As of August 8th , 2024, I’ll have been a faculty member at Arizona State University for 20 years. It makes me feel old. But I was hired by ASU at the age of 25 so I’ve just kind of gone from being the young guy to the not young guy, I suppose. An awesome anniversary. I’m proud of the work we’ve done over the past two decades. But this is not why I write.
By happenstance, this anniversary is at the precise moment that I’m crossing over to exactly 100 granted US patents. Borat: “Great Success!”) Philosophically, the purpose of the US patent system is to build on the knowledge of those who came before us in a structured and formal way. Giants. Shoulders. Standing. But also to incentivize collaborative innovation beyond the state of the art at that moment in history, fostering a culture of continuous improvement, driving, and codifying societal progress. The dynamo of America. I think only one of the 100 is a single inventor patent. So my career as an inventor has been characterized by some of the most wonderful and fulfilling collaborations with brilliant people. Brilliant, loving people. This milestone I’m truly proud of. At an average of 5 granted US patents per year over a 20-year span (with more in the pipeline!), the productivity of our team has been just remarkable. I’m so proud of the problems we’ve tackled. And the ultra-translational nature of the work. The degree to which we’ve gone beaker-to-field/lab-to-product/discovery-to-innovation-to-solution is the aspect of my career that I just absolutely adore. And I hope it inspires others.
I wanted to be an “inventor” when I grew up. As a young kid I’d watch “Mr. Wizard’s World” whenever it was on (I still love going back to YouTube and watching old Mr. Wizard clips. So many amazing experiments, many of which I repeated at home). This was the beginning of the formalization of knowledge for me. That and the multiple books on electricity, chemistry, and physics that I checked out from the library for years on end. (Also, for a good laugh: look up “Mr. Wizard is a dick” [sorry] on YouTube. His direct style wouldn’t work today!). I also loved an Australian TV show on the Discovery Channel called “Beyond 2000” that featured the most amazing innovations from dunking a television set in a fluorocarbon bath to demonstrate those amazing liquids to hydrogen fuel cells to self-driving cars, all back in the 1980s! My curiosity and constant spirit of exploration about the world was unbounded. And it remains so today. I feel childlike when I’m just pondering some problem in materials science or thermodynamics or applied mathematics and can just freely associate concepts. Dopamine hits abound!
As I grew, I had a lot of luck. ASU was very inexpensive when I entered as a freshman mechanical engineering student in 1996. I think I paid about $750 for the first semester, which was important because I had no money! My sophomore year, I fell in love with materials science & engineering upon taking the introductory class from Jim Adams. I was inspired and switched my degree program. I was also lucky to join Karl Sieradzki’s lab as a sophomore and that opened up a world of discovery and an acceleration of my education. The postdocs and graduate students in that lab (Nikolay Dimitrov, Stanko Brankovic, Miomir Vukmirovic, and Natasa Vasiljevic) were brilliant and I was immersed in their generous mentorship. I did work on nanomechanically patterning quantum dots, ultra-thin film stress evolution, physical electrochemistry, superionic conductors, and high temperature superconductors. Thanks to Sieradzki’s approach, which gave me a huge amount of free rein, I was able to do enough independent work that I was accepted into the PhD program at MIT.
At MIT I had the good fortune of joining Carl V. Thompson’s thin film group, again a group with an amazing set of other students. And I also became a member of Nikola Marzari’s group. Another group with super intelligent and amazing people. At MIT I worked on stress evolution in ultra-thin metallic thin films and density functional theory calculations related to catalysis and developing computational slights-of-hand to accelerate the calculation of properties of transition metals. Interactions with Yet-Ming Chiang, Craig Carter, Franz Spaepen, and others inspired me. The Institute has an intellectual energy unlike any other place in the world. A gift.
I then was recruited back to ASU as a junior faculty in 2004. I was very fortunate with grant proposals, winning an NSF CAREER award and DOE of Science awards in the first version of the so-called “Hydrogen Economy”. A combination of grants from federal and private funding sources followed, and when ARPA-e came around, four big grants on energy storage catapulted my group’s capacity to think about ever bigger problems. ASU has been a dream institution for someone like me: focusing my energy and skills on so-called “Translational Research”.
I built my academic research group around the full arc of working on hard problems and migrating them from beaker-scale discoveries that inform innovations to solutions in the field that solve a problem in the real world. This type of translation makes me a weird sort of academic, but a productive one! Being a faculty at ASU, with President Michael Crow at the helm, has given me a wide berth of academic freedom. ASU has enabled me to craft decade-long jaunts into single problems that result in companies, that result in massive amounts of capital being deployed to run the problem fully to ground. When one goes deep on a single problem the integral of progress is over decades not semesters. Unlock.
The graduate students, post docs, and staff scientists in my academic group, and the engineers and scientists inside the companies we’ve built are the foundation of this 100th US patent milestone. When I won the Lemelson-MIT Prize back in 2019, the largest award given for invention in the US, I dedicated it to the collaborators, friends, and loved ones who share inventorship with me on so many concepts. Some of these patents are just ok. And some of them are truly magical in the insights they describe. We made huge strides in secondary air batteries and in solar atmospheric water harvesting and made a much smaller impact on electrochemical ammonia synthesis. I’m proud of our work in hierarchically structured electrodes and less so in electrochemically stimulating fossil fuel resources. the way we solved shunt current problems in flow batteries, the so-called ‘showerhead’. And our work on dendrite capture unlocking high cycle life in zinc air batteries. I also love our elegant approach to sensing ozone concentrations in a fieldable sensor that has a dynamic pseudo-reference electrode. And ultimately my favorite set of inventions are related to the beauty of the thermodynamics that we continue to unlock producing liquid water from the air, using only sunlight as an input.
SOURCE is changing the state of water for people around the world. Making drinking water a distributed and high-trust resource where once there wasn’t one. The patents that describe the Hydropanel technology are nuanced and beautiful in the art they describe.
I miss my buddy Joel Hayes and his passion for problem solving, I cherish the moments solving problems with my brother Grant, I love the ongoing deep conversations with Ram Krishnan. I will forever be delighted by the way Jonathan Goldberg’s, Jose Bautista’s, Kamil Salloum’s, Kimberly McGuinness’, Paul Johnson’s, Mike Robinson’s, Elise Switzer’s, and Derek Wolfe’s minds work, they are each uniquely brilliant. Along with the myriad other coinventors who I’ve been lucky enough to work with, these people have made my career mostly like play.
I figure I’m about halfway through my career, though I don’t imagine ever retiring, so perhaps I’m only a third of the way through my career. I’ve learned to better celebrate the milestones when they come, because they pass us by so quickly. And there’s always the hard stuff, so we might as well savor the sweet moments.
Here's to another 20 (or 40!) years of problem solving with friends!