a large extent live on campus. There's a much more tight-knit community of undergrads in small private universities, I think Berkeley and large state schools in general, there's not as much connectedness of the students, especially large state schools where a large majority of students don't live on campus, which was the case for Berkeley.
Hellrigel:
Yes. And that was my case at UC Santa Barbara [University of California, Santa Barbara]. I was shocked by the lack of campus housing.
Goldsmith:
Yes. I think that's changed a lot in the ensuing years. I know Berkeley has a lot more student housing now than it did back then. But it's still—I don't know what percentage of students live on campus and that makes a big difference. If you live on campus, I think you're much more connected to your student cohorts than if you live off campus and you're coming in each day. In that case, you really only know the people in your classes.
Hellrigel:
Have you stayed in touch with the other three women?
Goldsmith:
Melinda Vander-Veen and I are very much in touch. The other two, we did lose touch over the years.
Maxim Technologies
Hellrigel:
Then you're going to work for four years after you earned your undergraduate degree. Which company did you work for and how did you end up there?
Goldsmith:
Yes. That's a great story too. I was very, very fortunate to go work at that company. Basically, when I was finishing my degree, I knew I didn't want to go on to grad school because I had no idea what I wanted to do. It wasn't like, should I go directly onto graduate school in engineering? I was thinking, maybe I'll get a law degree, maybe I'll get a business degree. I wasn't thinking about getting an advanced degree in engineering, I was just burnt out. I was ready to be done with school and to move on to the next stage of my professional career. I'd been a waitress from fifteen years old until I graduated college.
I was applying for jobs, and I wasn't quite ready to leave California. I had spent my whole life in California. I love California. This is the first time I've actually lived outside California other than my year in Europe. I was applying for jobs and the jobs in communications, which was my specialty area, they weren't really in the Bay Area [San Francisco Bay Area] or in California. AT&T was on the east coast. I interviewed with them. I don't even remember if I got a job offer with them. I had another offer that was—it was like a rotating position where I could try out different areas in this big company and then decide which one was right for me. But I'd also interviewed with this company Maxim Technologies, which was a small defense communications company in the Bay Area. I remember when I interviewed with them it was the only startup that I'd interviewed with, the other interviews were in big companies. I remember the interview on campus went well, and then they invited me down to interview in person. They were located in Santa Clara. I'd never been to Santa Clara except when I was a kid as there was an amusement park called Frontier Village around there. I hadn't been to Santa Clara in twenty years or so.
I remember I was driving in the carpool lane mistakenly and got pulled over on the way to my interview but they let me go without a ticket since I wasn't from the area. I was very, very much of a newbie.
I liked the idea of the startup. I felt like the work was fascinating. This really was communications. They were working on satellite systems and antenna array systems. The people in the company were mostly Ph.Ds. and new graduates like me. There were a lot of people that had Ph.Ds., and the way they talked about problems when I was interviewing was interesting. The problems they were working on were interesting. I wasn't so interested in working in the defense industry. I was from Berkeley, right? But the work was very interesting, and it allowed me to stay in California, and in the Bay Area, in fact. I ended up taking that job and that was a really great opportunity for me.
The fact that the people in the company either had a Ph.D. or were new graduates like me meant there was nothing in the middle.
Working with the people that had advanced degrees, doctoral degrees, they approached problems completely differently than I could even imagine approaching them. They just had a breadth of knowledge and a depth of knowledge that allowed them to think about problems in ways that me and the other new grads just couldn't. It was interesting to me to work with people like that. The problems were fascinating, but I didn't have the knowledge to solve them. I was given incredible responsibility. Like, I was asked to design a direction-finding algorithm for an antenna system. I ended up at the Stanford library, reading the papers on direction-finding, because I didn't know anything about it. I knew that my level of knowledge was not sufficient to solve the problems that I was being asked to solve and I knew that the people with these advanced degrees knew how to solve these problems. It was a great job, especially the first couple of years. The defense industry was going through a lot of turmoil in the 1980s.
By the third year that I was at Maxim, we'd lost contracts for the more interesting problems and the job became a lot less interesting. I was already thinking about, okay, what do I want to do next? Do I want to go to law school or get an MBA or maybe go back to school for engineering? It was really Maxim and the problems that I was working on, and the fact that cellular technology was starting to become a thing. I graduated in 1986. I went back to school in 1989. In 1988, two years into Maxim when things were getting a little bit less interesting or a lot less interesting, I decided, okay, I'll apply to graduate school in engineering for a master's [degree]. I was really thinking I'd go back for a master's [degree]. I wasn't thinking I'd go back for a Ph.D.
I wasn't ready to leave the Bay Area. My dad was in the Bay Area. I was very close to my dad. Starting from that year in Greece, we started becoming closer and then of course me majoring in engineering at his university also made us close. He was very proud of that. I only applied to Berkeley and Stanford for my graduate engineering studies, and I figured if I don't get in, then I'll apply more broadly the following year because there wasn't a big rush. But that's why I decided to go back to school, I just wanted to learn more. I was working on these really hard problems, and I knew I couldn't solve them in the way that I wanted to solve them.
Berkeley, Masters, Ph.D.
Hellrigel:
When you got into that master's program, you got funded?
Goldsmith:
Well, I think I applied for the Ph.D. program thinking I would get a master's and then decide if I wanted to go on.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Goldsmith:
At that time, Berkeley—I think both Berkeley and Stanford had this master/Ph.D. program where you come in as a master's student and then you have to pass whatever the qualifying exam are to go on for Ph.D.
I got rejected by Stanford, which is kind of ironic given that I spent twenty-one years on the faculty there. I thought I had a better chance getting into Stanford versus Berkeley because of my work experience. Again, my undergraduate grades weren't that great. My GRE scores were not that great. Because my first year at Berkeley was such a disaster, I had a couple of C’s on my transcripts, so that's pretty hard to recover from even if you do well later on. I was never a straight A student except maybe at the very end of my time as an undergrad at Berkeley. Recovering from a poor GPA during my freshman year; it got better, but it was a slow process. I thought, okay, with Stanford maybe the fact that I've worked for three years, that'll make a difference in Stanford. I didn't know about Berkeley. And even when I talked to the woman at Berkeley who was in charge of recruiting diverse students into the Ph.D. program, she was not very encouraging about my chances of getting into Berkeley. I figured probably I won't get into Berkeley.
I got the rejection letter from Stanford on St. Patrick's Day. This was 1989, St. Patrick's Day. I was really depressed because I thought that was my best chance. Then my dad had been telling me, you should go talk to the head of graduate admissions in electrical engineering at Berkeley because that may sway whether they admit you or not. I was a young woman who just didn't think that I should do something like that, but once I got the Stanford rejection, I thought, well I don't have much to lose at this point.
I made an appointment with the head of graduate admissions in electrical engineering, Pravin Varaiya, who ended up being my advisor. I went to talk to him, and I started off saying why I wanted to go back for a Ph.D. and what I was interested in and he just listened. Then towards the end, I figured I should explain why I had not such great grades as an undergrad, that I was working full time and my grades got better over time. I started explaining all that and he looks at me and says, you're going to get your admission letter in the next couple days. He'd already admitted me to work with him. He saw something about my application beyond my grades and test scores, including the fact that I'd worked, what I'd written in my statement of purpose, and that I was really passionate about communication systems. This was back in the late-1980s, and at the time, he had gotten a big grant from Caltrans to create one lane of every highway where the cars are automated. That was very forward looking at the time, and he needed someone who understood communications. He doesn't regret taking a chance by admitting me. In fact, he's a very dear friend now as is his wife. He gave me a chance, and I think that was also an interesting lesson for me at the time.
Now as a long-time professor and a dean, sometimes the best students don't necessarily have the best dossier. The people that are willing to take risks in taking hard classes or classes they are unprepared for, or have an unusual professional path, both of which were true for me, it's a more risky bet, but the reward may be much higher because these people don't follow a traditional trajectory, which can make them trailblazers. They are less afraid to fail. That was the case for me. Pravin saw that and he took a bet on me and admitted me not just to the program, but to his research group, and he funded me. He was an amazing advisor. If you look at any of the speeches I've made when I get an award or something like that, I always acknowledge him, not just for taking a chance on me, but for being an amazing role model, mentor, and advisor.
Hellrigel:
Then you earn your master's degree, and you stay on for the Ph.D. You did some teaching, I guess, at that point or were you only working in his lab.
Goldsmith:
Towards the end of my master's degree, which was a two-year degree, the December before I finished my master's, I was very lucky to meet the other transformative mentor that I've had professionally. I was at a conference in San Diego. I actually paid myself to go to the conference because I think I'd submitted a paper there, and it was rejected. That paper eventually, in a better form, became one of my most cited papers. That's another lesson I learned: when you get rejected for something, whether it's a job or a school or something like that, or when your work gets rejected, just take it as a lesson and do better, take that lesson to make things better and move on. The first journal paper I submitted, and the first conference paper I submitted which was the basis of the journal paper, were both rejected. I revised them to make them better, and now those papers are among my most cited works, not just the paper, but in terms of the awards that I've won often go back to the work in those papers —this was my master's thesis on doing adaptive modulation. The paper was rejected from the conference, but I went to the conference anyway, because I thought it would be a good thing for me to attend a conference and meet people at the conference.
I was fortunate to get introduced to my future mentor by another student who I'd been talking to at the conference. He said, “I want to introduce you to my mentor,” who was Larry Greenstein, a department head at Bell Labs. He introduced me to Larry and then a couple of months later, I was thinking about going on for the Ph.D. My research was going well. I thought it would be good for me to get some experience working outside of being a waitress and outside of being a student. I asked Larry if I could visit Bell Labs and talk to him about a summer job. I came out in March, that would've been 1991. That was my first foray into central New Jersey. I visited Larry Greenstein's group at Crawford Hill. He ended up making me a summer internship offer in his group, which I ended up taking. That was transformative, not only working with Larry, he was an amazing mentor, but working with the other people in Bell Labs. The interesting thing is that group was doing wireless through the 1980s.
Then AT&T decided wireless communication was a niche area and there wasn't going to be much future to it because that's what the consulting company McKinsey told them. That group ended up moving to fiber optic communication in the late 1980s, and they had just moved back to doing wireless communication in the spring of 1991 when I was interviewing with them. The whole group was moving back into wireless communication, and then when I started in the summer that was the area of work that I ended up doing. It was terrific to have this group of incredible researchers at Bell Labs to work with over the summer. I went back the following summer. I spent two summers at Bell Labs. I also did teach at a junior college.
Once I decided to go on for the Ph.D., I still didn't know what I wanted to do after the Ph.D. Do I want to be a professor? Do I want to work in a research lab because I had such a great experience at Bell Labs? Do I want to work in industry because I'd worked in industry before? I kind of wanted to keep all the doors open because I really didn't know what I wanted to do.
Part of my thinking was if I think I want to be a professor, I should see if I like teaching and I didn't want to just be a TA. I wanted to actually teach, to drive a course, to be responsible for a course. I ended up teaching a basic circuits class at the local junior college, Laney College in Oakland. And that was a transformative experience as well. I remember the first day of class, the very first class that I taught started at six o'clock at night and at six o'clock at night was when George H.W. Bush declared war on Iraq. I thought, how can I just start teaching this class to these young people, mostly men, when we're declaring war. I brought a radio in, and I said, we're going to start the class by listening to this announcement because I think it's more important than anything that I'm going to start the class with and then we'll do the class after the announcement. It was a really interesting first class for me.
The great thing about the students in that class, which was also true of the students that were my cohorts when I was in junior college, is that about half of them were entering junior college because they were working their way towards something better. They couldn't be full-time students because they had to support their families, or they couldn't afford it. But I had amazing students in that class, incredibly motivated, incredibly smart, incredibly capable as exceptional students. And then the other half of the students were there because they didn't know what else they should be doing, and they weren't particularly good students. It was great to teach such a range of students. I really enjoyed teaching immensely. And that had a big impact on my ultimate decision to stay in academia after I got my Ph.D.
Hellrigel:
Did your father give you any advice; which way to go with your career, academia, defense, or industry?
Goldsmith:
I knew he wanted me to be a professor. My dad's idea of success was himself, so if you're a professor of mechanical engineering at a top university, that's the pinnacle of professions.
Hellrigel:
It's not so bad.
Caltech
Goldsmith:
Yes. I was in electrical engineering, but that was okay. I was at Caltech, not Berkeley and that was okay. I knew what he really wanted for me. But the only advice he gave me was when I finished my Ph.D., or as I was finishing up and looking at job opportunities, I had job offers from MIT and Caltech. My husband's job was in the Bay Area, and I had hoped for a job from Berkeley. Stanford didn't have any openings, so that wasn't an option at the time. Berkeley ended up rejecting me for the job, actually, the day after my Ph.D. graduation, and about five days before my wedding, which was in May. They were very, very late in their decision, and I was holding off MIT and Caltech, hoping for the job from Berkeley. In the end, it was great that I didn't get that offer because I'd already been at Berkeley for all my degrees.
Caltech was a wonderful place to start my academic career. My twenty-one years at Stanford were also amazing. I might've stayed at Berkeley my entire professional career if I had gotten the Berkeley job offer. Who knows? In retrospect, it was good that I didn't get it. But it threw a huge wrench into my personal life because I was about to get married, and my husband had a start-up in the Bay Area. My dad's advice was not to take the MIT job because they don't give anyone tenure, which wasn't true at the time. It had been true twenty years earlier.
When I look back to the first question, or one of the early questions you asked me, what do my parents think of me singing my way through Greece when I was seventeen years old? I think my dad, when he said, I trusted your judgment, I think that was true maybe the whole time, and it certainly was true at that point. He did give me advice. I didn't ask him for advice because I knew that he had a very different definition of success than I did. To me, success wasn't just about professional success, it was broader than that. I felt like I could be happy in any of the job categories that I was looking at, being a professor, being in a research lab, going to a company. And so, I didn't think his advice would necessarily be the best advice for my definition of success —I asked for his advice, and he told me, don't go to MIT. But I asked a lot of people for advice. I asked my advisors for advice. The interesting thing was that I made my job decision to go to Caltech literally the night before I drove up to Napa to get married. At my wedding, most people did not know what I had decided, so there were all these rumors flying around the wedding. Where is she going? It ended up being an interesting sidenote of the wedding. and my husband-to-be was incredibly gracious. He said, you decide, and we'll make it work.
Hellrigel:
He's also an engineer?
Goldsmith:
He is. He got his Ph.D. from Stanford in electrical engineering, in fact. I was an unofficial reader of his thesis. He finished a year before I did, officially.
Hellrigel:
Arturo Salz. He has been in start-ups, not academia?
Goldsmith:
At the time that we started dating, he had started a company in the Bay Area that was doing software to validate hardware, called Systems Science. He was a co-founder of that company. When I was at Caltech and had applied to Stanford his start-up was in the process of getting bought by Synopsys. Which is a very large company.
Hellrigel:
Oh, yes.
Goldsmith:
With his start-up, he could work remotely. He moved with me to Pasadena. He came up to the Bay Area when he needed to for his start-up. We weren't sure whether that was going to work with the acquisition of the big company. I ended up getting the Stanford job and then we resolved our two-body problem perfectly for the next twenty-one years until I totally screwed it up by taking the Princeton job. He's still in Synopsys. He's a Synopsys Fellow and an incredibly valuable engineer and leader within Synopsys.
Hellrigel:
I guess some other academics would want to know how challenging was it? You have a successful marriage. How challenging was it to have two children while you're going through the process of tenure and moving up the academic chain at Stanford?
Goldsmith:
And at Caltech, because my son was born at Caltech.
Hellrigel:
Yes, at Caltech, too.
Goldsmith:
I think that harkens back to what I said about my time in Greece and my philosophy of life, which is that happiness comes in many dimensions. To me, I was very lucky to find an amazing husband and partner. I could not have a more special relationship than I have with my husband. It's beyond anything I could've dreamed of. We're going on twenty-eight years of marriage. He was amazing, and even in those early days, saying, “you decide where you want to go. I know your dream is to be an academic, and I'll follow you if you go to MIT or Caltech.” I said, “what about your start-up?” And he said, “well, we'll figure it out.” It helps a little bit that he's Mexican, so I think that even though he's obviously very driven to get a Ph.D. at Stanford and start a company that was successful, he also is a little bit less structured in the way he approaches life than many Americans, including the way I was before I went to Greece.
That year I spent in Greece, I saw people that have no idea what's going to happen a year from now, let alone have their whole professional careers planned out. So, for me, when I took the job at Caltech, it was like, well, I think I want to be an academic. I think that is what's going to make me most happy, but I can be happy in different jobs. I told Arturo, first of all, thank you for agreeing to move with me, so that we start our marriage together. We had a wonderful time in Pasadena in the early years of our marriage because we kind of left our comfortable cocoon in the Bay Area. He'd been in the Bay Area for over a decade. He had friends from grad school and other friends. I had all my friends and family in the Bay Area. So, we started our marriage in a different place, and it was actually very much of a bonding experience.
We had a really wonderful time in Los Angeles, even though I grew up there and hated it. When I moved back to Pasadena, we had a wonderful time, in part, because of his Mexican background. He spoke the language. I ended up learning Spanish. We explored the Latino side of Southern California, which was really enriching when you explore it with someone who was born and grew up in Mexico.
For me, I said to Arturo, okay, I'm going to go to Caltech and see what it's like to be a professor, but if it doesn't work out for you, if you can't be successful professionally because you're in LA with me, I can go back to the Bay Area and get another job. I enjoyed my job at Maxim. I enjoyed my job at Bell Labs. I'm an optimist by nature. I knew I didn't need to be a professor to be happy. I thought that’s what would make me happiest. I'm very grateful that Arturo allowed me to start and continue in this profession because it really is incredibly rewarding and joyful and has been amazingly satisfying. And I'm good at it, so that's also nice. But I didn't feel like if things weren't working out for him, that, no, I want to be a professor and he would just have to deal with it.
I was very lucky. Caltech was a wonderful place to start. It was also a bit small for me. I was at Caltech for just over four years. I enjoyed my colleagues immensely and I had fantastic students, but there were only about fourteen or fifteen faculty in electrical engineering. I was very lucky that Michelle Effros started the same time I did. We were the first two women in electrical engineering at Caltech. We ended up becoming close collaborators, as well as close friends. I had people to work with, but my students didn't have as many people to work with as when I went to a bigger place.
Caltech was a bit limiting for me in the long-term. It was a great place to start. The opportunity at Stanford came along just at the right time. I ended up getting the offer as Synopsys was acquiring Arturo's company.
Coming back to the kids. Arturo and I had been married for three years. I'd kind of gotten up the learning curve of being a professor at Caltech, things were going well, and we were ready to start our family. I didn't think about, what's this going to do to my tenure clock, or my chances for tenure. The way I approached it was, I don't think tenure is this very thin line, where having a kid will put you just below it, and not having a kid will put you just above it. In my view, I thought, you're probably either way above or way below the tenure threshold and having a kid probably won't make that much of a difference. And even if it does, I don't want my life, my full life—my personal life, to be dictated by a professional decision about how's this going to impact my tenure. We were ready to have kids, so I got pregnant and had my amazing son, Daniel. Daniel was born in Pasadena. Caltech, again, was an easier place to be a professor than any place else I've been, certainly easier than Stanford, and easier than Princeton, although I'm a dean here, so it's a different role.
Hellrigel:
What do you mean by easier?
Goldsmith:
First of all, Caltech was very small. My classes were small. It was very well funded, so I had multiple TAs (teaching assistants) for my small classes. There were very few committees that I needed to serve on because it's a small place without a lot of committees. It was a very easy place to be a professor. I had excellent students. So, one could really focus just on research and teaching as a professor at any career stage, but especially as an untenured professor.
Being an outstanding teacher was not as important at Caltech at that time, as it was at Stanford or at Princeton. I was a good teacher, but I wasn't an outstanding teacher and that was fine. Being a good teacher at Caltech put me in the category of being one of the better teachers. It was a well-resourced small place. It was an easier place to be an assistant professor than many other places. Plus, it had a great reputation and we got amazing students. I had all the benefits of being at one of the best engineering departments in the country, and none of the overhead of being at a very big place. I think MIT would've been a lot more challenging.
I had my son because my husband and I were ready to start our family and I didn't care if that derailed me from my academic job so that I didn't get tenure as a result. It's not that I didn't care, I just didn't think that my decision about starting my family should be dictated by that.
Hellrigel:
Would be dictated.
Goldsmith:
I also felt like, I think I'm doing well and yes, this will change my trajectory some, but I'm doing well professionally, and I don't think it will make the difference between tenure and not tenure.
Hellrigel:
Did Caltech have maternity leave?
Goldsmith:
Yes, that's a very funny story, too. Caltech did have maternity leave and I took maternity leave with Daniel. It was four months or something like that, but after two weeks, I was climbing the walls. I said, okay, I'm not going to go to the office for at least a month. We had a nanny lined up to start when I started going back to the office part-time. She was going to come part-time and then eventually full-time. She was wonderful.
Our first nanny, who I actually found through Francis Arnold, who was a good friend and colleague at Caltech. She had three kids at the time. Her youngest son was about six months older than Daniel. She was an associate professor when I arrived at Caltech, and now she's a Nobel Prize winner. Now she's co-chair of the presidential council of advisors on science and technology [President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, PCAST], which I'm also on and have the honor of working with her. She was my role model as a woman professor that had kids pre-tenure. My first nanny was actually a hand-me-down nanny from her. She had hired Anna temporarily while her full-time nanny was visiting her family. Anna turned out to be a wonderful nanny. Caltech had four months of maternity leave, so I took the maternity leave. I wasn't teaching when Daniel was born. He was born in September, so I had that fall quarter off. I don't have the nature to sit around watching an infant sleep, so after a few weeks, I was climbing the walls. When he was sleeping, I'd be cleaning out closets and scrubbing the floors. I'm not used to being idle, so eventually I said I should just start working again.
Hellrigel:
Go back to work.
Goldsmith:
We called the nanny and said, can you come part-time now? I took maternity leave with Daniel. That meant that I would've had an automatic one-year extension on my tenure clock at Caltech if I'd stayed at Caltech, but I didn't stay. I ended up moving to Stanford. I moved to Stanford when I was pregnant with my daughter, Nicole, and I didn't take any maternity leave at Stanford. In fact, I started teaching one month after Nicole was born, and that was because officially, when I went to Stanford, my tenure clock started over. I'd been five years at Caltech. Officially, at Stanford, I started over with the seven-year tenure clock. They told me we can put you up early, but there's no guarantee. I knew what they wanted was my teaching record. They wanted me to have three years of teaching at Stanford before they would put me up for tenure, so I thought, okay, if I do two years and a quarter, they might consider it. If I only do two years, they'll probably make me do another year. That's why I ended up teaching a month after Nicole was born.
Stanford
Hellrigel:
You spent five years at Caltech and then you go up to Stanford. Had they recruited you?
Goldsmith:
Not exactly. I was serving on a National Research Council panel on the future of untethered communication, and another colleague on that panel, a senior colleague, was Don Cox, who was a professor at Stanford in wireless. Don and I were chatting at the coffee break one day of this committee meeting, and I was just talking about how I missed the Bay Area and all the things I loved about the Bay Area. He made a comment and said, “Well, what would it take for you to come back?” I looked at him and I said, “Well, a job offer.” He didn't say anything, and it was nuanced. I think at that point he knew that the department had put in for a search for a wireless person, but it hadn't been approved yet, so he couldn't tell me that. Or maybe he made some comment about there being an upcoming search. I don't remember exactly, but—
Hellrigel:
But he's “fishing”?
Goldsmith:
It made me think there may be an opportunity at Stanford. The next time that I was up in the Bay Area, I arranged to meet with Don. I went to his office, and we were chatting about all kinds of things. My husband was meeting me afterwards; we were going to go to lunch or something. It was getting to the end of the hour, so I thought, okay, maybe I read too much into that comment in our conversation; there was nothing there. I said, “Don, it's been great talking with you,” and I started to get up and he said, “wait a minute.” He said, “we're launching a search in wireless, and I think you should apply.” Of course, I sat back down, and we talked about it. So, in that sense, as he was chair of the search committee, they had me in their sights as an applicant. Eventually the search was approved, and I applied to the search. Things took so long with the search, and it was approved very late, so that when they ended up posting the ad, it was already almost the end of the recruiting season, so they didn't get a lot of applications. They had to open it up again in the fall, so it took a long time. What I like to say is I applied to Stanford when I was pregnant with my son, and I came to Stanford pregnant with my daughter and they're twenty-two months apart. So, it was really a long-drawn-out process and my husband's company was in the process of getting bought in the middle of all that. I was asked to apply to the search, I applied to the search, and I won the search in the end.
I had a wonderful time at Caltech. It wasn't hard to leave Caltech for personal reasons, so that made it a very easy decision. But even for professional reasons, I really felt like I would prefer to be in a bigger place. I thought that long-term, my opportunities in a bigger place would be better. It kind of goes back to risk-taking and thinking outside the box. The chances I would not get tenure at Caltech were small. I started there at the end of 1994, and I left at the beginning of 1999, so officially, I was there five years. They were going to put me up for tenure the next year. Things were going very well. Joining Stanford, I was officially starting over. I needed to prove myself all over again. There was some risk, obviously, in taking the job. I felt like they wouldn't hire me when I was at such a senior stage of being an assistant professor unless they thought my trajectory was very likely to get tenure. Sometimes you just have to take risks and say, I think, long-term professionally, I'll be better off here, which was what I thought. Personally, for sure I'll be better off here, so I'm willing to take that risk. And again, if I don't get tenure, there's plenty of jobs in the Bay Area. There are other paths to professional happiness besides being a professor, so that's why I wasn't too worried about moving to Stanford.
I was pregnant with my daughter when I moved, so I had both my kids pre-tenure. As I said, when I got pregnant with my son, I never really thought about whether my professional aspirations should dictate when I have a child. Nicole was not planned, I did want more kids, but perhaps not at the time that we were moving and my husband's company was getting bought by a big company. The timing wasn't what we had planned, but she was an incredibly happy arrival and it all worked out in the end. Having my kids close together was fine and I did end up getting tenure. It was pretty crazy. We also ended up building a house, which we didn't want to do. We bought a spec home a year after we moved back to the Bay Area. That was probably more stressful than the two kids and the pre-tenure job combined, but that worked out in the end, too. We got a very nice house at a quote-unquote "reasonable price," i.e., reasonable for the Bay Area in the middle of the dot com boom.
Hellrigel:
How handy are you with tools?
Goldsmith:
Oh, I'm terrible. My husband likes to say I'm a theoretician when it comes to fixing things. In principle, I know how to fix things, but not in practice. We bought a spec house, so we had a builder and he had contractors. We were supervising, but we weren't actually doing the work, although my husband is incredibly handy. He can fix anything.
Hellrigel:
When I talked to people with the IEEE Council on Superconductivity, they always remind me that there are two groups, those that do things with their hands and those that do things theoretically, so I thought of that.
Goldsmith:
I'm definitely a theorist.
Hellrigel:
Okay. You have a very successful career at Stanford. You have, what, two dozen graduate students that you've shepherd and many undergraduates, and you were on a number of different committees. You've published a few textbooks and many other publications. I think one of the numbers I've found indicated that you have 749 total publications.
Goldsmith:
That sounds a bit high to me. I think I have on the order of like, 360 conference papers and maybe 160 or so journal papers, and four books, and twenty-nine patents, so I don't think that adds up to over 700.
Hellrigel:
Okay. Wrong numbers, but you have twenty-nine patents and counting.
Goldsmith:
Yes.
IEEE
Hellrigel:
While you're doing this, you're also involved with IEEE. Did you join IEEE as a student?
Goldsmith:
I did. As a grad student. When I was in grad school, I went to that first conference where I met my mentor, Larry Greenstein. It was GLOBECOM 1990 in San Diego. I was also reading IEEE publications, where the ideas for my master's thesis as well as my Ph.D. thesis came out of. I forget why I joined the IEEE, whether it was to get access to the publications or—I don't remember exactly when I joined, but I was a student member as a grad student. IEEE has been an amazing organization and professional home for me. It's an amazing organization for students. It has convening power, which is why I met one of the most influential mentors in my career at an IEEE conference, and Larry was very connected into the IEEE. I remember that the next conference I went to was to present the work that Larry and I had done together when I was an intern in his group. He told me, “You should come to the radio communications technical committee meeting because you're going to meet other people and it's a way to get connected into the professional community.” There were many things about Larry that made him great as a mentor, but one of them was really introducing me to the professional community through IEEE conferences. He was very engaged in the radio communications technical committee as well as the communication theory technical committee. And he got me plugged into not just going to conferences as an attendee or as a presenter, but also with the volunteers, and with the different organizational units within the IEEE that organized the conferences.
In fact, as a grad student in 1994, GLOBECOM was held in San Francisco and there was a mini symposium in communication theory. I forget exactly what happened, but the person that was supposed to be driving that mini symposium ended up either dropping out or not being responsible, so they asked me, as a grad student, if I would step in and be the lead organizer of this mini symposium. That was a great experience. I was working with the general chair and the technical program committee for the conference overall. It was a bit controversial at the time to have this mini symposium because it was the only technical area where there was a mini symposium. Now those conferences have moved to the structure where each area has its own track, but that wasn't the case at the time. I just tried to charm all the organizers regarding this structure, saying why you should do mini symposiums. I got very plugged into the IEEE as a grad student through this work, and that just continued beyond when I became a professor. So, I've really been deeply involved in the IEEE from my graduate student days, and it's been incredibly rewarding. Some of my dearest friends are people that I first met through the IEEE, through conferences or organizing various things.
Hellrigel:
Were you active at the—well, we'll get to the societies in a moment, but like, the chapter level?
Goldsmith:
No. My engagement with the IEEE up until maybe the last five or six years, where I got involved in technical activities for diversity and inclusion, and then also at the Board level now, all my engagement with the IEEE until recently was through the two societies that I'm part of, which is the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) and the IEEE Information Theory Society. I was also part of the IEEE Vehicular Technology Society for a while, but I never deeply engaged as a volunteer in that society. I would publish in their journals and attend their conferences, but really most of my activity has been through ComSoc and the Information Theory Society.
Hellrigel:
You also were very active or are very active as an editor. The different transactions with the Information Theory Society and the Communication Society. How did you get involved with that?
Goldsmith:
The first time I was asked to be an editor was for communication transactions [IEEE Transactions on Communications, editor, 1995-2001]. I was still untenured at Caltech. I remember we used to get all the papers in this huge box with print versions of the papers. They would send you six copies to send out to six possible reviewers. I think they asked me to be an editor because I'd been engaged as a volunteer, particularly as a graduate student, and had done a good job. You know, I was a good volunteer. I was well-organized. I didn't drop things. I got things done. I was asked if I would be an editor for the Transactions on Communications when I was still an assistant professor, which was somewhat unusual. Both universities and the IEEE liked to protect untenured professors. But they asked me and so I went to Larry Greenstein, my mentor, and the person who was so knowledgeable about the IEEE, and I said, “Larry, should I do this?” He said, “No. You should say no. You should wait until you're tenured.” I said yes anyway.
I have a very hard time saying no to things. But my thinking was that they must have a lot of confidence in me to ask me. I think this will give me a lot of visibility and I know it's something that I can do. I think I can balance it with the other responsibilities that I have. I have a hard time saying no, so I said yes. It ended up being a very good thing. Again, it enhanced my reputation for being a good volunteer who can get things done and who's responsible. I got to meet people that I might not have met otherwise, other editors, and the editor-in-chief. It was a hard job, both in terms of the time commitment, and also rejecting papers of senior colleagues, but I was fine with that. I thought, I'm going to do my job as a high integrity editor and make the right editorial decisions independent of the responsibilities or reputation that the authors have. That was the first time that I got involved as an editor of a journal.
Since I did a good job doing that, I ended up being guest editor on special issues. I was asked to be editor-in-chief of the ComSoc Journal on Selected Areas of Communication. I turned that down. I think at the time, I was doing my first start up, so I really didn't have time to do that as well. But I ended up joining the steering committee for that journal, which is an excellent journal.
I also was an editor for the information theory transactions [IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, associate editor, 2007-2009].
Most recently, I agreed, after being asked multiple times and saying no, to be the founding editor-in-chief of a new journal, which is the Information Theory Society journal on selected areas in information theory [IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Information Theory]. And that's been a very successful journal so far. It's already made over $100,000 in profit, but beyond the profit it's really established itself as a high impact journal, very highly cited, excellent papers, excellent tutorials. It was a lot of fun to launch a new journal. I was asked to do this by the head of the steering committee, Jeff Andrews, who was a student at Stanford when I arrived there as a young professor. He convinced me to do it even though I was in the midst of possibly moving to Princeton and had other things going on. He said, “you're the best person to start this new journal. You're an entrepreneur. You have a broad vision. You're connected into multiple societies. You've started companies. You're very connected in the industry. You will be the best person to start this journal.” I don't think he was trying to stroke my ego; he was very genuine and straightforward. For him to say that rationale to me was very convincing and gave me pause in saying no.
When I said no the first few times Jeff asked, it wasn't that I wanted him to come back and beg me or tell me how good I would be. I really didn't think I'd have the time to do it, but in the end, I decided that Jeff was right.
That to start a new journal like this for a society like the Information Theory Society, which is a society that had been somewhat insular and really needed to branch out and embrace new topics and bring people in from outside its community, I was probably the best person to do it. The journal has gone fantastically well. It's been very rewarding to lead it. I just handed it off to the next editor, Tara Javidi, so I'm kind of still engaged in the hand off and making sure the transition is smooth, but I'm very proud of having been the founding editor-in-chief of that journal.
Hellrigel:
When you're the editor, it's a two-year post?
Goldsmith:
Three years.
Hellrigel:
Three years. Okay. You've also been the recipient of a number of awards from both the IEEE Communications Society, as well as the IEEE Information Theory Society. Indeed, I read you were the 2009 president of the IEEE Information Theory Society, the first woman to hold that office.
Goldsmith:
That's right.
Hellrigel:
How did that come about?
Goldsmith:
The Information Theory Society had never had a woman president. It doesn't have a great track record, even now, of recognizing women with awards and other honors. I think what happened in 2009, the reason that I was elected president, is I’d started a new committee in the Information Theory Society for students that was very successful. That came about as I was on the Board of Governors. I realized that the Information Theory Society was very much viewed as an old boys' club, and that meant that for the women and even the young people coming into the community, it wasn't an inclusive environment. These people felt that if they didn't have the right advisor, or their advisor wasn’t one of the "old-boys" they would be treated differently, that there wasn't equity, and that it wasn't an inclusive environment. I thought, that's the path to death for any organization. If you can't bring in new people and make them welcome and make them feel like they can engage and this is the community that they should devote their volunteer time to, you're not going to have a society in another generation or so.
I thought it was important to find a way to engage the youngest members of the community of information theorists, which meant the students, so I formed a student committee for the society. I think this may have been the first ever student committee in all IEEE societies, not just in the Information Theory Society. The purpose of the student committee was really to create opportunities for students to engage with the Information Theory Society and to connect students with the senior members of the Information Theory Society, which up until that point, the connections were typically through the old boys' club. This was a new way for them to connect.
We had events where we would invite senior prestigious members to meet the students and engage with the students. We also had events just for students such as panels on professional career development or work/life balance or these kinds of topics that were just for students. We created a community of students, where they had their own community that was diverse and inclusive. We also had opportunities for students to step up as leaders, so they could organize their own events. We had student members of the student committee leadership and so forth. That committee was so successful in just engaging students and creating events that were incredibly successful. I remember the first student event we held was a research roundtable at one of the conferences, I remember planning that we were going to literally have round tables, six round tables, for six different research areas and each student can pick which table they want to sit at associated with a different research topic. I was charged with ordering the lunches, and I have no idea how many students are going to show up for this. Should I get twenty lunches, thirty lunches? I think eighty students showed up, so I had to rush down to the café and see if we could buy more lunches because we didn't have enough to feed the students.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Goldsmith:
This event and all the subsequent events that this committee did were incredibly successful, and I got a lot of visibility through doing that. I think that that's why I was asked to run for president and that's why I won because I think that people recognized that this had been such a transformational and important development for the Society that I should be tapped as a leader.
One thing I'll say about women and volunteer leadership positions, and this is true in the IEEE, and in other organizations as well, women will be asked to take on volunteer leadership roles because it's a lot of work and they know the women that are asked will do a good job. But that doesn't necessarily mean that those leaders have real power. If you think about the IEEE, and you say what is the most important role of the IEEE for a member, for a volunteer. For a member, it's professional development and recognition. For me, early in my career, being able to meet senior people and meet potential mentors and take on leadership roles as an editor or in other ways, really tremendously benefited me professionally. If you look at the job that I have right now, Dean of Engineering at Princeton University, I never had a formal leadership role at Stanford as an academic leader. It was my IEEE leadership roles that convinced Princeton that I was a good leader, even though I hadn't had an academic leadership role before. So, IEEE tremendously benefited me.
Something I've spent a lot of time on in leading IEEE diversity and inclusion committees is that even if you have a lot of women leaders, often we are not recognizing the accomplishments of women and other diverse people through awards. Yes, they have the leadership roles, but they're not being recognized for their work, and that ends up being very detrimental because those IEEE awards lead to other awards. It is important that diverse people get leadership roles in any organization, but it's also important, and especially in the IEEE, that diverse people are recognized for their professional accomplishments, for the work that they do. It's not enough just to give them leadership roles, because that will just say, okay, they’re great leaders. We're really happy that they're devoting all this volunteer time to leadership, but we're not willing to recognize what's most important to their professional success, which is the work that they do.
Hellrigel:
Right. One of the oral history projects I'm working on is IEEE Life Fellows. And when you look at the fact that there're very few women who are Fellows, let alone Life Fellows, we're talking more than 7,000 Fellows and 300 are women.
Goldsmith:
Yes.
Hellrigel:
You become an IEEE Fellow in 2005. What did that mean to you? You're such a select few.
Goldsmith:
Yes. It was interesting because I'm not someone who does self-promotion. I think a lot of women are in that category as well. I've had many people ask me to nominate them for things, including Fellow. I never asked anyone to nominate me. But there came a time when people were telling me, including my mentor, Larry Greenstein, actually no, he didn't tell me. Other people were telling me, you should be an IEEE Fellow. You should go up for IEEE Fellow.
I said it's not really up to me, but I asked people I trust, including Larry. I said to him, “Well, people are telling me that they think I should go up for IEEE Fellow. What do you think? He was such a trusted mentor that I knew that he would tell me, no, you're not ready, or you should wait a few years, or you are ready. And, that's what he said. He said, you should be going up for Fellow. You should be nominated for Fellow. I also asked people in the IEEE Information Theory Society, and they said, no, you're not ready, so I ended up going up for Fellow through ComSoc.
I became an IEEE Fellow, and I was thrilled. It's an incredibly wonderful recognition of your accomplishments. I didn't necessarily expect to get it, but the fact that enough people had told me, you should be going up or then when I would ask people, this is what I'm being told. I trust you. Tell me your honest opinion—and they validated that I should be an IEEE Fellow.
I think what often happens for diverse engineers, including women, is that because they don't self-promote and often there's implicit bias in who gets nominated for things because the majority of people in the profession are men and they don't necessarily think of women for awards because of implicit bias. They think, oh, this guy is perfect to become an IEEE Fellow, or to receive anotherr prestigious award or honor.
Hellrigel:
And Regions one through six, which is another issue.
Goldsmith:
Yes, exactly, there is definitely regional bias in award nominations towards people in North America. So, I think that there's two double whammies against diverse engineers on winning awards. One is that they don't self-promote, and the other is that because of implicit bias, they're not necessarily the first people that come to mind, if someone wants to nominate a candidate. I spend a lot of my time nominating diverse engineers for awards, because at some point I realized, I think it was when I was chairing the Bell Medal Committee and when I chaired the Bell Medal Committee, any medal or technical field award chair sees all the nomination data. This was back in—it was maybe, I don't know, eight years ago or so. I don't remember exactly. I saw the nomination data and I saw that, okay, women are not nominated for awards. IEEE can't really keep track of URMs [underrepresented minorities] because we're an international organization, and what underrepresented minority means in an international organization is not clear. Also, it's not a category that we ask people about in memberships. So, we don't have statistics on who's a URM [underrepresented minority] and who isn't, but we do have at least imperfect data on gender depending on whether people report it or not. I saw from that data that women are not nominated for awards and not just in my fields of communication and information theory, but across all of the IEEE.
Hellrigel:
Yes. Mildred Dresselhaus was the first woman to receive the IEEE Medal of Honor.
Goldsmith:
Yes, exactly. After I saw that data, I did two things. One is I said to myself, I'm going to make sure that there's a woman nominated for the Bell Medal. A deserving woman, and I knew a deserving woman. As a committee, we are tasked with getting nominators for deserving people for our awards, so we did solicit a nomination for this woman and the discussion in the committee was very much rife with implicit bias. People asked, did this person actually do the work—wasn't it the advisor or the co-founder or the this or that who did all the work or who should be getting recognized instead of the woman nominee. I knew this nominee better than anybody else on the committee, but I could not sway the committee, and the woman did not win the Bell Medal that year.
So, getting a woman nominated for the Bell Medal was one thing I did, but the other thing I did is I went to the women in my two professional societies, and I said, now I know that women aren't nominated for awards. I have it in black and white in terms of the metrics. If you think you deserve an award, come talk to me and if I agree with you, I will nominate you because nobody else will, and I ended up becoming very proactive in nominating women for awards. When I did nominate them, I would do a good job. I get good endorsers. I write strong nominations because I only write them for people that I think deserve the award, and many of the women went on to win the awards that I nominated them for.
I'm very proud of that, but I realized that what I was doing was not scalable. I cannot write nominations for women across the IEEE because I'm not in the other fields, and I'm only one person. So, I need to do something that is not dependent just on me to increase diversity and inclusion across all of the IEEE. I need to engage in something scalable. and that's why I talked to José M. F. Moura about my experience. He was at the time, TABVPLS. And he asked me as TABVPLS—we were at actually a birthday party for Tom Kailath who’s also a Medal of Honor winner and a good friend of both of us. José asked me at that party, would you chair an ad hoc committee on diversity and inclusion for Technical Activities? I remember I said to him, “José, you know, what I've seen at the IEEE from when I was president of the Information Theory Society, and I sat in on the TAB [Technical Activities Board] meetings as president.” I said, “IEEE is a big bureaucratic organization. I don't like to spend my time on things unless I can actually have a big positive impact, and I don't see doing that around diversity and inclusion in the IEEE.” He said, “Well, now it's your chance. You can try.” And I said, “Well, an ad hoc committee is one year. I'll see what happens. I'll give it a try.” It ended up being much longer than one year, but also incredibly transformative for the IEEE.
When I look back on my professional career and all the things I've done, I look at the work I did in the IEEE on diversity and inclusion as one of the most impactful and satisfying because I really believe that me and everybody else that I worked with on this committee, staff and volunteers changed the culture of the IEEE. I mean, not uniformly. There will always be pockets of implicit bias and discrimination, but I think we really did change the IEEE from the top down, both in terms of written documents and governance procedures, as well as leadership and viewpoints, for the better. That is what I set out to do in that volunteer role, because I knew that as an individual, I couldn't have that impact. I needed to get the whole organization behind making positive change, including looking at award nomination metrics and making sure that not only do we have women on every committee, because if there's one woman on a committee of five or ten, with only one voice.
Hellrigel:
A token.
Goldsmith:
If you don't get women nominated, you're not going to get women winners. Even in the first year or two after I started chairing this committee on diversity and inclusion and we had reporting on award nominations and discussions about why aren't women winning award, we saw progresss. We had five female medal winners the next year, and the data has been very positive every year after that. I think what mattered was just shining a light and saying we need to be transparent about the data, and we need to understand why is it that we are not getting diverse winners of our awards. As soon as we started having that narrative, as soon as people started paying attention and seeing the metrics, things changed, which I expected it to.
Hellrigel:
Now you're chair of the Board of Directors, Committee on Diversity Inclusion and Ethics, which is an interesting triumvirate and is that going to be a permanent committee or is it still ad hoc or what's going on?
Goldsmith:
Actually, that committee was an ad hoc and now it’s a permanent committee. So, what happened is I was chairing the Technical Activities Board (TAB) committee on diversity and inclusion and one of the things that came out of our work on that committee was that you can't really champion diversity and inclusion for diverse engineers when they're experiencing ethical misconduct, whether it's sexual harassment or discrimination, or just being treated differently, not getting the same opportunities as everybody else. There were egregious stories that people came to me with of sexual harassment and harassment and bullying. Those people said, well, you can talk all you want to about diversity and inclusion, but if this isn't a safe environment or an environment where we hold people accountable for egregious ethical violations, which are often towards diverse engineers, you're not going to be able to create a diverse and inclusive community. This is what I heard when I was chairing the TAB committee on diversity and inclusion, and eventually, that committee became a standing committee on diversity and inclusion in TAB.
At the same time, José Moura was then IEEE President-Elect, and he'd already convinced me once to chair a committee on diversity and inclusion. So, he said to me, in his role as president-elect in 2018, “I want you to chair an ad hoc committee on diversity, inclusion, and professional ethics at the Board level.” It was clear to both of us that unless we address the fact that the IEEE adjudication processes for ethical misconduct were broken, we could not make progress on diversity and inclusion. I mean, the processes were completely broken. IEEE was not holding people accountable for ethical misconduct. The ethical misconduct processes dragged on forever. There was no notion of anonymous reporting, which we already knew from the national academies’ study that a lot of people, especially junior people, are not going to report unless they can maintain confidentiality. José said, “You need to address the ethical issues along with diversity and inclusion at the Board level.” Our code of ethics did not preclude sexual harassment until my committee changed the code of ethics to do so. Those changes needed to happen at the Board of Directors’ level because governance document changes happen at the Board of Directors' level. So, José asked me to chair an Ad Hoc Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Professional Ethics to address these issues, along with chairing the TAB committee, which I continued to do. The two committees were very much intertwined into last year when I stepped down as chair of the TAB committee. I continued for another year as a member for continuity, but now, I'm off that committee.
It took us two years of the ad hoc Board committee on diversity, inclusion, and professional ethics to change the code of ethics, change the code of conduct, and change IEEE processes for adjudicating ethical misconduct. That was one of the hardest things I've ever done. When you look at the number of by-laws and procedures that we had to change, and the buy-in from the Board of Directors, the buy-in from the members, you can't change the code of ethics without member support. It was so much work and really a lot of socialization and convincing people that didn't necessarily believe that a professional code of ethics should preclude sexual harassment. They thought a professional code of ethics as an engineer means you build a bridge that doesn't fall down. It means that you don't misrepresent your engineering design. They thought that sexual harassment is outside of the purview of professional ethics. Convincing people that no, it is actually part of our professional lives, and it's not that I think those people were misguided or ethically compromised. It was just a new way of thinking about professional ethics that they hadn't thought about before, and not just them, [but] the profession as a whole.
If you read the code of ethics of any professional engineering organization, not just IEEE, but others, they don't talk about those things. They talk about what are we building and how are we responsible engineers, not how we treat each other. So, there was a cultural change that needed to take place. I was pessimistic that first year. I mean, everything I proposed to the Board of Directors that first year got voted down and I wasn't sure that I'd be able to convince people to vote for these things. Changing the code of ethics requires a two-thirds Board vote; changing the governance documents requires a two-thirds Board vote, and we weren't close to getting that during the first year. But the second year—Kathy Land was president elect and José Moura was president. I worked with both of them and the TAB committee, and we had been working closely on these issues for years at that point. They made it happen that second year. By the end of that year, all these things had been passed and they were put in place last year. Then at that point, the ad hoc became a standing Board committee on diversity and inclusion because we'd already done everything that the ad-hoc needed to do on professional ethics. At which point, we handed back oversight of ethics to the IEEE Ethics and Member Conduct Committee which had been restructured around the changes to the ethical misconduct processes.
Then the Board committee [IEEE Diversity and Inclusion Committee] just focused on diversity and inclusion which, as I always say, is a marathon, not a sprint. It doesn't make sense to have an ad hoc committee on diversity and inclusion at the Board level, it needs to be a standing committeee given the need for ongoing action at the Board level. So what I spent most of last year doing as chair of the ad hoc committee was turning that committee into a standing committee, which was approved at the end of last year and I'm chairing that standing committee this year, which is the first year of its existence, where we really want to come up with the charter of a committee at the Board of Directors level on enhancing diversity inclusion throughout the IEEE. It's a big charter. It's like I said, a marathon, not a sprint where there's a lot of things that we need to do, but we have time now that we're a standing committee. We don't need to worry about whether the committee will be renewed next year.
Hellrigel:
So, standing committee, is a permanent committee.
Goldsmith:
That’s right. But it's no longer got professional ethics as part of its charter. It's just on diversity and inclusion and professional ethics. All ethics issues now sit under the standing committee of the ethics and member committee.
Hellrigel:
I know we're running out of time, but—
Goldsmith:
I have a few more minutes actually. I can go maybe another fifteen minutes.
Hellrigel:
Okay.
Goldsmith:
If you—maybe you have another - -.
Marconi Fellowship, White House panel
Hellrigel:
No, no. I'm focused. You were the first woman to receive the Marconi Fellowship. And how did that feel? What does that mean to you?
Goldsmith:
That was amazing. The Marconi Fellowship recognizes significant contributions to the field of communications broadly interpreted including entrepreneurial endeavors and technology transfer. I've been involved with the Marconi society since 2011. At that time, I was on their selection advisory committee to pick the Marconi Fellow. I was on that committee for several years, looking at the nominations of my professional heroes, basically. When I look at the people that are Marconi Fellows, they are my professional heroes. People that I admire tremendously that have been my role models professionally. So, to become part of that group was not expected. It was an incredible honor. I'm still really over the moon about being recognized as a Marconi Fellow. It's just such a meaningful recognition to me, because of what it's recognizing and because of the other people that have won the award. I don't think there's a group of people that I admire more than the other Marconi Fellows, so to be one of them, just—it's remarkable.
Hellrigel:
You're still beaming.
Goldsmith:
Yes. Yes. I got the award more than a year ago, and it is an incredible honor for me to be a Marconi Fellow.
Hellrigel:
It was in the time of the COVID pandemic, so did you receive it virtually?
Goldsmith:
You know, it was interesting, how we ended up navigating all of that. I got the notice of receiving the award and I think it was February 2020, or March of 2020. Yes, right in the middle of COVID.
We ended up arranging a photoshoot at John Cioffi’s house. John is also an incredible mentor and friend. He introduced me to my co-founder of my first company. He's someone I admire tremendously. He invented DSL and created a startup around it. He graciously offered to host the photoshot in the middle of COVID, so that we could have some pictures of me getting the award because we weren't going to do any kind of event. He got dressed in his tuxedo. [Arogyaswami] Paulraj, who's another Marconi Fellow who lives in the Bay Area also got dressed in his tuxedo. We did a couple of pictures. I think Martin Hellman also came. I put on my long black gown, and we did pictures of me with John Cioffi's Marconi Award because mine wasn't ready yet.
We did the pictures, and at that time, in early 2020, all of us this COVID disruption will all be over within a couple of months. We were thinking that there would be a gala in the fall of 2020. That didn't end up happening. We ended up pushing it to the fall of 2021. In the summer, it was looking like that was perfectly possible and then, getting closer to the date—I was on the Board of Directors at that point of the Marconi Society and I just said, I can't have people come to an event honoring me if it's going to put them in danger, so I think we need to pivot to a virtual event. Vint Cerf, the chairman of the Board agreed. And so we ended up pivoting to a virtual event. I did have a small watch party at the home of Tom Kailath and Anu Luther, his lovely wife. They graciously offered to host the party. We had about thirty people, which was the most, people I had been around since COVID had started in early 2020. The virtual gala was spectacular. Yes, wonderful. They did an amazing job of having a virtual VIP reception where people gave speeches and then they had a whole production around me, which was wonderful. They had everyone in my family do a short video, which was a total surprise. Then after we watched the virtual event, we had our own in-person dinner celebration at Tom and Anu’s house, which was also incredibly special with more speeches and great food and great wine. It was an incredible event and it in fact maybe even more meaningful than if we had had the in-person gala. It was at least more intimate to be around thirty of my closest friends and professional colleagues celebrating this award that was so meaningful to me.
Hellrigel:
Then with the award, my understanding is that you started a fellowship program.
Goldsmith:
Yes. Most of the awards I've won in the last few years, including IEEE awards, an ACM Athena [Association for Computing Machinery Athena Lecturer Award] award, and now the Marconi Fellowship, I've donated the money back to the organization to create programs or awards for diverse engineers. That goes back to—I'll never forget, looking at the nominations of IEEE awards and realizing that diverse engineers just are not nominated for these awards and so I decided to create programs and awards specifically for diverse engineers. When I won the IEEE Sumner Award, I donated that money back to the Information Theory Society to create an award for young women information theorists. They gave my name to it. It's called the Goldsmith Lecture. That wasn't my intention. I really just wanted to create an award for young women, not to honor me through the name, but the officers insisted on that. I just won the IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award, and I donated that money to the IEEE Communications Society to create an award for student communication theorists. That's also named for me, again, not at my desire. There are two Goldsmiths awards, one in information theory, and one in communication theory. Again, I think of them not just as honoring me, but honoring my dad who was the first Professor Goldsmith and an inspiration and role model and cheerleader for me. Then the ACM, Athena award, I donated that money back to ACM to create a rising stars award for young women. When I won the Marconi Award, we haven't decided yet exactly how we're going to use that money, but it will be for something similar. There are two goals I have for that donation. One is to create a program or an award within Marconi for diverse engineers and the other is around digital inclusion because one of the goals of the Marconi Society is to connect the next billion of people that aren't connected. When I think about the pandemic and how important broadband connectivity is, not only in a pandemic, but in any time, I think that that mission of the Marconi Society is so important that I felt like donating money towards that goal was also important. I'm part of President Biden’s [President’s] Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, or PCAST. I mentioned that earlier. I'm also participating in a group within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy looking at how we might create broadband connectivity for everyone in the U.S.
Hellrigel:
How did you wind up on this White House panel?
Goldsmith:
I don't know for sure, because I was just asked, but I was asked by Francis Arnold. Our relationship goes back to the beginning of my academic career at Caltech, and she was my senior colleague, role model and friend and mentor. Then we also reconnected when I took the Princeton job because she's a Princeton alum and also received an honorary degree from Princeton in 2020. And we have another connection, which is really special and that's that we are, as of now, the only two father-daughter pairs in the National Academy of Engineering. She was the first father-daughter pair.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Goldsmith:
Her dad was a national academy [National Academy of Engineering, NAE] member, and then when she was elected, she was the first and then I came along years later, as the second father-daughter pair in the National Academy of Engineering. We have multiple connections; one through Princeton, one through the NAE, that special moniker, but most especially I think through my early days at Caltech and as, just becoming friends around the challenges of being a female academic, balancing young children, and a demanding academic career. She's also an incredible entrepreneur. So, when she asked me if I would join PCAST as she's one of the PCAST leaders, how could I say no to her, but also to serving the country in this way.
Hellrigel:
I guess that brings us to your research, which has focused on information theory, communication theory, and signal processing. You've had two companies, so you got to throw your hat in the entrepreneurial ring. Why did you found these companies?
Goldsmith:
Different reasons for each one. I founded Quantenna at the end of 2005. At that point, I'd been an academic for eleven years. I was starting at Caltech at the end of 1994 and then, starting at Stanford at the beginning of 1999. I was kind of ready to take a break from being an academic. I'd never taken a sabbatical or a leave of absence and I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do if I took a break. I'd already moved my husband once to Pasadena and back, and I wasn't going to move him again. My kids had no desire to go anywhere, and they were fairly young at the time, so I thought, okay, what can I do locally? I could do a sabbatical at Berkeley, but I already spent many years there as a student. I could do a sabbatical at another local university, but there wasn't really much that was drawing me to do that.
Around the same time, John Cioffi introduced me to Behrooz Rezvani, who eventually became my co-founder of Quantenna. And Behrooz had done a start-up in VDSL, so that's how he knew John, through the DSL standards community. Behrooz wanted to found a company around the emerging Wi-Fi standard of 802.11n which was the first Wi-Fi standard using multiple antennas. He asked John, could John introduce us because Behrooz knew I was doing a lot of work in MIMO communications. When Behrooz approached me, I wasn't thinking about doing the start-up and I was very naïve. But I just thought, you know, here I've been working for twenty years on the theory of wireless communication. My first job in the start-up, the defense start-up, I was actually building stuff. I was building antenna arrays, we were working on real satellite systems. I hadn't built anything in twenty years. I'd just been doing the theory of communications, so the idea of seeing if all this theory that I'd done in MIMO wireless communication would actually make a difference in a product was very intriguing. The idea of connecting with a co-founder who had already founded a successful company that had just gone public, I didn't know what it took to found a company or take it to the stage of going public, so that was very appealing. I was very naïve. I thought what do I have to lose? Maybe that goes back to the risk-taking. I didn't quit Stanford to found Quantenna, I took a leave of absence, so I had a fallback plan. It wasn't a break in that it was very, very intense and stressful. And I also, actually, won a big DARPA contract the month I went on leave at Stanford, full-time leave. And I still had young kids. I remember I would drive from Freemont where Quantenna eventually location back to Menlo Park to do the reading circle for my son's third-grade class.
So, really, I founded Quantenna because I wanted to take a break from academia and see if the research that I'd been doing made a difference. I liked working in the start-up. I liked when I worked at Maxim because I felt like I had a lot of impact in a small company, I thought that this new Wi-Fi standard was very interesting and could be transformational, and my co-founder had experience. Those were all the reasons I started Quantenna. Again, I was very naïve. Quantenna went through a lot of ups and downs; we almost closed many times. There were a lot of challenges: technical challenges, people challenges, funding challenges to founding a chip company in the mid-2000s. Raising the kind of money we needed to raise was really challenging. Eventually, we raised $170 million before we went IPO. It's a lot of money. It's not a software company where you can get started with a million dollars; that amount of money barely buys you the tools you need to start your chip design. It was a very hard experience.
If you ask me, what's the highlight of my professional career? The best thing? It's hard to say because there's been so many highlights. I would say the Marconi Award is one. Working with amazing students, the colleagues that I've had. The research, which has been really rewarding. The start-up, when we went IPO; that was one of the best days. But I can tell you the worst day was also at Quantenna when I realized that I had to step out of the company because of tensions with my co-founder. And that was a really tough decision, it was the right decision to make. Eventually, the new CEO asked me to come back. I was there at the IPO ringing the bell on the Nasdaq with the early employees of Quantenna who were very grateful to me for being a part of the company through the ups and downs of the early years. But it was tough; Quantenna was very hard. I took a full-time leave in mid-2006 and I went back to Stanford in the fall of 2008. I did two years at the start-up, and I was still consulting for another year; but I wasn't full-time anymore.
I was getting back into academia. I was actually elected, chair of the Stanford Faculty Senate in 2009. I was also elected President of the Information Theory Society in 2009. I was kind of getting back into my academic roles. I certainly wasn't thinking of doing another start-up. But then the opportunity came along, where I was introduced to the person who ended up being my co-founder, with my second company. And he was looking to do software in the Cloud to manage small cell base stations. This was 2010. I'd been working in small cells since the mid-1990s. I saw small cells as a really important way to increase capacity of cellular systems. I saw software in the cloud to manage wireless networks as a really compelling area. And so, when he approached me, I thought, well, in a start-up you can say yes or no to the opportunity, but you can't say, ask me in a few years when I've recovered from all the turmoil of my first start-up. So, I ended up saying yes. Because I felt like if we were successful in this start-up that we would not only transform cellular systems by figuring out how to manage small cells; but we could transform wireless networking by putting software in the Cloud to manage those networks. And I just thought, how can I say no to building a company around transforming wireless networking. So that's why I said yes to that second startup company. That company is still private. It's also very successful, had a big funding round last year. The name changed a few times. The CEO changed a few times. It's now called Plume Wi-Fi, but I'm very proud of that company as well. There was also a lot of turmoil and change in that company. Very different from the turmoil and change in Quantenna so I didn't make the same mistakes the second time around. I made different mistakes, different judgment calls. But I'm very proud of both the companies that I founded, and both so far have been very successful
Hellrigel:
You're still with these two companies?
Goldsmith:
No, I'm not; only as a friend of the company. Quantenna was acquired by ON Semiconductor a few years ago. They're part of a big company; I'm not really involved. I was involved as a friend of the company up until that acquisition. And Plume Wi-Fi, I'm not—once I stepped out of that company, which was again after about three years; I haven't really been involved in the company very much. Although, patents that we filed when I was still full-time or part-time, those are now being granted; so, I'm still on the fundamental patents of the company up until today. But I'm not really involved in the company.
Princeton
Hellrigel:
All of this leadership and entrepreneurial skill then makes you appealing for the adventure that you have at Princeton now?
Goldsmith:
Yes. The Princeton job, I'd been approached by different universities about academic leadership roles starting five, six, seven years ago. I was very visible in the IEEE. I was very visible as a successful entrepreneur. I was very visible as a successful professor at Stanford and doing a lot of leadership at Stanford that was not formal academic leadership being elected Chair of the Faculty Senate or serving on the Budget group for a decade. I was on the committee that looks at promotions and appointments across all of Stanford. I was part of the committees on undergraduate education and graduate education. I started the student committee in my department. I've done a lot of things at Stanford in leadership, but not formal leadership.
Academic leadership roles don't necessarily come along in the university that you are part of, for various reasons. My department at Stanford had never had a woman in any leadership role. I mean, not just Department Chair but Vice Chair, Head of a Search Committee; there had never been a woman in a leadership role in the department. Usually, department leadership roles are what lead to other forms of leadership roles, so at some point it became apparent to me that if I wanted an academic leadership role, I would probably need to look outside Stanford. I wasn't set on taking an academic leadership role. Again, my personal life was perfect in a way. I was living in the Bay Area where my husband's job was and all my friends and family, but I thought it was worth exploring. If the right academic leadership role came along, then I would—or that what I thought might be the right academic leadership role, I would apply for it and see if I got it and then decide if it was worth the professional or the personal turmoil to leave.
I had a number of opportunities that came along before Princeton. Most of them didn't look interesting and I didn't even apply for them. Some looked interesting and I applied, but they weren't the right opportunity in the end. The Princeton opportunity came along, and once I really figured out what the opportunity was, it was the dream opportunity—you might not think that because Princeton is a conservative place and, you know, it's been around for a long time.
Hellrigel:
Okay. Yes. All those dining clubs and the conservative reputation.
Goldsmith:
Yes. But it turns out that this is a moment in time that Princeton wants to really transform its School of Engineering. We're growing the school by 40 percent. We're building an entirely new neighborhood for all of engineering. There will be completely new facilities and a neighborhood for every engineering department, institute, and center, in the middle of campus which is really going allow engineering to build bridges much more easily to the other parts of Princeton that are outstanding in the humanities, and the arts, and the sciences. They really want to focus on diversity and inclusion within engineering as well, which is something I've spent a lot of time on. They want Princeton to be a catalyst for entrepreneurship and innovation in the entire region, which is something I also have a lot of experience within the Bay Area. And the advantage of bringing that here is that—the Bay Area's a great place to be an entrepreneur if you're a white man but it's not a great place to be an entrepreneur if you're diverse; and I experienced that directly. I think Princeton can be a catalyst for diverse entrepreneurs to be successful and we can create companies and foundations of entrepreneurship and innovation that bring in diverse engineers that often have some of the best ideas.
I'm excited about all of those opportunities. And once I realized that that was the opportunity at Princeton, I thought, I don't think there's a better leadership opportunity for me anywhere in the country that not only taps my experience and expertise, but that I could have a huge impact on engineering at Princeton, on Princeton overall, on the entire region, and thus on the country and the world.
Princeton's motto is similar to IEEE's motto. Princeton's informal motto is in the service of all nations and all humanity and IEEE is about engineering to benefit humanity. Being an Engineering Dean at Princeton is really a continuation of the reason I became an engineer, which was to create technology that benefits people and the world. I really believe I can do that here at Princeton. It's been a great opportunity and it's going extremely well. I'm having a great time. There are new challenges in this role that I didn't anticipate, but I think that's the fun of leadership; encountering new challenges and figuring out how to overcome them.
Hellrigel:
Right. The whole COVID pandemic is another issue. As you're trying to settle in at Princeton, the whole world is topsy-turvy, and you should be flexible with that.
Goldsmith:
I'll make a comment on that because my second interview for the job was at the end of February 2020. In fact, I came directly from an IEEE Board meeting, in I think it was in Boston, to come for my interview. I got the job offer in March of 2020, it was officially announced in April of 2020, and I started in September of 2020. Never expecting that I would be moving across the country and starting the job in the midst of COVID. A lot of people ask me what was it like? Were you disappointed? Or how did that change the way you started your Deanship? I said, I'm an optimist by nature, so the way I looked at it was through optimist eyes which is that nothing about the opportunity at Princeton changed because of COVID. I mean, all the things I just mentioned to you that I came here to accomplish, COVID didn't affect any of those aspirations. Coming in as an outsider and as an optimist, the fact that I was so optimistic, that I was not going to be dissuaded by COVID, I'll just figure out the silver linings to it. I was able to meet one-on-one with every faculty member in engineering; all 150 of them. In part because of COVID because everything was by Zoom. I never would have proposed that I meet my faculty by Zoom under normal circumstances but there was no other way to meet them. And because nobody was traveling, I wasn't traveling for work, I wasn't traveling to conferences, I wasn't traveling to meet alums and donors; I could really focus on strategic planning that first year and getting to know the university and the culture. This harkens back to my travels through Europe. When you come to a new place you have to learn the culture before you can accomplish anything, so I really spent that first six months meeting my faculty, meeting the other leaders, meeting faculty and students outside of engineering and in engineering. I spent the time figuring out what my strategic plan was and how I would execute it, so in many ways COVID provided an environment that allowed me to focus on certain things and not on other things. That ended up serving me well in the early days of my Deanship.
Hellrigel:
You got off to a running start?
Goldsmith:
I did. I took the job very thoughtfully. Again, this was not an easy decision. It was a big upheaval to my personal life, for my husband who was infinitely supportive as he has been throughout our marriage. For which I'm very grateful. I didn't accept the job until I really put a lot of thought into what would I want to accomplish? And asking, would I be able to accomplish it? It's one thing to say, I have these grand aspirations for being Dean at Princeton, but you're coming into a new place with new leaders and you don't know exactly what you can accomplish. But, again, having been an entrepreneur, having worked in the IEEE, I knew I could assess how likely it would be that I could accomplish my goals. And I thought that chances were good. It was taking a risk, but it was a calculated risk. When people tell me Princeton's a tough, tough place to change, how have you been able to get the leadership to agree to some of the things that you proposed which they've never done before. I just say, well, given that I never had a formal academic leadership role, I needed to accomplish things through influence. And that was also true at the IEEE. How do you become a great leader in the IEEE when everyone's a volunteer? You have to be able to influence people and convince people that your way of doing things is the right way to do things. You can't beat them over the head. You can't use formal authority and say I'm your boss and therefore you need to do this. Those are really valuable leadership skills in any leadership position. Even if you do have formal authority to say you will do this or else, that's not a good way to lead. I'd like to say that my leadership experience in the IEEE where I accomplished a lot as a volunteer without any formal authority was a great learning experience. I did the same at Stanford as a volunteer in committees without any formal authority. That served me well at Princeton in figuring out what I should ask for and how to get my faculty and students behind it and how to get the leadership behind it.
Hellrigel:
Yes, to buy into a shared vision.
Goldsmith:
Exactly. Yes. Shared vision, and then providing the resources or giving up things that they've had —under long-standing policy or traditions because there's a better future if you do things differently. Takes time to convince people of that.
Hellrigel:
Right. At this point, you don't get too much time to teach?
Goldsmith:
No. I'm not teaching now, which makes me sad. I love to teach. I know I will come back to teaching. I've been in that position before. When I took the leave of absence in my start-ups, at least the first year I didn't teach at all. I kept up my research and I still have my research group now; in fact, I'm building it. I just hired a post hoc and I will probably hire a Ph.D. student this coming cycle because you can't really give up research and easily come back to it.
Hellrigel:
Right.
Goldsmith:
Teaching is something that you can say it's like riding a bicycle. Not exactly. If you're teaching a topic and you take a year or two or three off from it, there's some work involved in coming back and reestablishing your teaching; but it's not as hard. I know I will teach again. I love teaching. I love being in the classroom. I love mentoring students. But right now, I don't own my schedule and I'm still getting up to speed on how to be a dean. Until I am up to speed and realize how I can carve out time for teaching I won't be teaching.
Hellrigel:
And then what's next?
Goldsmith:
What's next? I have never thought about that in my professional career, which people find surprising. They're like, well, did you always plan you would be a Dean of Engineering? I didn't even plan to go to grad school, you know? I mean, I didn't even know if I'd stay in engineering as a profession. People said that to me a lot when I was looking at academic leadership jobs. They're like, well, if you take this job, that's a springboard to be provost here or president there. And I said, I don't work on springboards. I live in the moment. Am I doing something that I get a lot of satisfaction out of? Am I having a big positive impact on the people around me? Whether it's personal or professional. I feel like what I'm doing right now as Princeton is incredibly satisfying. It's challenging, it's fun. I've had some success, which I'm very proud of. There are many more things to do. And so, what's next, is executing on my strategic plan. Doing the things outside of being Dean of Engineering; like I'm very excited about serving on the Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. I'm co-chairing a committee that's looking at how do we regain and retain American competitiveness in basic research and in technology transfer and innovation. That's a huge charter. If I can have a positive impact on the country in those dimensions, I'll be very, very proud of that. What's next after doing those things along with I’ve got to finish the second edition of my wireless communications book. That's also on my radar screen. I don't have aspirations for what am I going to do after Princeton. I may retire at Princeton. I retired at Stanford, and I'm enjoying immensely being at Princeton. It's a wonderful, very special university with very special leadership. I' m sure there will be other opportunities that will come my way, and I will assess them as they come my way. If I feel like there's an opportunity where I can have an even bigger impact than in the role I'm in now, I will consider it. But I don't have any plan for what's next other than being successful at what I'm doing right now.
Reflections, closing remarks
Hellrigel:
You have such a fascinating career. I know you're, you're awfully busy and you've given me a lot of your time; however, is there any topic we didn't cover? We didn't cover your publications too much, but you've covered that, and I've watched some of your talks on YouTube.
Goldsmith:
I don't think we need to cover my professional accomplishments. I would say that one thing we didn't really talk about that much was the dimensions of success outside my professional success. I really want to touch on that. I commented on my husband. I have two children, Daniel and Nicole. If you go to my website, I list them as my best results, and they really are. They've kept me humble. One of the great things about children is that no matter how professionally successful you are, they still think you're stupid or you don't know anything.
Hellrigel:
You're not cool.
Goldsmith:
They have a little more respect for what I know now than they did when they were growing up, but they are just such joys in my life. And when I look back on the decision of having kids when I had kids because I knew that that would give me so much joy and happiness. And how that impacted my professional career really wasn't important because there were many paths to professional happiness. I don't even have words to say how much joy my husband and my children have brought me. As well as my extended family, I mean, my sister, my stepmother who I call my honorary mom because stepmother just doesn't capture the relationship I have with her. My mother-in-law, my husband's mom, another honorary mom. I couldn't be closer to her if she was really my mom. And then my friends who know I have an incredibly rich social life with people that I love deeply and care deeply about. And the fact that I've been able to have those dimensions of success outside of my professional success have given me so much more joy and happiness than I could've had just from my professional successes. So, I think it's important to recognize when you're talking to someone about success, I am professionally successful, but that's not all of the dimensions that matter to me on success.
Hellrigel:
Do you get to vacation then with your family? Do you get to decompress?
Goldsmith:
Yes, so I like to say I work hard, and I play hard. We are extensive travelers. My kids have had passports since they were babies. We've been all over the word. Our last trip—we haven't traveled since COVID, so two years now we've been in the US only. Our last trip was to Uganda, Tanzania, and the Seychelles Islands so that just gives you an indication of our vacation.
Hellrigel:
Wow.
Goldsmith:
That wasn't even an atypical trip. We've traveled all over Asia. We've traveled all over Latin and South America. I love to travel. It goes back to my time in Europe when I was seventeen. Being around people from other cultures, experiencing other cultures and other people, I find it incredibly refreshing and invigorating, and it keeps me grounded in what matters. When I see other countries where people live very different lives from mine or from people that I know and their lives are very rich also in different ways, I just find that incredibly invigorating and refreshing. We haven't traveled in a long time. I miss that. I look forward to getting back to it. Then I mentioned a little bit about my social life. I love to cook for people. I love to throw big parties. All of these are things that we haven't really done under COVID. I look forward to coming back to them, but we just adjusted. Now we have smaller gatherings of maybe one other couple. I still cook for people and it's something that I really, really enjoy is just social gatherings. I know it's been hard on everyone suffering under COVID to miss those social interactions that bring us so much meaning and joy.
Hellrigel:
I've also watched your talk that you gave for Princeton Hillel. I got the impression that religion is also an important part of your life.
Goldsmith:
Yes. It's interesting because—my dad's a Holocaust survivor as you probably saw from that talk. And I didn't grow up with any kind of Jewish religion or culture or traditions. My dad came over to this country when he was thirteen. He lost his whole family. My mom's also Jewish, but she was very assimilated in New York City so me and my brother never really had any Jewish traditions. I'd never celebrated a Jewish holiday. I'd never been to a synagogue. And what happened is after college, when I was working at MAXIM Technologies and living in the Bay Area, I became curious. I wanted to know more about what it means to be Jewish. I know I'm Jewish. Both my parents are Jewish, but I don't know anything about Judaism. And so I kind of started—I had a friend who was also Jewish and, like me, hadn't really grown up with any of the traditions so we decided we'd have a Passover seder. It was him, me and our significant others, so there were four of us. A lot of wine was consumed, we spilled a lot of wine, and it was a lot of fun. It was a fun way to kind of figure out what Passover was on your own. Then when I started graduate school one of my closest friends in grad school grew up in Princeton in a Conservative Jewish community and she and I stared celebrating Jewish holidays. I learned a lot about Jewish tradition and culture from her. Then I met my husband—at the time he wasn't my husband. Arturo grew up the opposite of me; he grew up Orthodox in Mexico City.
He went to rabbinical school for high school. He knew a lot more than anyone I'd ever met, but he was no longer Orthodox. He was very much grounded in the traditions, but he had gotten a bit disillusioned with the religious part of Judaism. We were kind of coming at it from opposite ends. I was coming at it from knowing nothing and learning about it on my own. He was coming at it from knowing everything but becoming disillusioned with religion. Where we met was the perfect place in the middle. I liked Conservative Judaism because I liked the traditions. I liked the fact that prayers were in Hebrew, but I didn't really understand them. Because if you translate them to English, they're not necessarily inspiring and there's a lot of sexism and pettiness if you actually understand what's being said in the prayers. Arturo wanted to raise our kids Jewish, once we started talking about getting married. I was fine with that because I was very appreciative of being Jewish at that point. I'd realized that there was a lot of meaning to the traditions and culture of the Jewish people.
On the religious side, because you asked me if I'm religious, I'm not religious. I didn't grow up religious. I don't believe in God. But what I love about the Jewish religion and the temple that we were a part of in the Bay Area, which we're still members, is it's a very open community that embraces Jews wherever they are in terms of are they part of this community because of traditions or culture or religion. Both our kids were bar mitzvahed. The first time I read from the Torah was at my son's bar mitzvah. And I actually learned Hebrew. I took Hebrew in graduate school because I wanted to be able to understand some Hebrew. And so, I feel very connected to being Jewish, to Judaism in the dimensions that are meaningful to me. And I think in some ways it's easier when you don't grow up within a particular set of boundaries around your religion. That you can define it the way you want to define it. And that's what I've ended up doing. I never had to decide, do I like this childhood tradition or not or do I believe in the God as that God has been presented to me as a kid. I was able to carve out my own Jewish identity which I feel very strongly about and very much connected to Judaism through that identity. And just one interesting story is my husband and I, the first trip we did after we got married was to India. And we were in Cochin, which had, at the time, a very small Jewish population. We knew one of the families through a friend, so we went to visit that family. It was the last night of Hannukah. And we're walking through the streets of Cochin [now known as Kochi, India] with the cows and the chickens and the spice stores and all this very Indian ambiance. And we go into these people's home—India, the community in Cochin is pre-rabbinical. It goes back thousands of years. And we go into these people's home, and it just felt like any Jewish grandparents’ home anywhere in the world because the traditions are so strong even going back thousands of years. That also made me very proud to be part of a tradition that has so much history despite a lot of adversity that tried to wipe out that history. You know, we're still here.
Hellrigel:
Yes, and so it's a sense of community, too. It seems that you found that in IEEE, you found that at Caltech, you found that everywhere and that is pretty cool.
Goldsmith:
It is very cool.
Hellrigel:
Is there any other topic that we forgot?
Goldsmith:
I think we covered everything.
Hellrigel:
I truly appreciate you permitting me to take up so much of your time.
Goldsmith:
We're very lucky that I didn't have anything this hour. It's been a joy. No, it's really been fun talking to you. I appreciate it and it's nice that this is recorded. You know, something for my kids to see. The only other thing that I'll recommend that you might take a look at if you haven't yet is my acceptance speech for the Marconi Award, which is—I can send you the link if you don't have access to it. It's on the Marconi website. I spent a lot of time writing that speech and it really goes through the arc of my career. If you haven't seen it, the words that I say in that speech are probably the only other thing that I would share with you that might be relevant for this history.
Hellrigel:
Okay. I'm going to create an entry for you in our ETHW site and maybe you can pin that speech as a supporting document also.
Goldsmith:
That would be great. Like I said, I was very emotional. And winning the Marconi award I was very emotional in making that speech because this was such a meaningful award for me. I made myself cry because I didn't give it live. It was videotaped, so I watched it at the watch party, and I was crying and everyone else was crying, too. It really acknowledges all the people in my life that supported me and mentored me and made me the person that I am and made my successes the successes that they are. So, it is—I've given a lot of speeches, but that one is probably the most important one I've ever given.
Hellrigel:
Well, thank you. I'll look at that again. You've had a lot of speeches and a lot of lectures that I've been watching on YouTube.
Goldsmith:
I have. I know there's a lot and that's why I just said you don't need to—I mean, for more about my technical accomplishments, there're more technical speeches or talks or whatever. But that speech from a personal level is the most important speech I've ever given.
Hellrigel:
Right. Yes, I've listened to some of your 5G lectures. As an historian I'm like, “generation.” That's where the G comes from.
Goldsmith:
Yes, not everybody knows that. That's true.
Hellrigel:
Thank you very much and I'll sign out.
Goldsmith:
I'm so glad we were able to do this, and I apologize for moving us around so many times. The silver lining is that I have this extra hour, so it worked out well that we moved it to this morning.
Hellrigel:
Is this your Wednesday open time?
Goldsmith:
No, no, no, no, no. I try to keep Fridays open, but that didn't work out. I have a staff meeting a little bit later today. My schedule, I don't own my schedule anymore, so things get moved around. And then if I'm behind on deadlines, like there's actually two things that I am behind on that were due yesterday and last week. I have a few gaps in my calendar, and we just got lucky that there's a gap right now. So anyway—but it was great talking to you. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for your patience in rescheduling this. And it was really fun conversation.
Hellrigel:
My pleasure. Thank you.
Goldsmith:
Take care. Bye-bye.
Hellrigel:
Take care. Bye-bye.
