Dougherty with faculty and students at Airlangga university, Surabaya, Indonesia in April 2018. Courtesy photos.
CAMARILLO — CSU Channel Islands (CSUCI) Professor of Applied Physics Geoff Dougherty, Ph.D., will teach in Indonesia during the 2021/2022 academic year on a Fulbright Senior Scholarship. It’s another chapter in a career that has taken Dougherty around the world.
“I’ve been a bit of a gypsy since I turned 18,” Dougherty said. “I was born in Northern Ireland, I went to England and did a Ph.D., a post-doc in Switzerland, then went to teach in Malaysia.”
Dougherty will spend six months in Indonesia teaching at two universities: Diponegoro University, a public university in Semerang in Central Java; and Airlangga University in Surabaya, East Java.
“Indonesia is actively investing in education of all sorts,” Dougherty said. “The people universally recognize that education is the way for them to move up the economic ladder and better themselves.”
Dougherty specializes in medical imaging and pattern recognition, which are both areas of interest to the Southeast Asian country, which lies between Malaysia and Australia.
“Medical imaging is a big thing as they have an aging population that is living longer and they are acquiring better health care with PET (Positron emission tomography) and CT (computed tomography) scans,” Dougherty explained. “I can help improve these images so we can spot things early on before they become a problem.”
The pattern recognition classes Dougherty will teach are designed to help students look at satellite imagery and spot patterns in, for example, ultrasound images of the sea bed, which are used in oil exploration.
“They have a lot of agriculture and a problem with land usage,” Dougherty said. “This way, you can use pattern recognition in order to plan land use. You can follow the ebb and flow of growth in certain urban and forested areas.”
Dougherty, who arrived at CSUCI when it was just getting started in 2002, started his academic journey on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. He was born in Northern Ireland where political tensions were heating up, coming to a boil when Dougherty was in his late teens and the Irish Republican Army’s bloody armed campaign was in full swing.
“There were car bombs and the rest of it, allied with a civil rights movement, but they were violent,” he said. “I was down in Belfast once and there was an explosion just a couple of blocks away.”
Dougherty was a good student so those around him encouraged him to leave Ireland and attend college in England. Once he got there, he said, the gypsy really took hold.
After earning his undergraduate, graduate and doctoral degrees at Manchester University and later, Keele University near Newcastle, he moved to Zurich, Switzerland for some post-doctoral research, then felt a hankering to visit the Far East.
He landed a teaching position at the University of Science in Malaysia, where he met and married his wife, then spent a year in Singapore. That was followed by a research position in Melbourne, Australia, where the Dougherty’s son was born. Their daughter was born in Fiji, then their second daughter was born in England after Dougherty returned to serve as Chair of Physics and Physical Sciences at Oxford Brookes University.
Then, the family relocated to Kuwait after Dougherty received an intriguing offer to become the Chairman of the Radiologic Sciences Department at Kuwait University.
“After it was occupied by Saddam Hussein and they were booted out, they torched the oil wells and scavenged the university and took everything they could,” Dougherty said. “A colleague of mine who had been in touch with them asked if I would like to help them build up again.”
After 10 years of helping build up a university, Dougherty was intrigued with the newly-launched CSUCI, so in 2002, he and his family crossed the ocean again to settle in Camarillo, where he has been ever since.
Dougherty is looking forward to his time in Indonesia as his wife is Malaysian and the two countries have many similarities. These days, Dougherty satisfies the gypsy in him with trips to CERN ( Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire or European Council for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, where he takes students to intern, and to universities in Indonesia, intercultural adventures he believes benefit every educator.
“I think being exposed to other cultures stimulates the mind, and makes you think in different ways with different perspectives,” Dougherty said. “Sharing cultural experiences helps us understand other people better so that we can encourage an environment where we all can thrive.”
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