Faculty profile: Unni Pillai

Unni Pillai likes a challenge and hopes his students do, too.  In the classroom at SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering, Pillai challenges his students every day to think about the ways that technological change impacts our lives and, in turn, our economy.

Pillai, Assistant Professor of Nanoeconomics at CNSE, recently delivered the prestigious William E. Weiss Lecture in Economics at Skidmore College. His talk, “The Semiconductor Industry and its Contribution to Economic Growth,” discussed how the increasing computerization of the U.S. economy from 1975-1995 was accompanied by slow productivity growth in the economy. It wasn’t until the second half of the 1990s, he says, that productivity growth accelerated, crediting Information Technology as the main driver behind the resurgence; the semiconductor industry playing a major role.

“The Weiss lecture is given every two years to foster discussion on contemporary economic issues,” Pillai said. “There has been a lot of interest among the people in the Saratoga region about the economic activity that is being generated by the Global Foundries plant in nearby Malta. So they were interested in getting someone to speak about the semiconductor industry and one of the faculty members at Skidmore knew about my work.”

Pillai teaches courses related to economics and technological change, including focusing on the role of technological change and economic growth, using game theory to understand competition among firms in high-technology industries, finance and valuation of companies in high-technology industries, and technology revolutions and the role nanotechnology is playing in many leading industries.

In the long run, he says, technological progress is the main driver of improvements in living standards within a country or a region and the main driver of differences in living standards across those areas.

“I try to understand how economic factors affect the rate of technological progress, in individual industries and in the aggregate economy. Such economic factors include government policies, market structure, competition among firms, the nature of technology in an industry, etc.”

It’s through technological progress that we see improvements in our economic well-being, he explains, adding that better technology makes individuals and companies more productive, leading to increases in average income per person. If that technological progress stops, though, Pillai says that our economic well-being will become stagnant too. On the other hand, he says, technological improvements in products and services are motivated by the prospect of economic returns.

“Companies pour millions of dollars into research and development to produce new or better products because they expect these investments to increase their profits (and returns to their shareholders).  Economic motivation drives technological progress, and improvements in technology in turn raise our economic well-being.”

Growing up in Kerla, a coastal state in the southwestern part of India, Pillai completed his high school education before going to Singapore when he was 17 on a full college scholarship. He spent eight years in Singapore, four in college pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering and the other four working there.

He says it was halfway through his degree program that he started to feel that his interest in the social sciences was getting stronger, and he began to explore ways in which he could pursue a degree in it. It was also while in SIngapore that he says he got his first exposure to the rapid economic development of the city-state.

“Singapore was a fishing village in 1950s but became one of the richest countries by the turn of the century. In contrast, India had languished economically and still remained economically poor. The contrast was striking, and you couldn’t stop thinking what caused the differences in the paths of the two countries.”

Completing his engineering degree, he immediately began work on another bachelor’s degree through an external study program offered by University of London through their London School of Economics and Political Science. This was also while working as an engineer at Advanced Micro Devices, also known as AMD.

“I was planning to do a degree in politics, but after my first year, I realized that economics would be the best way to combine my interests in social sciences with my belief in the importance of careful thinking through mathematical models. I completed the undergraduate degree in Economics, and then I continued to pursue a Master’s degree in London School of Economics on a full scholarship. At this point, I was sure that I wanted to spend the rest of my life studying questions at the intersection of technology and economic development. So after the master’s degree, I decided to pursue my PhD in Economics, and landed at University of Minnesota in 2003.”

All of these pursuits made for what he calls a “very varied” college experience, part of which included getting used to a new country. He was involved in student activities during his undergraduate days, becoming the General Secretary of the Student’s Union. At the same time, Pillai was trying out different areas within electrical engineering to determine what interested him. He eventually found his way to circuit design, spending quite a bit of time in his senior year working on a final project in Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) design, which is the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. It was this project which landed him his first job in the semiconductor industry at AMD.

Now he puts all that experience in the semiconductor industry and his knowledge of economics to use at the Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering.

“CNSE is an ideal place to pursue my research agenda on economic drivers of technological progress. Not only do I have as colleagues many physicists, chemists, biologists and engineers engaged in doing cutting edge research, but you would be hard pressed to find another university campus that houses as many corporate labs as CNSE does. The ability to interact with all the engineers and scientists, from both the academic and corporate world, was one of the main reasons for coming to CNSE/SUNY Poly. I get to observe on a daily basis, and from many different perspectives, the process of technology development.”

The opportunity to do research in economics was what attracted him to a career as an academic, only to find how much he enjoyed teaching after he started it.

“Teaching, I figured out later, is also the perfect way to really understand a subject well. When someone is exposed to an idea or concept for the first time, as students are in a class, it is really new terrain and so you have all kinds of fundamental and basic doubts. When they voice these basic doubts, you as a teacher have to think really hard about basic stuff, which is always the best way to learn. I enjoy teaching more and more every year.”