Muhammad Hussain, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Most of the time the information we get about engineering innovators is about their professional accomplishments. A podcast hosted by a Purdue University professor aims to get to know these trailblazers on a personal level, too. Muhammad Hussain, professor in Purdue’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is the producer and host of the EDS Luminaries podcast for IEEE’s Electron Devices Society (EDS). He says the idea for the podcast came to him during the pandemic in 2020.

“There are many people who have made seminal contributions to the electron device community. Typically, we know of these people because we go to conferences, we read their books and research papers, and we hear them giving technical talks about their work,” says Hussain. “My idea was to go a little deeper and get to know these people up close, about their lives and personalities.”

In December 2020, Hussain proposed the idea at a meeting of the IEEE EDS Board of Governors and convinced them to give it a try. And despite never having listened to a podcast himself, he offered to host it.

“A group of people, including the then-president of EDS, put together a set of questions,” says Hussain. “The questions were divided into three parts, how they grew up and what led them to their career path, a rapid-fire round with questions about their hobbies, favorite movie, places they like to travel, etc., and their thoughts about the future of the field.”

The group also set the criteria for who to interview, deciding the podcast guests should be members of national academies, winners of the national medal of technology, and could be from industry or academia. The first episode of the EDS Luminaries podcast launched on January 15, 2021. As of March 2023, Hussain has produced 25 episodes.

Among the guests have been two Purdue ECE professors, Mark Lundstrom and Muhammad Ashraful Alam.

Lundstrom, the Don and Carol Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and recently-named chief semiconductor officer for Purdue, is well-known for his contributions to the theory, modeling, and understanding of semiconductor devices, especially nanoscale transistors. On the podcast, he talked about his professional achievements but also gave insight into his childhood and personal interests. According to Lundstrom, he grew up in a small town in Minnesota, where he was interested in science from a young age -- shooting off model rockets, tinkering around with radios, and even building his own eight-inch reflecting telescope. His favorite foods are Italian and Indian. These days he spends a lot of time working on his two motorcycles, a Harley-Davidson and an Indian.

Alam is the Jai N. Gupta Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research and teaching focus on physics, simulation, characterization and technology of classical and novel semiconductor devices. He has made fundamental contributions to, and innovative computational models for, spatially and temporally complex materials relevant for flexible electronics, solar cells and scaled transistors. In his conversation with Hussain, he discussed growing up in Bangladesh during the War of Independence in 1971. Alam says this experience caused him to take nothing in life for granted. He also revealed that he is very good at table tennis, likes animated movies, and enjoys reading (two of his most recent reads are Codebreakers by Walter Isaacson and The Anarchy by William Dalrymple).

Hussain is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, co-director of Purdue SMART, and associate director of Purdue Semiconductor Education. His research is focused on designing futuristic electronics to realize his vision about empowering humanity through democratized electronics technology. He reveals some personal information, as well, during his conversations on the podcast. Hussain grew up in Bangladesh. His hobbies include cooking, gardening, gadget, widget and website design, app development, video editing, podcast, furniture assembly, listening to music, and watching movies.

Hussain says the success of this podcast has led other IEEE societies to start their own. He says in the future he plans to chronicle his experience, possibly in a book, of interviewing these influential people. Hussain is currently working with EDS to develop two new podcast series - one will focus on historically underrepresented communities, the other will be about young professionals in industry and academia.