For years Jim Leatham wondered why he looked at the world and behaved in ways that were so different from other people. It’s not as though Leatham wasn’t flourishing. He obtained an undergraduate mechanical engineering degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a master’s degree in electrical engineering/electrophysics from the University of Southern California.
Leatham’s career is equally distinguished, including numerous patents and publications and a series of jobs at startups before taking his current leadership position as an Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Technologies. But despite his many successes, Leatham couldn’t help but feel like an outsider.
“There was a dissonance in how I behaved, and how I did things was not how most people did them,” says Leatham, this year’s winner of the AISES Technical Excellence Award. For example, in his leadership positions Leatham always emphasized including and supporting everyone on his research teams, instinctively believing that togetherness ultimately resulted in a better product or outcome. Only over the past 10 years or so has Leatham realized that his approach to leadership, and life in general, is very much a reflection of his Cherokee roots. In particular, the Cherokee concept of gadugi is all about togetherness and inclusion. “Only in the last 10 years have I realized that what I have been doing is a result of my culture and upbringing. It’s a validation,” Leatham says.
There are many reasons why the connection between Leatham’s outlook and his Cherokee upbringing hasn’t been clear until recently. Leatham lived in India for the first five years of his life, and spent his elementary school years living in Turkey and the Philippines. When his family moved to Oklahoma, where his Cherokee mother was raised, Leatham was a teenager with a homogenized view of what it means to be an American, let alone what it means to be Native American.
And while Leatham participated in tribal activities, his mother’s experience of being sent to Chilocco Indian Agricultural School and later to the Haskell Indian School and prioritizing assimilation also had a big influence on him. “My mom’s goal was assimilation and for me to grow up and blend in as American,” Leatham says.
Throughout his life, Leatham has certainly been able to blend in. Though his parents split up, Leatham’s attraction to STEM was fueled by his dad’s career as a civil engineer. When Leatham was trying to figure out where to go to school, though, he struggled to choose between engineering and theater. “I was drawn to engineering and science because it gives you the ability to discover how things work and to create and take building blocks and piece them together into something new that hadn’t been imagined before,” Leatham says. “It was all about the creative process.”
These days, Leatham’s research and creative prowess are focused on integrated photonics, which examines how to use photons to carry information. At Raytheon Technologies, his research has the potential to improve quantum sensing and computing as well as signal routing and processing. Insights from photonics research can be used to bolster radar, remote sensing, and avionics technologies.
As satisfying as research has been to Leatham, his reconnection to his Native roots in recent years has been every bit as gratifying. In part, it was a journey sparked by Leatham’s desire to connect his children to their Cherokee culture. But Leatham took to heart the advice he gave to his kids to educate themselves about their roots and was inspired by a Cherokee history course he took at UCLA — especially because the instructor had a journey similar to his. Leatham has also been active in the American Indian Network (RAIN) at Raytheon Technologies and through mentorship and outreach efforts in the Native community. “I think it’s important for anybody to understand where they come from. I didn’t realize that,” Leatham says. “My focus was science and engineering. But the peace that comes from understanding where I come from informs where I’m going and gives me more confidence.”
