I want to leave a legacy for future generations of researchers

I was born in 1940. In 1958, I joined the Department of Radio Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology, which had a hundred-year history from the Tongcheng Secondary School. In 1963, I started working at the Fifth House of the Commission for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense.

Due to strict confidentiality conditions, I could not publish any of my research. Later, I joined a pre-research project on “microstrip antenna.” After two years of work, I published a few papers with Prof. Jingxiong Chen. My ideas led me to turn to the measurement of dielectric constants of microwave materials. I wrote a paper titled “Determination of resonant frequency of a rectangular microstrip antenna and its application to measurement of dielectric constants of microwave materials” and published it in the official journal of the Chinese Meteorological Association, Acta Metrologica Sinica.

Following this, I made revisions to my paper, added some content to it, and prepared my first English paper, which I submitted to Microwave Journal. The journal editor was kind and recommended that I submit to IEEE Transactionson Microwave Theory and Techniques. I followed his advice and my paper underwent peer review.

I received detailed comments from three reviewers and made changes based on each and every comment. It took me more than a year to finish multiple rounds of revision. I worked on the revisions alone and didn’t ask anyone for help.

Why so? Why did I choose to work alone?

It was because I became famous at a very early stage in my career and got suppressed by peers, including my supervisor. So I didn’t want to let others know about my success. Even when I received many mails from researchers and institutions abroad, I didn’t show off. I wanted a low-key life.

But there’s one thing I have always believed in:

I need to publish papers not to improve my reputation as a researcher, but for leaving a mark on research in my field. Whatever research I’ve done, it HAS to be published and shared with the world.

In recent years, I got into the field of biomedicine. I developed a keen interest in Parkinson’s disease after my wife was diagnosed with it and wanted to learn more about its causes, diagnosis, and treatment.

I wanted to combine this with electromagnetic compatibility research that I have worked on for 50 years. I actually found that there’s an ultra-wideband, wide angle scanning, super antenna array in the human eye. I proposed this idea and wrote a paper on it.

I also submitted this research to CAS for online publication but got an unreasonable rejection. Later, it was published on XinhuaNet. But I was not satisfied with this. I was yet to establish my theory so I wanted to pursue further research to broaden my knowledge.

Earlier this year, I compiled the blog posts I wrote for ScienceNet blog into a book titled “Multidisciplinary Research on the Human Eye.” This book includes posts on topics like biology, medicine, physiology, chemistry, physics, optics, micro optics, antennas, radar, and communications. It includes more than 500 references and is now ready to be reviewed by multidisciplinary experts.

This is a book I completed in time for my 80th birthday. I want to publish it, simply because I felt that I should leave this as my legacy for the younger generation and inspire them to take up multidisciplinary research.