Day in the life: Neil Honkanen

Working in the Department of Physics and Astronomy Electronics Shop is Neil Honkanen’s dream job. “Where else could you design computer-controlled cable testers for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (where they believe they have discovered the elusive Higgs Boson) one day and help an honours student design a brain-wave simulator the next?” he asks. “Working with sharp, young students every day, I know that the future is in good hands.”

Honkanen is this year’s recipient of the Faculty of Science Award for Excellence in Service. When he started working at UVic 30 years ago, maintenance of electronic equipment dominated the job. Now, however, design work occupies most of the time of the three-person shop. “It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to take a concept that someone has brought you, proto-type it, and then produce a finished product that allows students and researchers to push back the frontiers of knowledge,” says Honkanen.

The wide variety of work—with both labs and researchers—makes Honkanen’s job challenging and never boring. Examples of his projects include designing electronics hardware and driver software for the automation of the department’s 20-inch Lorenz telescope, which has gathered several hundred thousand photographs of the night sky. He also designed a variety of computer-controlled cable testers for the UVic ATLAS group, which enabled them to measure and log the characteristics of 2,000 cables for one of the detectors used in the Large Hadron Collider.

Over the past three decades, Honkanen has seen a tremendous change in electronics. Programmable hardware, such as microcontrollers, is one area that has greatly reduced the time that it takes to develop a design. “Rather than committing a design to hardware, which is very difficult to modify when changes are required, the design is in software where changes are very easily made,” he explains. When microcontrollers first became available, Honkanen spent six months of his own time exploring their usages and benefits before recommending that the shop go down this path. Now microcontrollers are used in most designs of any sophistication.

For Honkanen, what makes his job a pleasure every day is the people he works with. “It doesn’t get any better than this—to work with people who are passionate about what they do and know how to work well as a team,” he says. “Looking at retirement in a few years, I am very pleased to see that the Electronics Shop is in very good hands with the young technologists that I am now working with,” he says. “They are as passionate about their work as I am about mine.”

Honkanen has two grown kids and three grandkids. In his spare time, you will find him sailing around Vancouver Island or exploring Europe by bicycle with his wife, Laurie. “There isn’t enough time in a lifetime to do all I would like to do, but I’m giving it a good try. Quite a few years ago, I was determined not to wait until retirement to enjoy life—as the future is always uncertain—and in that regard I would say that I have succeeded.”