Ransom's CV

About Ransom Stephens

"One thing we know about creativity is that it typically occurs when people who have mastered two or more quite different fields use the framework in one to think afresh about the other. Intuitively, you know this is true. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist, scientist and inventor, and each specialty nourished the other. He was a great lateral thinker. But if you spend your whole life in one silo, you will never have either the knowledge or mental agility to do the synthesis, connect the dots, which is usually where the next great breakthrough is found." -Marc Tucker, President of the National Center on Education and the Economy Ransom brings a comprehensive understanding of how things work. Everything he does is rooted in the clear thought processes of a physicist. With 1000s of hours speaking experience addressing scientists and engineers, professionals in transition, retirees, junior high to university students, lovers of literature, attorneys and executives, ex-cons and soon-to- be former juvenile delinquents, ascending and well established authors, in auditoriums, lecture halls, laboratories, art galleries, bars, bookstores, and classrooms, Ransom is a natural born teacher. He communicates complex subjects clearly to any age group at the appropriate level of literary and mathematical sophistication. "To be able to distill complex concepts into a thought provoking yet entertaining format is the sign of a great teacher and/or writer." -George Fortier, from his review of Ransom's novel, The God Patent • Ebook pioneer: author of “The first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing.” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The God Patent, a novel set in the culture war between science and religion that has been embraced by both atheists and theists - also in Amazon’s Top 10 in quantum physics for over 15 months and technothrillers for 6 months. • Produced and moderated Litquake’s (San Francisco’s Literary Festival) popular science panels that have featured Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, bestselling authors, leaders in philosophy, neurology, psychology, theology, physics, spirituality, and noetic science. • Led a high-tech commando team of engineers and scientists to the solution of a complex timing noise problem through to development of marketing content to convey the solution’s value to the market. • Guided hundreds of professionals through tenuous career transitions: from layoff to startup. • Performed two thirty-five city speaking tours across the United States plus a few stops in Europe, giving full day training seminars to the engineers who create our nation’s wealth. • Helped thousands of students choose their careers and help them pave the way to fulfilling their greatest potential. • Introduced a new marketing concept – midway through a ten-minute presentation the client picked up the phone and scheduled a meeting with his marketing team who took the concept and generated $4.5M in quotes in six months. • Led development of a new wireless-web broadcast information delivery technology. • Devised new signal processing techniques to separate multiple signals and noise. Resulted in the discovery of a new state of matter, precision measurements of rare processes, and new techniques for signal identification and characterization. • Collaborated on the discovery of the Top Quark with the D-Zero collaboration at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. • Introduced new university courses, curricula, and degree programs. • Discovered a new type of matter, the R(1525), a quark-anti-quark resonance including a “valence gluon.” 2005-Present Ransom’s Notes Petaluma California Writer, physicist, speaker Applied Electrodynamics Physicist Litquake San Francisco Event producer, MC, and moderator 2000-2005 Agilent Technologies Santa Rosa CA / Richardson TX 2004-2005 Product Marketing Manager/Technical Marketing Engineer 2002-2004 Applied Electrodynamics Physicist / Applications Engineer 2000-2002 Applied Lightwave Scientist / Systems Engineer 1999-2000 Enhanced Messaging Systems Southlake TX Staff Engineer-Scientist & Director of Advanced Technology 1993-1999 University of Texas at Arlington 1999 January-July Associate Professor of Physics (tenured) 1993-1999, Assistant Professor of Physics o ATLAS experiment, European Center for Particle Physics (CERN), Geneva Switzerland o D-Zero experiment, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia Ill On the team that discovered the top quark o Solenoid Detector Collaboration, Superconducting Super Collider, Waxahachie TX 1990-1993 University of Florida Gainesville FL Research Associate in Computational and Experimental Particle Physics o Cornell Electron Storage Ring, Cleo-II collaboration, Ithaca NY 1984-1990 University of California, Santa Barbara Research Assistant in Experimental Particle Physics o Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, TPC-Two-Gamma Collaboration, Menlo Park CA Discovered the R(1525) in the fusion of two photons Teaching Assistant • Pending: New technique for stressed-receiver tolerance testing using Crest Factor Emulation • Two techniques for distinguishing timing noise from different causes: US Patents #7,191,080 and #7,149,638 1990 Ph.D. Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara o Dissertation: The pi+pi-pi0pi0 Final State in Two Photon Physics o Named the James Chadwick Scholar of the 1989 Ettore Majorana International School of Sub- Nuclear Physics, Erice, Sicily, Italy 1984 B.S. (cum laude) Physics, University of California, San Diego o 1982-1983, University of Birmingham, England, Education Abroad Program 1980 Las Lomas High School, Walnut Creek California