IEEE Spectrum February, 2007 - 21

cano to a school, community, or
business group; a few days ago,
he was on the resort island of
St. Barthélemy giving a lecture
to utility executives. Every now
and then, he's in Paris, sharing
his expertise at the observatory's
parent institute.
A sunny morning in early
October finds him headed for
the summit of Soufrière and
a rendezvous with Dominique
Gibert, a professor of geophysics at the University of Rennes,
in northwestern France. On the
way up, Anténor-Habazac climbs
steadily, fortifying himself with
sweet, gooey, dried bananas
that he takes from a package in
his green climbing suit.
Anténor-Habazac and Gibert
have been studying a mysterious
water-filled crater, named Tarissan,
up on the summit. The water's surface is 110 meters down from the
rim of the crater, and the crater's
depth is several tens of meters. It's
hard to measure more precisely
because the water is boiling and is

so acidic that its fluctuating pH is
CHrisTiAn
usually negative.
AnTÉnOr-HAbAzAC
The two men believe Tarissan
AGe: 56
is the crux to understanding how
heat and water propagate through
wHAT He dOes: Designs,
the volcano and, therefore, how
installs, and maintains solarthe volcano might behave in the
powered sensor stations to
monitor the Soufrière volcano.
future. Soufrière is a subduction
volcano-which means that its
FOr wHOm: Observatoire
fire and fury come from a region
Volcanologique et
Sismologique de Guadeloupe, a
deep below the volcano where
unit of the Institut de Physique
two tectonic plates are colliding
du
Globe de Paris
and sliding, one over the other.
wHere He dOes iT:
Anténor-Habazac has been trying
Guadeloupe, French West
to design some casings to protect
Indies.
temperature sensors, hydrophones, and other electronics from
FUn FACTOrs: Travels around
the Caribbean and to Paris;
the boiling acid, but so far he's had
lives on a beautiful island
little success. Some heavy-gauge
and works in a tower on top of
stainless steel and aluminum fixan extinct volcano; faces an
tures he tried recently were eaten
intriguing assortment of chalaway within two months.
lenges in circuit design, antenToday, the investigators want
nas, solar power, and software.
to collect samples of the seething liquid. But after they stretch
some guide ropes across the rim, slings his pack over his shoulders
the clouds open up. Forty min- and heads down the volcano.
utes later, with the rain still comA couple of hours later, he is
ing down hard, Anténor-Habazac sitting outdoors at a charming res-

taurant in St. Claude, relishing his
first real meal of the day. He starts
with a petit punch-clear, bracing
Guadeloupean rum mixed with a
bit of raw cane sugar and fresh
lime juice. It blasts away the lingering chill from the soggy trek. Then
there's pea soup and a wonderfully
satisfying goat curry-"the only
true curry," Anténor-Habazac
insists, as he minces an orange
habanero chili to put on top of it.
Nearby, the street teems with
children playing and adults strolling to markets and offices. The
life and bustle remind AnténorHabazac why his monitoring
networks matter: St. Claude will
almost certainly be the first town
pulverized the next time Soufrière
blows its top.
But for now, as the sun sinks
behind nearby palm trees, the
engineer is in a mood to reflect
on his life and career. "I like
radio technology," he says. "I just
always want to connect something to something else."

-Glenn Zorpette

technology officer of the company's now- art installations, Jepsen returned,
brain surgery: are you still smart
defunct display division. Looking for a somewhat reluctantly, to Brown
or not? So afterwards I tried to
change of pace, at OLPC she soon found for a Ph.D. in optics. "All the
challenge myself to find out."
herself at the happy center of a whirlwind. advice I'd gotten was that,
She finished her Ph.D. in the
"The whole first year I couldn't sleep past as a woman, it's a lot easier power consumpTion next six months and then
of a Typical
two or three in the morning, I was just [with a Ph.D.], because people
cofounded MicroDisplay, a
lapTop
so excited to wake up and enjoy what I will let you through the door,"
Fremont, Calif.-based company
did again," Jepsen says. "There were no she says. "It's a union card; that's
that manufactures liquid-crystalboundaries; we were just running as fast all it is. Just get the stupid union card.
on-silicon chips for high-definition
as we could."
So that's what I did."
TV displays. She left MicroDisplay in
Jepsen, now 4 1, spent her ch i ldHer ambivalent return to academia 2003, citing "creative differences" with
hood on a family farm
coincided with a precipi- its chief executive, but within days Intel
mAry lOU JePsen tous decline in health. was recruiting her.
in Connecticut. She first
ieee member At age 29, Jepsen found
dove into technology durHer health problems weren't quite

8 to 30 w

ing the summer after her
junior year of college, testdriving nuclear submarines for the U.S. Naval
Under water Systems
Center in New London,
Con n . Sh e g ra du ate d
from Brown University,
in Providence, R.I., with
degrees in art and electrical engineering, and
subsequently earned a
master's degree from the
Media Lab. After brief
forays into teaching computer science and creating
large-scale holographic

www.spectrum.ieee.org

AGe: 41
wHAT sHe dOes: Dreams up
ways to design a high-quality
US $100 laptop for children in
emerging countries; acts as
"ambassador" to the laptop's
manufacturers in Asia and
to the countries that will buy
the computers.
FOr wHOm: One Laptop
per Child
wHere sHe dOes iT:
Cambridge, Mass., and Taiwan.
FUn FACTOrs: Gets to travel
the world and meet heads
of state.

herself suffering from
bl i s ter i n g he ad ac hes ,
confined to a wheelchair,
and sleeping 20 hours a
day. She was just about
to drop out of school
when an MRI revealed a
tumor on her pituitary, a
small gland at the base of
the brain central to hormone production. She
underwent surgery to
have the tumor removed
and emerged from the
ordeal ready to move on
with her life. "There's a
stigma when you undergo

over, though. As a result of the operation,
Jepsen's body now makes no hormones,
requiring a rigid schedule of twice-daily
hormone supplements to keep her alive.
Now that she's a globe-trotting computer
executive for the OLPC venture, the regimen can be tough to follow; last March she
went into adrenal shock on board a plane,
forcing it to make an emergency landing.
(On the bright side, Jepsen reports that as
a result of her hormone deficiency, she is
unaffected by jet lag.)
The bold tech n ica l cha l lenge of
designing a US $100 laptop and the
chance to work on global problems are
what made the project irresistible to her.
Her first big assignment was to reinvent

February 2007 | IEEE Spectrum | NA 29

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum February, 2007