Josh’s Work

Physics Background

Josh received his B.S. in Physics in 1997 from Virginia Tech. In the summer following his graduation, he attended the Los Alamos Summer School in Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics. This was a mixture of guest lecture presentations in the morning and performing research for a Los Alamos staff member in the afternoon, usually with a focus on computational physics. A small, internal project related paper was written as a final product of this work.

Starting in the Fall of 1997, Josh started attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Physics Masters Program. He started working for Richard Superfine (yes, his real name) in the area of Condensed Matter Physics and Material Sciences, in particular with what is now called the Nanoscale Science Research Group. What peaked his interest the most was the use of the NanoManipulator to interface with their Atomic Force Microscopes [wikipedia]. Josh followed up on work performed by a postdoc (now professor) named Mike Falvo, investigating the interactions of single and multiwall carbon nanotubes with graphite substrates. We found that due to their similar lattice structure, the nanotubes would “lock” into place every 60 degrees, and thanks to the AFM and NanoManipulator tools, we were able to quantitatively measure that locking force, and compare it to models predicted by researchers at North Carolina State University. From that work (which was funded by ONR, NIH, and the NSF), in addition to a master’s defense presentation, 2 papers were published:

Falvo, M. R., Steele, J., Taylor II, R. M. and Superfine, R. (2000). “Evidence of commensurate contact and rolling motion: AFM manipulation studies of carbon nanotubes on HOPG.” Tribology Letters 9: 73-76. PDF

Falvo, M. R., Steele, J., Taylor II, R. M. and Superfine, R. (2000). “Gearlike rolling motion mediated by commensurate contact: Carbon nanotubes on HOPG.” Phys. Rev. B 62(October 15): 10665-10667. PDF

Josh was also a teaching assitant while at UNC; he was one of the first TAs for Dr. Superfine’s Physics 16: How Things Work class, and was recognized in 2000 with a Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award.

Computer Science Background

The interest in the computer science side of the NanoManipulator projects pushed Josh to leave a physics career after obtaining his Masters Degree, and towards a Computer Science Degree. He went back to Virginia Tech for this, to their Department of Computer Science. Focusing on Human-Computer Interaction in his elective courses, but unable to find research to do in this area, he joined Dr. Richard Nance’s Systems Research Center, and investigated communications resource allocation for tactical networking. This work was funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) NAVCITTI Program. His thesis came from this work, and can be found here:

Steele, R.J., Determining Communications Resource Feasibility in a Tactical Communications Network (2002) PDF

A supporting document (that is no longer online) that was done while working for Dr. Nance is:

“Commercial-off-the-Shelf (COTS) Effects on System Maintenance: A Collaborative Study with Lockheed-Martin Naval Electronics and Surveillance Systems”, Nance, R.E., Steele, J., Tatikonda, N. Technical Report SRC-01-003. Systems Research Center, Virginia Tech. 2001.

Josh was able to publish one small paper based on his work in HCI centered classes, however – a Work in Progress (WiP) paper to IEEE Visualization 2001

Tian, Y., Clement, M., Ellis, M., Steele, J., North, C., “Gene Expression Mural: Visualizing Gene Expression Databases”, WiP Proc. IEEE Visualization 2001, (Oct. 2001). PDF

Present Day

After graduating in 2002, Josh joined the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab Space Department in June 2002 and became a member of the Science Applications Group (SIS) of the Systems Information (SI) Branch. Our group works closely with lab scientists and helps develop applications that can be used by them for data analysis, instrument planning, data retrieval and so on. In particular, Josh helps develop software for the MESSENGER program (which is en route to Mercury) that will plan out the entire (Earth) year’s mission at Mercury while analyzing all of the mission, instrument and physical constraints. He uses Java as his primary programming language (using Eclipse for his IDE), and uses tools such as Maven and Continuum for build deployment and Subversion for configuration management.

His current interests continue to be Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) as well as objective-based opportunity optimization methods (in other words, using high level goals to define opportunities and then optimizing the overall process).  He is also interested in build and deployment software packages and education and outreach.