Johan Robertsson: From industry back to academia

Johan Robertsson has been working at the Department of Earth Sciences for the past year. In this interview he talks about his experiences in this first year and about his future plans.

Mr Robertsson, you are here since one year. What was the biggest surprise or change in this year?

I worked for the same company for 15 years. The company is called Schlumberger and is the world’s largest oilfield service company. The change back into academia brought more or less what I had expected. Time scales of research do not differ that much from the top industry research labs where time scales up to 15 years from a commercial product are not unusual. I think the greatest difference between working in applied sciences in a research oriented industry and academia has to do with the focus and goals of the research. In industry the projects must eventually bring predictable commercial value to the company. In academia the freedom of conducting research is much greater in this regard. At ETH I can undertake any challenging research topic without having to consider its value for oil exploration and production.

You like this?

Absolutely – it is very refreshing and enables a highly creative environment. Another positive aspect with academia is that you have a lot of students around yourself, which means young people. This drives creativity and makes the workplace dynamic and inspiring, and hopefully keeps you young(er)!

What was the main reason you changed back from industry to academia?

I had been here at the ETH as a postdoc and I knew about ETH as one of the very best universities worldwide and the resources available here. There are not many places like this, at least not in Europe. So when this position became available, I immediately decided to go for it. I would not have left Schlumberger for many other positions in academia.

So it was not so much the position but ETH, which is very attractive?

There are aspects of academia in many places that would not have attracted me. I wanted to find a position where I can concentrate on conducting world-class research as opposed to constantly writing and applying for research grants and having too much administration to do. I already had an excellent job in Schlumberger and few positions in academia apart from the ETH professorship would have been appealing to me.

Did you get here everything you expected?

Yes – pretty much. I can’t think of much that have disappointed me.

What about your family, did everybody agree with your decision to move?

That was the most difficult part. I have two children, 10 and 13 years old, and it is a very difficult age for them to move.

Did they grow up in Cambridge?

Essentially. We have lived in the Cambridge area for 10 years in total and in particular during the last 5 years. Our children pretty much grew up there and probably think of the UK as home. Especially my boy who was five when we moved to Cambridge the last time and has all his friends there. So this makes it difficult – if it weren’t for that, everything would be absolutely fantastic. But this is a little bit of a problem.

How do you cope with it?

At the moment, my daughter is living in England in a boarding school and my son is here in the local Swiss school. My wife is torn between the two places. We will have to work on this and find a solution.

Did you get the help of ETH to find a place for living here?

Yes, ETH offers very good support but we have lived in Zurich before so we were fairly familiar with Switzerland already.

Do you like Zurich?

Very much so. I really like the outdoors, and it is so easy here to go skiing, hiking and making trips to different parts of Europe.

Where do you live now?

In Niederholz, a little village outside of Wald, in the middle of the countryside, with the sound of cow bells in the morning and skiing on your doorstep in the winter.

Do you have contacts with the Swedish community in Zurich?

No, not really. I haven’t lived in Sweden since 1990 and we go there quiet often because we have a house there. I do not feel a need to mix with the Swedish expats in Zurich and we might even have more in common with the English. If we would be on another continent like in Africa, I guess we would join an expat community, but Switzerland it is not so different from home.

So you never speak Swedish?

Yes I do. Two of my postdocs did their PhD degrees at Uppsala University and speak fluent Swedish, which is a bit of a coincidence. I also speak Swedish at home with my children and of course when I go back to our house there.

What are you working on at the moment?

We are starting to work towards building a new laboratory, which we call wave propagation laboratory. It is going to be unique – there is nothing like this that exists in the world. It involves lab experimentation of acoustic and elastic wave propagation. It is a perfectly controlled experiment completely surrounded by sensors. We want to do real time computation on the recordings so you can completely link a physical experiment with a numerical simulation. This allows you to study non-linear effects and poorly understood wave propagation. Besides that, we are also starting a small consortium with three industry partners where we are focusing on how to characterize the near surface to remove its effects from deeper land seismic data.

When will the lab open?

At the moment, we are preparing the room and recruiting people. Next year we will simulate the lab and start to build it. In 2014 we hope to be able to start working in the lab. We already have a Phd-student here who started to do some small scale experimentation in order to characterize sensors.

This must be very exciting.

Yes, the possibility to build such a lab was a major attraction for me to come to ETH. It is an example of research that would have been difficult to motivate in an industrial corporation

Did you always know that you wanted to work in geophysics?

No. I did a master’s degree in Engineering Physics in Uppsala in Sweden. During the last year I was in an exchange program with Rice University and that’s where I came into contact with Geophysics. I naturally felt that this was the field I want to work in: One can work on fairly theoretical topics, but at the same time you can travel the world collecting experimental data in the field. You are not stuck in a lab all the time, which most other physicists are.

You worked for over 15 years in the industry. Why?

Schlumberger has a lab where you can conduct real research. Without being an Ivory tower, it is a world-class research institution and at the same time relevant to the business. Very few companies manage this balance act.

How does an industrial corporation manage to do valuable research without it becoming engineering?

When presenting our research to the rest of the company, we talked about three different horizons: Horizon one was projects that were one to two years away from a commercial product. This is very much applied research (borderline engineering) for example aimed at improving an existing product. The research projects on the second horizon are three to five years from a commercial product, for example the next generation of seismic acquisition system. Horizon three is the blue sky stuff, the most difficult project portfolio and where the real game changes will come from. You rely on experience and the senior researchers and their judgment on what to work on. It may not be entirely clear all the time that this will turn out to be fruitful. This was very exiting and the reason why I stayed so long in the company, but after 15 years it is very healthy to leave and see things from different perspectives.

What would you have become if not a geophysicist?

I would have been another scientist, in physics or an engineering related field perhaps. But I do have other interests as well. Sports and outdoor activities are important to me. I hunt and fish when I am in Sweden. I am very interested in history, and family history in particular. I am also into renovating old buildings – in particular our old farmhouse in Sweden. I think I will be quite busy also after retiring from geophysics…

And where do you see yourself ten years from now?

At ETH, with the lab running and being successful, and working on the next version, a yet bigger one.

Johan Robertsson was interviewed by Gabrielle Attinger.

JavaScript has been disabled in your browser