Jeffrey H. Shapiro '67, SM '68, EE '69, PhD '70

INTERVIEWER: Today is June 27, 2011. I'm Barbara Moran, and today we are speaking with Jeffrey Shapiro as part of the Infinite History project. Dr. Shapiro, who received his Bachelor's, Master's, and PhD in electrical engineering from MIT, is a Julius A. Stratton professor of electrical engineering at the Institute.

Dr. Shapiro's research interests have centered on the application of communication theory to optical systems. He is best known for his work on the generation, detection, and application of squeeze state light beams, but he also works in the areas of atmospheric optical communication, coherent laser radar, and quantum information theory. Since 2001, Dr. Shapiro has been the director of the Research Laboratory for Electronics at MIT.

Thank you very much for joining us.

SHAPIRO: My pleasure.

INTERVIEWER: Great. So you've spent almost your whole adult life here at MIT, which I think gives you a really wonderful perspective on the Institute. So I'd like to start by asking you to go back in your mind to that teenage boy that you were, deciding where to go to college and what to study, and tell me about what attracted you to MIT in the first, place back in the 60s.

SHAPIRO: It actually goes back into the 1950s. I was in sixth grade when Sputnik went up in 1957. And there was a tremendous fear, I suppose, which I didn't feel as being a child, but certainly I think the rest of the country did, that the Soviets were becoming far ahead of us and there was a great enthusiasm for science and engineering. And I was good at that sort of stuff and I liked it, and so I became increasingly interested in pursuing a career. And I thought of engineering even though I had no close relatives who were engineers-- I didn't know what it was really like.

So I became interested in high school in amateur radio and ham radio. Not so much circuits-- I wasn't really enamored of that-- but I got interested in the hobby, and MIT was the place to be if you were going to be an electrical engineer. And it still is.

INTERVIEWER: What was it like when you came here? What were some of your first impressions, if you remember that, as a freshman?

SHAPIRO: It was a little scary living away from home. I was 16 when I was a freshman, which was not uncommon for students who had grown up in New York City because you got to skip eighth grade if you passed a certain test. And I was a young-looking 16, so it was an interesting thing being away from home with lots of other bright people. And I enjoyed it a lot.

INTERVIEWER: Did you immediately know that electrical engineering was going to be your field, or did you explore a little bit?

SHAPIRO: That was not as easy as it is now. When I was a freshman, you didn't get-- very few students got a lot of advanced placement credit. I placed out of a year of calculus, but most of my contemporaries, most of my friends in the freshman class had no advanced credit. We all took the same flavor of calculus, pretty much the same flavor of physics, the same flavor of chemistry. And on a rotating basis, every Friday morning at nine am there was a freshman quiz on top of Walker Memorial. So your life was driven by that clock-- this week is chemistry, next week it's physics, the next week it's calculus.

During my second semester of my freshman year, I said, well, I'm going to major-- MIT students choose their majors at the end of their freshman year ordinarily-- and see what electrical engineering is like. And so that's what I did, and I liked it. I didn't like the circuits as much as when I took courses in signals and systems, the stuff that underlies the theory of communication. And it was the theory of communication that I pursued when I went on into graduate school.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me why you decided to stay here for graduate school.

SHAPIRO: Well, I don't know how to explain that. First of all, I had no plan of going to graduate school. In fact, I think in my friends, sophomore friends, very few of us had any thought beyond, well, we're going to get a Bachelor's degree and we're going to go out and work in industry and launch a career. And I was doing so well at the end of my second, oh excuse me-- my first semester of sophomore year, my adviser urged me to apply and get into a 6.2 program. Electrical engineering. This was before it was electrical engineering and computer science. Electrical engineering had this program, 6.2, for students who were sufficiently strong that the department felt it was likely they should go on to graduate school, at least to get a Master's degree.

And although I was not fond of taking on extra work, it seemed like a good program. We had to take more required courses in all the regular undergraduate subjects, we had special recitation sections, and extra homework. But nonetheless I signed up for it, and that launched me on a path towards graduate school. And when I was in graduate school I became very excited about the prospects of doing research and went on and got my PhD, at which point, having been a teaching assistant, I thought it would be a great career to become a professor.

INTERVIEWER: What excited you about the research?

SHAPIRO: Oh, research is wonderful because when you're in the fourth week of a particular mainstream undergraduate subject you get your weekly problem set. And you can be certain that what you've just been hearing in recitation and lecture is probably the kind of material that's needed to address that problem set. And you can get into a kind of compartmentalized way of thinking. When you're doing research, first of all, there may not be an answer. And second of all, in addressing the problem you're working on, or even better, in defining the problem, which for doctoral students and faculty and leading researchers is almost more important than solving the problem, picking the right problem, you have to reach into your collection of knowledge and pick out the things that are relevant to address what it is you're trying to accomplish. And it's fun when you succeed. It really is. And of course, as a professor, it's really fun to see your students develop that capability.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me a little bit about-- I mean, having been here at MIT so long, can you tell me some things that for you define MIT?

SHAPIRO: That defines MIT. Well, there are certain core principle that MIT has that I regard extremely highly. We have a long-standing commitment two need-blind admissions, and a long-standing commitment to need-based financial aid. This is for undergraduates. It's a very special place to be able to do that. There are other schools that are using merit-based aid, and there's nothing wrong with that, but MIT has been an entryway, a ladder up for students who come from households where there had been no college education prior to their coming here, and launches them into a professional career. Unlike many universities where there's a separate college of engineering, a college of arts and sciences, a college of humanities and so forth, admission to MIT it to the Institute as a whole. On your application, you probably said something about what your interests are and what you might major in, and a significant number of freshman change their minds between when they enter and when they choose a major. But we are pretty much one place.

And it's a kind of strange and unusual place in a number of ways. You can major in the humanities here, but you get a Bachelor of science degree. You've taken two semesters of calculus, two semesters of physics, one of chemistry, one of biology, a laboratory course, and two restricted electives in science and technology. My daughter, who's now an attorney, went to Brandeis undergraduate-- and she has a Bachelor of arts degree-- and she had to take one math and one science course. My son, who has two degrees-- Bachelor's and Master's from MIT-- had to do all those things for the general Institute requirements, plus eight humanities and social science subjects. We do try to balance the science and technology here, perhaps more so than some other schools.

INTERVIEWER: Thinking over your time here, are there any big changes that stand out?

SHAPIRO: There have been lots of changes. When I was an undergraduate I typically went back to New York City for a summer job, and I'd come back and there'd be some parking lot that now was growing a building. That's what it was like in the 60s. So that's a change of the physical plan, which is continuing, of course, all over the place.

INTERVIEWER: Can I-- I just want to ask you a little bit more about the physical plan changes. That does seem very dramatic to me. I mean, is there a sense of it going more utilitarian to more architecturally interesting? Or do you have a--

SHAPIRO: We went through a real utilitarian period with these glass curtain wall buildings and these concrete and glass buildings. And then we got things like the Stata Center, which I find to be-- I don't have my office in the Stata Center, I know some people who are enamored of the way it's set up on the inside or that are not so happy-- but the architecture of the Stata Center I think is just fabulous. And the opportunities are provided, particularly to my department, by bringing the computer scientists onto the main campus and to provide those interconnections. And the faculty dining room, and the child care facility, and the student street, these are all wonderful additions to the Institute.

And of course, we have other signature architecture. In the 50s we built Kresge. And we built Baker House. And then we had a long time where we weren't building so much. Oh, I left out the chapel. The chapel is a beautiful Saarinen design. And then we have Simmons Hall, which is a signature building, I think, for the Institute. So we're getting more of that now.

INTERVIEWER: Before I interrupted you, you were talking about changes other than the physical, the physical plant.

SHAPIRO: Oh, there's been a tremendous change in the student population. When I was a freshman, I think my entering class was maybe 900 or over 900. There was something like 20 or 22 coeds, they were called. The women were called coeds. I don't know anyone who'd call an MIT woman a coed anymore. And now it's about 50/50 in the undergraduate student body. It's not quite as high, but it's still very significant in the graduate school. And of course, the ethnic diversity and the diversity of nations represented at MIT has grown tremendously.

And there are many other things that have changed. I told you a little bit about the rigidity of the freshman program when I was here. Now it's much more flexible, and there are many more things. Undergraduates are almost all engaged in research, some perhaps starting even their freshman year through the UROP Program. There was no UROP Program when I was a student in the 1960s.

There are many other things that are different. I pointed out that I came here expecting to go to school for four years and go out and work in industry as an engineer. I've been an undergraduate registration adviser now for a long time, and I ask my sophomores-- I get them as sophomores and I stay with them until they finish either their Bachelor's degree or in EECS, since a good many of our students stay on for a Master of engineering degree, I would stay with them as their adviser through that. And in getting to know them in that first semester that they were majoring in EECS, I asked them about their ambitions. And with the rarest exception, they all have something beyond getting a Bachelor's degree. They are going to go out and work a little bit and then get an MBA. They're going to get an MD degree. They're going to be a patent lawyer. They're going to get a PhD and be a faculty member. And that's quite different I think than when I was an undergraduate.

And of course, there's a great deal more entrepreneurial fervor I think even among the undergraduates than there was when I was a student. Certainly there were students who went through MIT and created companies, but there were not as many students who were looking to participate in these entrepreneurship competitions with the thought that if they got some seed funding, they might go out and create a company.

INTERVIEWER: That's very interesting. Do you think that's particular to MIT?

SHAPIRO: No, I think that's true elsewhere, as well.

INTERVIEWER: I was wondering if you have a sense of MIT's role in the world, and how you fit into that?

SHAPIRO: Me, personally?

INTERVIEWER: Yeah.

SHAPIRO: Oh, I don't know about that, but certainly MIT has a major role in the world. We are viewed repeatedly over many decades now has the leader in science and technology. In fact, there are many great schools in the United States, but the farther you get from the United States, the more people want to ally in these various countries with which we're building collaborative opportunities with MIT. We have advanced many fields. Certainly electrical engineering, certainly computer science, but molecular biology and many other branches of engineering and science have come from here.

And my personal role? Well, I'm a faculty member. I've taught some students who've become quite successful. I've taught some students who've gone on into the academy. I have created some courses. I've spent, though, a significant fraction of my senior faculty career in the administration. I spent nine and a half years as Associate Head of the EECS. EECS is the largest department here. And I've spent 10 and 1/2 years directing the research lab of electronics. So that's 20 years out of the 26 years that I've been a full professor.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to go back a little bit and talk about just your upbringing. I think it's always interesting for people when they see somebody who's become a professor to see where does it come from, where does it start? And so is there anything before Sputnik?

SHAPIRO: Oh, I had all these building toys as a child. And some of them were these electricity kits with motors and switches and other things, and so I'd been playing with that as a little boy. And I liked that, and that led me to-- well, I was good in math and good in science in primary school, and it just went forward from there.

INTERVIEWER: And you grew up in New York City.

SHAPIRO: I grew up in New York City. I went to the Bronx High School of Science, one of the exam schools there.

INTERVIEWER: And brothers or sisters who were also--

SHAPIRO: No. It is interesting. I said I have no relatives who have been interested in science and math. My father did extremely well in math in high school, and he had to quit college to go to work. And of course, he was very lucky to get a job during the Depression with a major insurance company and to hold that throughout the Depression. And he stayed and spent his entire career there. So he might have gone on and done some other things had he the opportunity, but he never really had it. My brother was a history major and is an attorney, so it's very different.

And some of that lives on in my children. My son is a software engineer, and my daughter is an attorney. One has the math and science orientation, the other not.

INTERVIEWER: And were your parents pleased with your math ability and your choices to go into--

SHAPIRO: Sure. I think they were very happy about that.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel that there are any values from your youth or memories from your youth that have sort of shaped the person that you became?

SHAPIRO: I don't know what to say there. There was always a deep commitment to education. For my brother, it was a different orientation, but still, the importance of education and learning and going forward and getting into a profession, that, I felt very strongly from my parents.

INTERVIEWER: What about outside events other than Sputnik? Do you remember anything from the 50s and 60s that might have persuaded you that engineering is a good path there to choose? It seems like a number of people I've interviewed have cited that time and Sputnik as being-- or getting the impression as a child that this was a really important field, worthwhile field to go into.

SHAPIRO: Yes. Well, I never became an aerospace engineer, but certainly when John Kennedy said, when I was in high school, that we would take a man to the moon and bring him back-- not a woman, mind you, but a man to the moon-- and bring him back safely in this decade, that was a great challenge. And that required all sorts of fields to participate. There was a lot of enthusiasm about that. People followed developments in manned spaceflight quite closely.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any science or math teachers before college who encouraged you to--

SHAPIRO: I had, in high school, the opportunity to take a physics course. The Physical Science Study Committee, which was started by Jerrold Zacharias, here, from the physics department, really revolutionized the teaching of physics for my generation. And Charles Hellman was that the physics teacher that I had in my high school, he was quite inspirational to me. I found physics very interesting. We also had, that I get to take, a biology course, a similar thing. BSCS-- I can't break down the acronym anymore. That was very biochemistry oriented. I did well in it, but I didn't find it nearly as interesting as the physics work. And so I was launched towards engineering more, but physics basis of that was very exciting to me. And as it turns out, I do more physics work now than really electrical engineering.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any especially influential teachers or classes or mentors as you went through your education at MIT?

SHAPIRO: Well, I certainly had great inspirational teachers. I had Amar Bose for Introductory Network Theory. He lectured that. And Amar Bose is an unbelievably talented instructor. I had Paul Gray for some of the semiconductor lectures. He, too, was-- he taught when he was the president of MIT and electrical engineering and computer science was having an unbelievable glut of enrollment and we needed all hands on deck. So he helped teach by I think teaching recitations in one of our large undergraduate circuits courses. And he got very high marks on the student evaluations in all categories but one: availability outside of class. After all, he was the president.

INTERVIEWER: You can't blame him.

SHAPIRO: No, you can't blame him.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting.

SHAPIRO: So I had some great teachers. And I did my Master's and doctoral theses for Bob Kennedy in the area of optical communication. And Bob was one of the early people to start research in that area in the mid-1960s. And he had a lot of great students, if you want to leave me off the list, and we did some very interesting stuff. And he gave us great mentoring and nurturing as we became from neophytes to people who could really carry on.

INTERVIEWER: So tell me what drew you into optical communications in particular.

SHAPIRO: It's a very interesting thing. I was looking for a research activity. I hadn't liked optics all that much in sophomore physics. I did well in it, but I wouldn't enjoy it as much. And I was looking-- I had a National Science Foundation Fellowship, I was in a new graduate student, and I went to orientation for new graduate students interested in communication related activities that the department held, and I went and talked to some faculty. And I want to talk to Bob Kennedy, and he said, well, you know, you have a fellowship. I've got some general areas of interest, but you should really find out if you like this stuff. We're giving a series of lectures on things that would lead into optical communication by some of us and you should go. So I went.

And one of the-- maybe two of the early lectures were given by his colleague Estil Hoverston. And Estil was talking about optics, about diffraction, things that I dan't liked all that much. But he was talking about them in terms of Fourier Theory, signals and systems, convolution, all the stuff that I loved from that of course that I had as an undergraduate, except now was in two dimensions-- in space instead of just in time. And thought of that way, which is not the way the sophomore physics course can teach it because you lack that mathematical background, I said, this is great stuff. And so I wanted to pursue that.

INTERVIEWER: What year is this that we're talking about?

SHAPIRO: 1967.

INTERVIEWER: Okay. And what were the big questions at the time, or challenges in optical communications?

SHAPIRO: Well, when the laser was invented, you got-- 1960, Ted Maiman--

INTERVIEWER: Yep.

SHAPIRO: There were pronouncements how it would revolutionize communication, because you can think of a communication link as having a carrier frequency which is modulated with the information you're trying to transmit. And the technology gets harder and harder the larger the fraction of that carrier frequency you want to use as bandwidth for communication. And so you just took the carry frequency of the microwave backbone, which is what AT&T, Ma Bell in those days, used to do long distance and say, all right, if we did this on the laser, we'd have so much more bandwidth, we could send so many telephone calls. No internet then. Telephone calls. And we could transmit everything practically on a single laser. But there was no good way to do that.

The microwave backbone went through the air. I think it doesn't take much contemplation to realize that sending a laser beam through the air suffers if there's a cloud in the way, or fog or rain or snow. But even in clear weather, there are problems. There are problems associated with refractive index turbulence. Stars, you know, don't twinkle outside the earth's atmosphere. That's due to this turbulence. And if you've ever seen the shimmering of things over a hot highway or looking out over a radiator in the wintertime into the outside world, that's also affects due to turbulence. And it can be a very severe impact on trying to do laser communications.

So if you're looking at things that needed to be done in the 1960s, we were thinking of going through the air and nobody knew enough about that. So that's what I started working on. In fact, the vast majority of optical communication is now carried in fiber, in glass fiber. And that didn't begin until around 1970 when Corning Glass made the breakthrough of getting the loss low enough that it became practical. And so I've not worked a lot on fiber communication, really only very peripherally.

But I've been interested in optical communications in the following sense: look at things that are truly fundamental. The text books that I studied communication theory in have a diagram. There's a source of information-- it's a block. And next to it is a block that's a transmitter, and the transmitter might have inside it an encoder for error correction and a modulator. And that connects to a block that's called the channel, which has some ill effects-- noise, distortions of various sorts. And then a receiver, which may have inside it the demodulator and the decoder, and then the information that's received gets delivered to the user at the other end. That block diagram of a single source to a single user is good at any frequency, any kind of-- it's good for me speaking to you right now. It's good if we think of spatial information if you're looking at me.

But if we think about sending bits-- let's make it digital-- and it's optics as supposed to a much lower frequency, with the exception of the single mode fiber that's used for long-haul communication, optical communication has two fundamental things that differ from the lower frequency world. There's an enormous number of spatial degrees of freedom. That's why you're able to see me clearly-- you have all those spatial degrees of freedom to form images. And the second thing is that light wave frequencies, like all electromagnetic waves are quantum mechanical, but at light waves we have detectors, and have long had detectors, that are sufficiently sensitive that the noises that limit your performance are actually quantum mechanical in origin. And so quantum effects become demonstrably important whether you model them explicitly that way or not. And so that's what I've been looking at principally, sort of spatial effects and quantum effects in optical communication and communication construed not just to be transmitting of bits, but formation of images, and remote sensing, and things of that nature.

INTERVIEWER: When you were starting out in electrical engineer, did you ever think you were going to end up in quantum communication?

SHAPIRO: I didn't think I would end up in that. In fact, when I was a doctoral student there were some students working for my supervisor on quantum issues-- I was working with several other people on these atmospheric issues-- and I didn't understand much about the quantum stuff at that time. Although I heard talks on this topic, I hadn't been following it closely. And when I came back to be a professor here in the early 1970s, and one of my contemporaries in graduate school came back here on the research ladder, he started to continue his work in the quantum area and pursued some new ideas that led him to a claim that with quantum techniques you could avoid all propagation loss. Well, diffraction loss, should we say, in vacuum. And this would have been a phenomenal-- I said would for reasons I'll get to-- a phenomenal achievement. So I said, I know a lot about diffractional loss in optical communication channels-- I have to understand what this is all about that you've been doing. So we started working together, and our first major paper proved that his idea didn't work. But we went on and did other great things after that.

INTERVIEWER: It's very interesting, it's just--

SHAPIRO: So let me just make one more statement. I learned a little bit about quantum mechanics in junior year physics here, but some of the stuff, the bedrock on which my work for the last 20, almost 30 years-- I would say 30 years in some cases-- his base was just getting published in original journals. Roy Glauber from Harvard was publishing his work on coherent states, for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics a few years ago, when I was studying as an undergraduate. So it was not in the textbook that had been published a few years before. So like many of us, in fact, all engineers who stay in the professions, scientists, you have to keep learning.

INTERVIEWER: Yeah, right. You always have to stay right on the edge there. A little beyond the edge, I guess.

Tell me a little bit about your work in quantum communications. And I wonder if you could phrase it in the question that you're trying to solve, or the problem. the big overarching problem that you're working on there.

SHAPIRO: Well, there are several. Let me pick one and talk about that for a while. Before Claude Shannon published his famous 1948 work, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. people thought-- and the Bell labs, where he was at that time, is the place for communication work, both theory and hardware, shall we say, systems-- that noise prevented you from communicating reliably, perfectly. And of course, the early telephony was all analogue, and you'd go for a while in the signal would get weaker and noise would creep in and then you'd amplify it and filter it and send it out again. And it was clear that it would get to a limit where you couldn't communicate perfectly, and it was understood you could try to do some sort of digital communication, but then not enough was understood about whether you could get all the bits correct. Claude showed that there is at a capacity in a noisy channel such that if you're communicating at a rate below capacity and you code, you provide error correction, you put redundancy in, in a very appropriate manner, which he didn't show, he just proved that it could be done, you could get error probabilities as small as you would like. In your entire message, not just on individual bits.

And of course, that has been applied-- it took many years-- in many channels to the point that we now, for sort of classical world things, we can get very close to that capacity. And the capacities for certain basic optical communication channels were already understood when I started working on this topic in the quantum domain. They were understood if you said, if I use this kind of detector, I know, although it's quantum mechanics under the hood, that the statistical models for my noisy data are this. And there are three basic paradigms for photo detection, and they all have statistical models that don't explicitly show the quantum mechanics. So that was known. And people have worked out capacities, or at least bounds on the capacity.

But we start looking at this, and there have been some early work, but in about 2004 a group of us started looking at that and we knew from some general work in quantum information that there was a different theorem, not Shannon's theorem, you needed for the ultimate ability to transmit classical information over a channel that's governed by quantum mechanics. And that's the Holevo-Schumacher-Westmoreland Theorem. And so we obtained the first capacity theorem for a meaningful optical channel in about 2004. And not surprisingly, it's better than all the known techniques. And in some cases may have an interesting gap that you would like to bridge.

One of the basic things about going after fundamental limits on communication, going back to Shannon, is you know the ultimate limit is, then you look at what we know how to do, and if there's a substantial gap, you say, well, we should look to find out how to bridge that. So we're working on some of those bridging issues right now in some collaborative efforts.

INTERVIEWER: I wanted to ask you a little bit about your collaboration with Franco Wong. And not necessarily about the work, per se, but about how it works. Why do you have such a close collaboration with someone, and how does it actually-- is that common? And how does that work in your research?

SHAPIRO: For me, it's an absolute necessity. In the early 1980s, I was developing the theory of these things that are now called squeeze states. These are non-classical light beams. That's a technical sort of term. All those models I was talking about for photo detection systems that people have done capacity for, they're all based on treating light as a classical electromagnetic wave. And there are states of the electromagnetic wave-- quantum descriptions for electromagnetics-- that won't satisfy the assumptions that are made in those models, and so those things are said to be non-classical.

And my friend from graduate school, Horace Yuen, who was later a research scientist here, had been focusing on a particular class of these things, which appeared to have very interesting properties for communication or for position measurements. And we were trying to get some money to generate them experimentally. He's a theorist, I'm a theorist. You don't go and do major laser labs experiments without bona fide people who know how to do that sort of stuff.

So I had briefly a collaboration with a faculty member here, and then I hired a research staff member, Prem Kumar, who is now senior faculty at Northwestern University. So when he left, I knew I needed an experimenter in my group, and Franco came here in the mid-1980s and has been here ever since. He's now a senior research scientist. He's the lead experimentalist. I'm the lead theorist in the group that we have, which is called, well, quantum communication, quantum propagation and communication, something like that. I don't remember-- I should, I'm the director of the lab-- I should know my own group's name. Optical Propagation. I don't know.

In any case, he does experiments, I do theory. Sometimes the experiments are an outgrowth of theory, things that I've come up with. There's a new approach to make an optical communication link completely immune to what I call passive eavesdropping, somebody who's just listening to the light going around the link, that we're doing an experiment-- he's doing an experiment with that one of his postdocs on that. And there are other things which come more out of his end that he thinks about, this would be a really great thing for us to do, but how does it really work and what could be used for, that I work on those aspects.

INTERVIEWER: Why did you end up in theory rather than experimentation?

SHAPIRO: I don't know. I think in equations more than pictures. And I'm maybe not as good with my hands as I should be. Something like that.

INTERVIEWER: You ever dabble?

SHAPIRO: Only a little bit. I did do some of the photo detection measurements when we were doing atmosphere things trying to understand what would happen to laser light propagating in bad weather. So we had a transmit station up on top of the Green Building and we had a receiver station out on the Air Force research lab. I guess it was still the Air Force Cambridge Research Lab had a millimeter wave observatory on top of Prospect Hill in Waltham. And we found that space-- Bob Kennedy was still here on the faculty and we were in the same group-- we found some space there that they would let us have. It was in a little sort of aluminum shack up on a small tower, a rotatable room because they used it for some antenna testing. It was referred to as the doghouse. We were in the doghouse for a couple of years making measurements there.

So I was involved both with my students in putting together the equipment that we used for those measurements, and sometimes going out there and taking measurements. Which could be extremely frustrating because we wanted to get measurements in the lowest visibility weather that we had sensitivity for.

Because what happens is, you can think of light as just going in straight lines. If you want to think of light as comprised of photons, particles of light, being billiard ball-like things going in straight lines. What happens when there's bad weather is they scatter in a variety of directions, and you can have multiple scattering, scatter off many things in heavy fog and clouds. And so they're moving at the speed of light all the time, but if their path has become lengthened because of all this bouncing around the pulses get stretched and we wanted to measure that pulse stretching, and we wanted to measure the attenuation and other properties.

If there was nothing in the way, the light you see should just be arriving-- these were line of sight connections-- on a straight line. And so if you have the focal plane of a telescope it should be arriving right on axis. But if there's all this scattered, it can come in off axis. We wanted to measure that, too. And we discovered, unfortunately, that weather conditions are not stable around our sensitivity limit. We could have visibility that was pretty good and we didn't see anything interesting, and then briefly have it just around the point that we wanted to see and then it crashed to the point that you could see nothing. So I had fun sometimes driving on snow storms, get all the way up the hill, which was not easy to do, and then discovering that we couldn't see anything and then driving all the way back.

INTERVIEWER: Right. Just as it cleared up.

SHAPIRO: Just as it cleared up.

Oh, the other hands-on thing I did was as a graduate student. We were then trying to measure clear atmospheric effects, some of the doctoral students-- I was a Master's student. And so we had a helium neon laser, red laser, established up on the roof of the Museum of Science out by the tower under that steeple there. And we had a room that was lent to us in the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory behind Harvard Square-- we had telescopes put in that little room and so forth. And we were making photograph-- I was doing photographic measurements of what turbulence could do, and a doctoral student was doing interferometric measurements. And not that many people in the mid-60s had seen laser light. It was before laser pointers and other things.

And there were small telescopes and little domes on that roof, and I think the graduate students in astronomy would take their girlfriends up there and show them the stars. One night I was working there alone in that room and I had a very tightly helium neon beam focused. The spot was only about this big, a red spot on the back of the wall. And I had the lights on-- the lights off, excuse me, in that room because I was taking photographs and so forth. And this couple walked up on their way to the small dome at the end of the roof where I was, and somehow they looked toward MIT and that light was-- it wasn't dangerous. It was eye-safe at the source, really. It's weaker than laser pointers you can buy now. They walked into this exceedingly bright red light and they saw it, and then they moved two feet one way or the other and it was gone. And they were staring at it and they were saying, what is that? Have the Martians landed, and all that.

I came out of the room because they couldn't see me-- the lights were off-- and I explained who I was and what it was. And, please, would you leave so I can make my measurements?

So I did those experiments as a student and I did the other experiments as a faculty member, but I was mostly in the measurement end of things, not in developing lasers or getting them to do the complicated things we need for this quantum information work.

INTERVIEWER: So how do you day to day work with someone like Dr. Wong. Do you meet every morning?

SHAPIRO: No, we don't meet every morning. No, no. We stay in touch. We have group meetings with all our students maybe every other week. We have meetings whenever we feel we need them. And we typically have lunch at least a couple of times a week.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting. Tell me a little bit how an average day goes for you.

SHAPIRO: I don't know if I have an average day. I live about 25 miles from MIT, which is a long trip for many people here. We moved out there--

INTERVIEWER: Yeah. Most people seem to live--

SHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah. I know. You see, I'd been an assistant professor at Case-- it's in the Cleveland area-- and we had a beautiful house in Shaker Heights. And we had lots of furniture and a washer and a dryer and a two year old daughter when we moved here. And believe me, the comparable neighborhood to where I lived in Ohio would have been in Newton. And the price in Newton was two and a half times higher than what my house in Ohio was worth. So we looked in concentric circles and we landed up living in Sharon because that's where I have a cousin, it's a very nice community, it has an excellent school system. And we liked it there, and we still like it there. Although we're thinking that we may downsize. Our kids are grown and out of the house. We haven't decided because we have close friends there and we have our congregation there. I don't know. Haven't decided yet.

So I have a 25 mile drive. And I have lots and lots of meetings. I had that when I was associate head, I have that now, and I'm director of RLE. So I get up very early and I'm in here maybe by 6:15 in the morning. And that gives me at least a couple of hours to do email-- and I get over 100 day. And that's after the spam filtering. And catch up on some things.

And then I have meetings. I have meetings associated, regular meetings associated with running RLE. I have a senior staff meeting with my senior people, the assistant directors. I have ad hoc meetings with a variety of people. I have faculty who are coming to me with, I wouldn't say complaints, let's say needs. I care a lot about the young faculty. I think it's an important part of my job to help them succeed. I can't do their research for them. I can't teach their classes for them. But certainly in terms of the resources they need, if we can't get that for them, then we can try to help. And I say we because the department does this, as well, to provide them ways to find what they need. So I'm quite proud of the young people in RLE and what they've been able to accomplish. So I have meetings like that.

I have a number of committees that I sit on. I teach. Right now, my group consists of myself and Franco. Between the two of us we have four postdoctoral associates, 10 graduate students, and three undergraduates. So it's a substantial group. I try to meet with my research students once a week individually. I try to write papers with them. Sometimes I write my own papers. There's a lot of things that go.

I'm on a variety of things. I'm on the Extended Engineering Council. I'm on the Research Council. I'm on some Institute committees. I do some consulting for MIT Lincoln Laboratory. I couldn't tell you what a typical day is except to say that it's busy.

INTERVIEWER: It's full?

SHAPIRO: It's full.

INTERVIEWER: What time do you go home?

SHAPIRO: Lately around five.

INTERVIEWER: Oh, not too bad.

SHAPIRO: That's only about 11 hours on campus. And then there's homework sometimes. It is interesting, though, there is a benefit, if you're theorist, to having a long drive home. Because there's only so much algebra you can carry around in your head. And so when you're thinking about a problem-- and my wife hates me when I tell her this-- she says, you're driving and you're thinking about this. Who knows what's going to happen? I say, look, I've been up and down this route so many times for so many years, the DPW calls me up before they install a pothole.

Anyway, can only do so much algebra in your head. You have to think about a problem very clearly and formulate it in the most appropriate and efficient fashion, and then maybe you make some headway. So I've actually gotten some things done that way.

INTERVIEWER: That's very interesting. I wonder--

SHAPIRO: In fact, I had a meeting with one of my collaborators, a former student at Raytheon BBN out in Fresh Pond. And we spent the morning together and then I had to be on campus for a meeting. And so between Fresh Pond and getting to MIT I called him on his cell phone, I said, I've just proven the following result: you ought to write it down before I forget it.

INTERVIEWER: That's interesting. Some people will go jogging in the morning, and you have the 25 mile drive to--

SHAPIRO: I have the 25 mile drive.

INTERVIEWER: To sort it out.

Tell me a little bit-- talking about your work, you're a very clear explainer of things, which makes me feel like you're a very good, must be a very good teacher and take care to explain ideas to people. And I wonder if you can just tell me a little bit about your experience teaching and the importance of teaching in your career.

SHAPIRO: I think teaching is extremely important. It's important to me. It's something I care a great deal about. When I was associate head I didn't do any teaching because there was so much going on and I was trying to keep a research career going. I'd been advised by my predecessor in that position, and my predecessor in RLE, both of whom I consulted when I was offered that position. And they pointed out to me, at that young age that I was, 20-something years ago, that I ought to try to keep research going because if you're out of it for five years or so, it's very tough to get back in. And so you have to make time for something. And I missed teaching. It was something I don't relish giving up, didn't relish giving up.

And when I became RLE director, my first semester was the spring semester. And I was a little foolish-- I taught a class that time because I didn't realize that the spring semester was when the heaviest load of committees and administration fell. So I made a deal with the department that I'd only teach in the fall. So since then, I've taught in the fall either an undergraduate course doing recitations or, one time, sharing lectures, or teaching my graduate subject on an alternate year basis.

And MIT in general, I think, and certainly EECS care very deeply about classroom teaching. And it's one of the things I believe that distinguishes MIT EECS from the school's departments with whom we compete for the best faculty candidates and for the best graduate students. We have simultaneously a very large undergraduate program-- some of the other schools we compete with don't, some do-- but of those that have the large program, I think we're unique in the amount of faculty commitment to that program. And I don't mean lip service. I mean having top senior faculty, the best teachers teaching the lectures and faculty, by and large, teaching all the recitations. You're not taught by special instructors or by graduate students. You're taught by faculty. And that takes a lot of effort, and I think it's worthwhile. I think it's something unique about the MIT undergraduate experience. I believe it probably goes on in many other departments, I just don't know them well enough to say it with the same assurance.