ECE Alumnus Kobayashi finds success in a variety of roles throughout career

ECE alumnus Herb Kobayashi (BSEE ’56) never found himself limited to just one profession.

In six decades, he has worked across the country in a variety of roles that include missile tracking research, federal telecommunications oversight and a stint as a biology professor. Looking back at all he had accomplished, he gave credit to his four years at Illinois for giving him the tools to pursue his passions.

“The schooling I got at Illinois was instrumental in giving me a foundation for my career,” Kobayashi said.

Kobayashi came to Illinois in 1952 after serving as a Korean War infantryman from 1950-1951. He was part of the first wave of veterans to receive the Korean War GI Bill that was good for four years of college education. Kobayashi decided to pursue electrical engineering after growing up with a strong interest in amateur radios, which he continued to be involved in as a student at Illinois.

He was one of the few Hawaiian students at Illinois at that time, but Kobayashi said he had no trouble fitting in with the student body. He just had to act like he belonged.

“My feelings that when you go somewhere to live and there is no one of your own nationality there, what you should is act like you belong with crowd,” Kobayashi said. “If you do that, people won’t treat you differently.”

After graduating from Illinois, he focused his career mainly on telecommunications work, devising satellite communications for Lockheed Martin’s missile and space division. It was the only private company he ever worked for; he spent the rest of his engineering career working for the federal government.

He moved on to work for Boulder Labs, a U.S. Department of Commerce scientific research laboratory. Kobayashi’s research there primarily focused on highly accurate missile tracking technology.

“What they wanted was to have information on a missile’s trajectory after it is launched from Cape Canaveral,” Kobayashi said. “The system we were working on would be able to locate the projectile at all times.”

Kobayashi’s ten year stint at Boulder Labs ended when he decided that engineering wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore. His interests at the time laid in a different STEM field: biology. So he enrolled at University of Colorado at Boulder and received his master’s degree in biology in 1967 and a PhD in plant ecology from the University of Hawaii in 1973. He travelled back to Colorado after receiving his doctorate and began a stretch as a professor at the University of Colorado.

But after a 12-year stretch away from engineering, a position at the NSA in Annapolis, Maryland, piqued his interest, and Kobayashi returned to the communications field. He spent the next 25 years helping to improve the telecommunications spectrum through his work with the NSA and the National Communications and Telecommunications Administration.

“We were working on improving and overseeing how the telecommunications spectrum operated,” Kobayashi said. “I dealt with radio antennas, and the experience I had with amateur radios at Illinois gave me a leg up on my peers.”

He retired 17 years ago and has lived in Hawaii since then, but that doesn’t meant he stopped traveling. Kobayashi returned to Illinois in May to see the new ECE Building and celebrate the 60th anniversary of his graduation. He said that having had the opportunity to travel and see the country has been an invaluable experience to his career and life.

“Geography is one of my favorite subjects,” Kobayashi said. “I was really interested in seeing these places and learn what’s there because that’s how you enlarge your life. As far as I know, I have never been discouraged by traveling.”