Reed has continued to work hard to help Native students interested in STEM careers. His efforts have led Raytheon to engage with local Native student communities in Boston.
F or a long time, Thomas Reed had trouble pinpointing how he got started in a STEM career. It’s a journey that has taken Reed, a member of the Hopi Tribe and this year’s winner of the Most Promising Engineer or Scientist Award, from his formative years growing up outside Seattle to a position as a senior electrical engineer designing highly advanced integrated circuits for radar systems and other technologies for defense contractor Raytheon.
But when Reed really stopped to think about what influences and people first pointed him toward the cutting-edge, award-winning monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) design that’s his focus today, he credits his parents and uncles. Reed’s uncles lived nearby when he was young, and a few were engineers at Boeing, while others demonstrated the everyday practicality of engineering by constantly working on their cars. While his parents worked in food service rather than engineering, both reinforced the importance of math and science. “My dad taught me integers on a chalkboard when I was four or five years old,” recalls Reed. “We even used to do math problems on paper while we were sitting at church. Both my parents emphasized how important it was to do well in school.”
Reed took the lessons to heart, and when he arrived in Utah to enroll as an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, he had a pretty clear idea about how he wanted to spend his time. “I was looking through the majors and asking myself, ‘OK, what has to do with physics and math?’” recalls Reed, who earned his BS in electrical engineering with a minor in math. Already involved with MMIC design as an undergraduate, Reed wondered what his next step should be after graduation. A BYU professor who had done similar work suggested he look into the electrical engineering PhD program at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Though Reed ultimately flourished at UCSB — earning both a master’s and a doctorate and even designing an MMIC that was able to generate more power for its size than any before — he got off to a rough start. “In electromagnetics class in my first semester, I was struggling. In the first midterm, I got a 35 out of 100 and I thought I would have to go home,” he recalls. “But it turned out that the average was a 31. Sometimes when you struggle, you don’t realize that you’re not that different from everyone else who is struggling too.”
Reed’s success in school was aided in part by his involvement with the school’s AISES Chapter. Reed had grown up far away from the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, but he had spent time there as a kid. At UCSB, the sense of community he felt among fellow AISES students helped him persevere through the inevitable challenging times. “I felt a camaraderie with all the Native people at school,” he says. “That kind of support from friends can be the difference between staying in school to get a degree or getting discouraged and dropping out.”
Since joining Raytheon in 2013, Reed has continued to work hard to help Native students interested in STEM careers. His efforts have led Raytheon to engage with local Native student communities in Boston. He is eager to talk to students about the many advantages of joining Raytheon — or of pursuing a STEM career generally.
Though Reed is highly satisfied with his work at Raytheon, he sees his career at the company potentially using IC technology to help deliver power to rural communities, including tribes. At Raytheon, he has successfully garnered grants to support his research and is hoping to get funding to look into technologies that enable more effective remote power delivery and microgrids. “Having MMIC design as part of my career is going to continue,” he says. “But one of my goals is to continue to obtain research dollars and work on R&D that will benefit humanity and the tribes.”
