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A tool-making animal |
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“One of my big faults is that I don’t clean up very well. I’d rather be doing something than cleaning up.” Lloyd Frei isn’t kidding. He’s the engineer in charge of the psychology department’s instrumentation shop. That department, like many others, conducts research on human subjects. The human frame (and the animal frame, for that matter) has been measured and metered in the search for more knowledge about how minds and bodies work. Once those experiments have been conceived, it’s somebody’s job to design and build instruments that will do the actual measuring. At Iowa, that somebody is Lloyd Frei. Walking around his shop in the basement of Spence Laboratories, it’s hard to escape the overwhelming sense of highly productive clutter. Computers with their guts exposed sit side-by-side with power drills. In one corner stands a stationary bicycle connected to a tangle of wires and electrodes. On a large workbench rests a child’s dollhouse. Circuit boards and oscilloscopes vie for space with band saws and belt sanders. One recent project Frei is particularly proud of is the bicycle. Or, to be more accurate, the virtual bicycle. It’s part of a bicycle simulator that will teach computer students how to write simulation programs and give psychology students insights into how children learn to ride. The idea is for a rider to sit on it, pump the pedals, steer the handlebars, and apply the brakes while watching computer-generated images of the road going by them. Frei’s contribution was to rig up a normal bike with sensors that record all the rider’s motions. In addition to measuring esoteric things like the dynamic change in the pressure on the pedals, Frei had a more mundane challenge on this project: “They might fall off.” Apparently when the riders make sharp turns on the virtual bicycle, they instinctively lean into them as they would on a real bicycle. “We’re trying to fit some kind of harness on the person so if they tilt, they don’t fall,” he says. Not all his projects are so mechanical. Things get harder when you’re measuring the human body itself, which isn’t conveniently made of hinges and axles. Researchers in exercise science needed to measure the effect of swimming on a person’s intake of oxygen. For that experiment, Frei designed a lightweight, waterproof instrument that was strapped to the swimmer’s back. It rode out of the water so that it wouldn’t drag. It was equipped with a set of strain gauges, small wire devices that send out an electrical signal in response to being bent. The gauges measured the expansion of the swimmer’s ribcage, which is an accurate way to measure the intake of air into the lungs. There’s a teaching component to Frei’s work as well. “I lead seminars on instrumentation for graduate students. We teach them how to select computers, how to select interface boards for computers, basic electronics. Then we also have shop practices. The grad students come down and learn how to use a bandsaw and a circular saw, safety equipment, and that kind of thing.” With Frei in place, why do the students need those skills? “A lot of the students coming in haven’t ever had shop, have never even used a screwdriver. It’s really important that they know how to ask questions. You go down to some technical person and say, ‘I want to do X.’ And if you can’t put it in terms that the technical person understands, possibly you’re going to not get what you want.” Over the years, Frei has encouraged his female students not to be shy of machinery, even though they may have had less exposure to tools. “I look back and wonder just how many Madame Curies we lost because we had such a bias against women in science. And it isn’t just because the University wants to move that way. I really do think that’s important, to equip these students as well as we can no matter what gender. I’m particularly proud to have been the technical adviser for two female bioengineering grad students who took first prize in an instrument contest sponsored by the Olympic Committee in Boulder, Colorado.” When things are slow in psychology, Frei jobs out and builds instruments for other departments. He’s clearly a man who would prefer three tasks to none. “This is probably the most fun job there is on campus,” Frei says. “I sometimes think that they really shouldn’t even have to pay me.” by Sam Samuels |
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