The way I work: Rajen Akalu

The 35-year-old researcher from Bristol, England, is writing his PhD thesis on the role that markets play in the allocation of the radio spectrum resource, at the TPM faculty’s economics of infrastructures section.

“I started out with a regular legal career, wearing fancy suits and all that, but didn’t really find it rewarding. I then got hired by the University of Toronto, where I was responsible for managing PhD and master student research on telecom-related issues, like ‘digital rights management’, so dealing with peer-to-peer file sharing and the associated legal issues that come with exchanging content over the internet.

I’ve been at TU Delft for just over a year now. How did I come to work here? Well, I left Toronto to work for professor Bill Melody, at Denmark Technical University. Professor Melody was once the head of the TU Delft section I currently work at. He’d also been the chief economist at the U.S. telecommunications regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, and very much involved with the liberalization of the U.S. telecommunications sector at that time.

When I met professor Melody it was ‘love-at-first-sight’ you might say. I heard him lecture and thought, ‘That’s what I’m going to do my PhD on!’ He introduced me to the idea of radio spectrum. I got interested in telecommunications policy and law because communication is a universal human imperative. All countries need telecommunications.
The rules are generally set in industrialized nations, so it’s important to understand how they work there. But for all countries, a functioning telecommunications infrastructure is critical to economic development, because it lowers the cost of doing business. Communications is a basic requirement that encourages cooperation between nations – even when they’re at war.
Part of the reason I came to TU Delft was to do research I couldn’t do in other places. TU Delft was prepared to fund this research, and many things come together well here. For my research there must be lots of open-minded people who are receptive to multidisciplinary research, because otherwise you’re going to get people who are simply unwilling to understand.”

Freedom
“I think you learn what you know through a long process. It takes a long time to learn the process of legal reasoning, for example. By the time it became second nature to me, I had to unlearn much of it in order to engage with engineers. I found that being able to talk to engineers in a language they understand required additional effort from my side.
It’s interesting how engineers typically think of law: ‘you tell us the rule and we’ll figure out what to do’. Whenever they talk about economics, they generally mean revenue. So money and rules, that’s all they really want to know! Economists have a sense of resource constraints; they focus on how to optimize those constraints in order to allocate a scarce resource. Lawyers, meanwhile, have a keen sense for what’s relevant and irrelevant; they really want to know what the outcomes are of engineering decisions and policymaking, because they must translate this into legal frameworks. So combining all these perspectives is certainly challenging.

I enjoy multidisciplinary research. To tackle telecom-related issues, you need the expertise and cooperation of many different people and organizations. I still work with experts from many fields, but now I have more freedom to work on my own. Before arriving in the Netherlands, I worked for the Commission for Communications Regulation (ComReg) in Ireland. When working for a regulatory commission, you’re bound by the commission’s rules. You can’t just say what you want, because that’s going to represent the organization. But as a PhD student, you have more freedom, and people are very much interested in my ideas and opinions.

Here I can say things that I couldn’t perhaps say elsewhere. That’s a real benefit. People from the Dutch telecommunications regulator, Opta, read my thesis chapters and talk to me openly about their problems, owing to my prior work and background. So, my experience and current PhD work come together, making debates more useful and interesting.
When writing a PhD thesis, you can say: ‘These are the problems I’ve encountered in my career and that I think are very important.’ My thesis specifically looks at when the market can be used in the management of the radio spectrum resource. There’s lots of debate around the world about the privatization of resources and how this makes everything much more efficient. I study what’s involved with the privatization of the radio spectrum. My thesis essentially points out that efficiency is a judgment – not really an objective concept – that embodies the values and interests of a society. 
For me, it’s crucial to have a research outline, which takes a long time to get. I have one chapter I look at everyday: it’s the outline of my thesis. I put it all in one page. This is tough to do, because you must be very specific about your thesis, explain things in detail. I then divide this outline into chapters, and look at each chapter individually. I basically break down each chapter into a further outline and then find information and develop the argument that way.
I work in a telecommunications subgroup that focuses on spectrum. We’re a diverse group: an economist, two engineers, the regulator, my PhD supervisor, and me, in addition to various people coming in to give their views. Every day I actively communicate with this diverse, multidisciplinary group of people. I chose this research. I could’ve made lots more money working as an attorney in New York, but for me the real value is freedom, having control over my time, having the opportunity to spend time on things I care about and find interesting, and sharing this experience with people who have similar outlooks.”

Provocative
“Besides my work, I do lots of other things, like, for instance, recently giving my first stand-up comedy performance. A colleague would come into the office each week and we’d develop a script. The stand-up was about my Delft experiences, my views on things people complain about, like that there aren’t enough girls here. The experience was unique. The way I put it is: if you can do stand-up, then PowerPoint presentations are a cinch!
I try to look for things I’m scared of, and then do those things to overcome fear. So I’ve done stand-up, Thai-boxing, horseback riding…. My first stand-up performance was in Amsterdam and was pretty tough. My material was really provocative, and not only was my PhD supervisor there but he was in the front row! Good thing is he was laughing!

Stand-up comedy is a lifestyle, much like being a PhD student is a lifestyle. When I was a lawyer, I was careful about everything I said, but in stand-up I can just speak my mind. Jokes are actually better if you have strong opinions. When I’m doing stand-up, I just throw it out there! In the process I’ve learned more about who I am and about having confidence in myself. Those two things are already very valuable for cultivating my independence as a researcher.
On a typical day I come in at 9:00 and leave by 17:30. I work during that period, that’s it! But you must have your own discipline for that. If you have it, though, then you can do lots of other things in between, like stand-up comedy or whatever else interests you.” 

Met een subsidie van 2,4 miljoen euro van de Stichting voor Fundamenteel Onderzoek der Materie op zak, kan het programma ‘Control over functional nanoparticle solids’, een mooi begin van 2009 tegemoet zien. Het project is een samenwerkingsverband tussen de TU Delft en de Universiteit Utrecht. Daarin wordt onderzoek gedaan naar nanodeeltjes die zichzelf kunnen ordenen, zodat nieuwe materialen ontstaan. Met behulp van halfgeleidende, metallische en magnetische nanodeeltjes denken de onderzoekers een breed scala aan nieuwe technische toepassingen te kunnen ontwikkelen. Gedacht moet worden aan nieuwe displays, optische dataopslag en biosensoren.