Date: Nov 07, 2010 Author: Andrew Khouri Source: Daily Breeze (
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Twenty-five years ago, Polish immigrants Joanna Jannson and her husband, Tomasz assembled a laser laboratory, complete with optical lenses and recording film in the garage of their Redondo Beach home.
"I bought lasers. I fixed the garage - everything," said Jannson, who speaks with a heavy Polish accent.
But the couple didn't keep their experiments there for long, moving into a rented facility, after winning a number of government research awards in 1986.
"I had scheduled meetings (at our house), but by the time the meetings happened we already had a facility," chuckled Jannson.
Today, Jannson, CEO of Physical Optics Corp. and her husband, who serves as chief technical officer, have slightly more room - a sprawling 100,000-square-foot, five-building complex in a Torrance business park.
Physical Optics makes advanced technologies, such as flight recorders, surveillance systems and IED detectors for the military and aerospace markets. This year, the company projects slightly more than $45 million in sales, when its spin-offs Luminit LLC and Broadata Communications Inc. are included.
Physical Optics is currently developing a dog tag for the military that packs into a memory chip much more information than the standard engraved blood type, name and Social Security number.
"You carry your own medical records with you inside the tag," said Rick Shie, the company's senior vice president.
Those vital records can be transmitted to and from the smart tags through a wireless network. A user can also speak into the tag, providing soldiers with an audio description of their medical history. Medics can capture the information from the dog tag within 10 meters of the device, the company says, doing so before ever reaching an injured soldier.
The tags, which can be worn as a watch in addition to the typical necklace fashion, allow medical history (including any treatment given in the field) to arrive with a soldier in a medical center, Shie said.
Since 9/11, Physical Optics has moved increasingly from the commercial arena toward the military and security markets, said Jannson.
"Very quickly after 9/11 there was really an opening in the government markets, in the military markets. They started to look into new technologies to replace the old ones," said Jannson, 58, who now lives in Torrance.
Physical Optics won $6 million in Department of Defense contracts in the agency's fiscal year 2001, according to usaspending.gov, a government website that compiles all federal awards.
In 2010, that number grew to $24 million, when including Department of Homeland Security contracts, according to the website.
Government spending has been sharply criticized as the national deficit reached $1.3 trillion in the 2010 budget year. Last week, continued high unemployment helped catapult Republicans to control of the House of Representatives. Party members carried a message of scaling back government, although in general, they have not supported cutting defense expenditures.
Jack Borsting, an assistant secretary of defense in the Carter and Reagan administrations, said defense spending will come under increasing pressure to share the pain.
"I think if the Congress and the administration get serious about deficit reduction, they'll have to do some defense cuts," said Borsting, dean emeritus at the USC Marshall School of Business.
Borsting added that such decreases would likely take place in administrative positions and big weapons systems, areas Defense Secretary Robert Gates has already moved to trim.
The defense budget situation, Jannson said, provides the company with countless opportunities, pointing out Physical Optics is not in the business of building large weapon systems.
"We are a provider of new technologies that can supersede the existing, expensive and inefficient techniques that the military uses," Jannson said.
Jannson added the company will provide the Navy with a flight crash recorder next year that will save nearly $200 million over 10 years, although she declined to elaborate.
Born in Warsaw, Poland, Jannson came to the United States with her husband in 1981, defecting while at an international optics convention in Graz, Austria.
"We had enough of (communism). That's why we immigrated," Jannson said.
Jannson, who along with her husband has a Ph.D. in physics, said they would not have been able to start Physical Optics in their native Poland.
"I was always thinking I would study biology and those type of things," she said. "But then I got hooked on physics and I never changed from that time, except when I came here, and I saw business opportunity. It was a new world."
