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Research forms the foundation for practice, but in some quarters the term “lighting research” is an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp” and “open secret.” Lighting is the application of light. As such, the intellectual lineage from research to application is invisible to most practitioners, and an appreciation of how research might be applied to present problems is beyond their training and education. Similarly, scientists trained in physics, neurosciences or biology, often see lighting only as a field of application and may not see the inherent value of pursuing lighting research focused on improving building energy efficiency, roadway safety or sleep efficiency in the elderly.
Perhaps more to the point, very few individuals within the manufacturing sector, a potential source of financial support for lighting research, appreciate its relevance. The assumption being that lighting manufacturing cannot possibly benefit from fundamental discovery or even synthesis of fundamental principles outside those projects leading directly to product development or application.
The Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has enjoyed 20 years of active research and education, and, at any given moment, has more than 50 projects underway. The LRC employs over 35 faculty and staff and supports more than 20 graduate students in “advancing the effective use of light for society and the environment.”
Someone unfamiliar with the LRC might think this is a large group and ask, “How many people does it really take to screw in a lightbulb?” Well, the answer is not 55, but this is really the wrong question. Better questions as they relate to society and the environment are “What lightbulb should be used? Should it even have a screw base? How will it be controlled (optically, temporally, chromatically)? Who is going to use it and for what purpose?” These are questions that receive research funding, as the LRC has proven for many years.
COLLABORATIVE EFFORT
The LRC recognizes that it is impossible to hire all the people necessary to advance its ambitious social and environmental research mission. So we collaborate—a lot. There are smart and talented people out there doing basic and applied research that have no close association with the lighting industry or with lighting practice (e.g., astronomers, oncologists and civil engineers). We see our job, in part, as reaching out to this talent and building on their expertise and goodwill to meet our mission. These collaborations are deeply satisfying to us because they provide a forum for rapid learning, but even more so because they validate our belief that lighting truly cuts across disciplines and has fundamental value to humanity.
Education is an important part of meeting our mission. Like many other lighting education programs, we teach our students what is important to know about lighting and how to provide lighting for a wide range of applications. Perhaps unlike any other lighting education program, however, we place most of our emphasis on teaching students to ask why. Education and research at the LRC are flip sides of the same coin. After all, research is inherently about answering the why questions, so we have built our education program around an emphasis on answering them. Our formal teaching curriculum covers a wide range of disciplines, from physics Lighting Research & Education to biology to architecture. However, our students also become involved in research almost immediately. Some of our graduates, in fact, discover their nascent love of research and continue to pursue it as a career.
I recall coming to the LRC from the National Research Council Canada (NRCC) and being advised by one of the leaders in the lighting industry not to take the job of LRC Director. He said, “You’re crazy leaving a solid research environment with good funding for a job that is insecure and requires raising funds.” To further emphasize his point, he added, “There is no more than $250,000 per year in the entire lighting industry to support lighting research.” And he was right. There wasn’t more funding than that then, and there isn’t much more than that now provided by the industry for lighting research. (Again, I distinguish lighting research from lighting product development.) Despite this warning, the LRC operates on an annual budget of more than $6 million per year. But, significantly, this funding comes from people who need good lighting, not from people who do good lighting. Knowing the difference has been essential for our success.
THEN AND NOW
So, what are some of the projects that we have undertaken in the past 20 years? Probably at the top of my list would be those projects under the National Lighting Product Information Program (NLPIP). NLPIP was established as an independent testing program by utilities and government agencies across the United States. Manufacturers were prohibited from participating in the program or providing funding. The goal was simple enough: NLPIP was created to provide product-specific data on the performance of lighting technologies.
Since our first publication in 1990, NLPIP has published 50-plus reports on lighting components, systems and issues. As a testament to our risk management procedures, Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, broke with its long-standing tradition of doing its own testing and, with permission from us, published NLPIP data on the performance of compact fluorescent lamps. By independent testing and reporting, NLPIP has quietly supported those lighting technologies that improve building energy efficiency.
Significantly too, original research has emanated from NLPIP testing, and today we have several programs supported by government and industry to study the basic performance characteristics of fluorescent lighting systems, control technologies and, of course, solid-state lighting.
In fact, today, solid-state lighting is a very extensive area of research at the LRC, one that we undertook a decade ago. The LRC has, for example, established a number of test methods, including a definition of LED system life and LED system performance under different temperature environments (open air, enclosed and insulated ceiling). Behind these test methods are basic research projects supported by government and industry to improve the energy efficiency (e.g., scattered photon extraction) and aesthetic properties (e.g., color rendering) of solid-state lighting systems. In addition to these more basic research topics, the solid-state lighting program has completed nearly 20 application and demonstration projects from New York to California.
Arguably, the LRC has transformed the entire discussion of outdoor lighting. Fifteen years ago, the LRC, with support from manufacturers and government, established a program of basic research devoted to understanding how the visual system performs under mesopic light levels, where both rods and cones participate in the visual response. From that research, a unified system of photometry was developed and published. That body of work has led to a greater worldwide understanding of basic visual mechanisms as well as efficient application of light at night.
Recently, we have developed a comprehensive system of measuring light pollution, known as the Outdoor Site-Lighting Performance (OSP) method. What distinguishes OSP from others has been the quantification of sky glow, light trespass and glare into one practical system that can help communities discuss this important topic in a rational, quantitative way with lighting practitioners.
We are currently pursuing a basic understanding of how street lighting affects driver safety. This study is supported by the National Academy of Sciences and a final report should be available to the public at the end of this year. In addition, we are developing, with support from both government and industry, a basic understanding of headlight glare and the various factors that affect driver safety and comfort. A congressional report on headlight glare is due in the coming year.
Finally, the LRC is defining light in a totally new way. Light not only affects our ability to see, but it also regulates all of our recurring daily functions like the sleep-wake cycle. These circadian rhythms are found throughout the entire body, even in individual cells. Since light (and dark) is the primary regulatory stimulus for these rhythms, we saw it as essential to develop a new definition of light for the circadian system. We recently developed a model of phototransduction for the circadian system that can form the foundation for a new definition of circadian light. We have already applied these new concepts of circadian light to improve sleep quality in the elderly and help young people to be awake and asleep at more socially acceptable times.
This area of research is also expected to help our collective understanding of the importance of good lighting for night-shift workers who suffer from a high incidence of some cancers, possibly because they do not experience a regular, 24-hour cycle of circadian light and dark. In this context, we are also developing new light-measurement and analysis tools that may help prevent these cancers, and may also lead to better treatment of some cancers by orchestrating cellular timing for more effective application of chemotherapy.
BECOMIN A 'FIELD'
One day we hope that lighting will become a field, like biology, physics or neurosciences. A measure of success will be the day when high school guidance counselors begin to say, “You know, lighting might be a field for you to consider as a career. It’s an exciting area of both research and application.” Establishing lighting as a field is, of course, a tall order. But it was a tall order to transform the practice of medicine from crude barbering to sophisticated surgery. Medical research was the foundation for that beneficial transformation, and we believe lighting research can help shape lighting practice to provide greater social benefit in such areas as transportation safety, building energy efficiency and human health..
Some have recently argued that funding for lighting research is disappearing. This is not true. There is a genuine need for foundational lighting research, and, I assure you, there is plenty of room at the bottom.
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