Being an Engineer

S2E12 What It’s Like Being A 40 Year Engineering Veteran At The Same Company | Bill Atterbury

March 12, 2021 William Atterbury Season 2 Episode 12
Being an Engineer
S2E12 What It’s Like Being A 40 Year Engineering Veteran At The Same Company | Bill Atterbury
Show Notes Transcript

Over his 40 year tenure working at Battelle, Bill has worked on a multitude of different projects, been named on dozens of patents, and developed skills using a wealth of design tools. In the process he has been named inventor of the year (2013) and a Battelle Distinguished Inventor. Join us during our conversation as we discuss what one learns working 40 years at the same company, the importance of process, and how to mentor young engineers.

The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us

About Being An Engineer

The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.

The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us

Presenter:

The being an engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people, resources and opportunities. Enjoy the show.

Bill Atterbury:

I tell our clients, I tell them, the people I work with, you know, I don't have an answer to this one. But the 40 times in the past that this, this type of problem has been presented to me, we forgot a pretty good solution to it. And I know we'll get through this one too.

Aaron Moncur:

Hello, and welcome to the Being an Engineer Podcast. Our guest today is Bill Atterbury, who holds both Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Mechanical Engineering, and notably, has worked at the same company Battelle for 40 years. Bill has spent his career designing and developing new products largely in the medical device space. He is a Battelle distinguished inventor, and in 2013, was named Patel's Inventor of the Year. Bill, thank you so much for spending some time today.

Bill Atterbury:

Thanks for having me.

Aaron Moncur:

Well, what made you decide to become an engineer?

Bill Atterbury:

This is, yeah, always a tough question, you're gonna get a lot of the same answers, I'm sure. Of course, when I was little, I really love to take things apart. And that was always enjoyable, found satisfaction from that, my dad kind of wanted me to step up to the next next level and start putting things back together. So that was, that was obviously the next step is to put them back together. And then, and then of course, starting to make them work. And so I really found a lot of enjoyment with that, you know, start with bicycles. And as I got older, you know, I started wrenching on cars. And that was pretty enjoyable to me. So I found I was good at that I was good at visualizing mechanical things, I was pretty good at math. So it sort of made it a natural.

Aaron Moncur:

Tell me a little bit more about visualizing mechanical things, because I think that's a skill that a lot of us have that is kind of hard for others to understand without without having that natural skill. At what point did you realize that you're pretty good at just visualizing things in 3D?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, I don't know if I realized it myself. But I realized it and others how somebody could look at something and spin it around in their head and make it match up to other parts and how things work. A lot of the shapes we see now, you know, you got to visualize how it's going to look in your head and, and I, I began to appreciate how others could do that. And I guess found that I had some of those skills as well.

Aaron Moncur:

Tell me a little bit about what it was like what it is like to have worked at the same company, Battelle for 40 years, that is pretty rare these days. I mean, for someone even to go for 10 or 20 years at the same company, let alone 40.

Bill Atterbury:

It is. Yeah, and I guess there's a lot of reasons why you might want to switch, I have to give you a little bit of background on Battelle. And maybe we'll do that in a minute. But we get into a large variety of projects and products. And you know, we're kind of doing something different all the time. So when one project ends, and we pick up another client in a different industry, maybe or a different part of the medical industry, and it's a totally different products totally per project. And oftentimes you get to work with different people. So it's always changing. And because of that, I feel like our values over the years have kind of stayed aligned enough that I've enjoyed staying there.

Aaron Moncur:

You mentioned this just now, but maybe you can give us a little bit of background on Battelle.

Bill Atterbury:

Yeah, I got to talk a little bit about the history and how it started. to kind of understand who we are. It's not a very common name. Now, not everybody knows who we are. Oh, yeah, they're down the street. I know. They do a lot of good things, but I don't know what they do. That kind of stuff. So it was started back in the 30s. Liver 90 years ago by a man by the name of Gordon Battelle. And he and his family were, I'll call them central Ohio industrialists, they were involved in mining and material materials and metallurgy and things like that. And Gordon didn't have any heirs to give his wealth to. And so instead, he set up His will, funding of an organization named after him Battelle Memorial Institute. That's where the memorial comes from, who's kind of had a vision that science and research advances can solve problems in business and society as a whole. And so in This organization then can fulfill that vision of his. And so we're, it's really weird. We're not, you know, we're we're nonprofit company. We are, you know, we don't have any shareholders, we don't have any owners, we are simply set up by this will. And in addition to continuing to stay sustainable and relevant in this world, we also donate a fair amount of our proceeds to charity.

Aaron Moncur:

That is fascinating. Since Battelle doesn't have an owner, how, how is top management structured? I mean, is it pretty typical for any modern day organization?

Bill Atterbury:

Yes, I'd say so. You know, of course, we have a management structure, just like everybody expects, and it goes all the way to the top, we have officers, and they report to a board of directors, which are folks hired to help guide Battelle in the future. And I guess it's nice that we don't have to answer to shareholders, but we still have to stay sustainable. So that means we have to stay, you know, basically, relevant. And financially, we have to have revenue coming in to meet to meet our future needs and to donate to charities.

Aaron Moncur:

Now, did you say Battelle is owned by? Is it a trust?

Bill Atterbury:

It is a trust that was created based on Gordon's will? Yes.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay. How does that work being owned by a trust? Is that I guess legally, what does that really mean?

Bill Atterbury:

Our primary legal responsibility is to maintain the definition of the company as defined by the will.

Aaron Moncur:

And does that go on in perpetuity? It does.

Bill Atterbury:

And the good thing about the will the way it was written is, you know, I told you that Gordon had kind of interest in mining and metallurgy and steel. And so the focus is kind of on the problems of the day, which a lot of metallurgy involved and things like that, but the wheel was set up in much more general terms where we could do research and development, pretty much in any area of technological significant significance that we saw fit.

Aaron Moncur:

So you're self guided, to a large extent.

Bill Atterbury:

To some extent, we are. But just like everybody, we have to pay the bills and keep the doors open. And so, you know, we tend to follow the needs of others who ask for work to be done and are willing to pay for it. So that we can continue to do good work. Sure.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah. I think Reed Harper, who was on the show earlier referred to Battelle as the the largest not for profit that you have never heard of. Like a fun definition.

Bill Atterbury:

Yeah, it is. It, we oftentimes don't get much credit for what we do, we work for clients, and they take our products and market them sell and manufacture them. But our name oftentimes doesn't get mentioned as part of our contracts, in many cases. In some cases, we can talk about some of the things we've done and and I'll bring up a few of those as examples along the way.

Aaron Moncur:

Great, well, what what benefits Have you enjoyed from your career, having worked for the same company for you know, for so long that you think might not have you might not have had, where you did, you know, job hop every four to six years, like many of us do?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, obviously, there's the standard benefits that anyone company offers. But, you know, the stability is nice, you kind of know what you're going to do in general terms, you know, what your office is, you don't have to...

Aaron Moncur:

But you get that after you know, 2, 3, 4 years you have that already, you're an order of magnitude beyond that.

Bill Atterbury:

In my case, it's been the connections we may have to make, amongst, for example, clients, getting to know different clients and they know our skills and are able to you know, understand what we can do and what value we can provide to their organization. And that kind of just kind of grows as other people move around to different companies and then you get to do work on different projects for different people.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah. Well, you mentioned that you stayed at Battelle is one of the reasons you stay there is because their values have continued to align with yours and I wondered have there ever been times during the past 40 years where you thought to yourself you know, it's been a good ride here it's been great but maybe I ought to start exploring opportunities with with other companies and maybe you have explored but ultimately you've stayed at Mattel is that because use it to some degree anyway been able to kind of create your, your own reality to set up an environment that works well for you or has it really just worked out so well that Battelle aligns with you and nothing has had to change

Bill Atterbury:

it's it's Somewhere in between those two, when I first started at Battelle, I worked in a different group, we were primarily doing government contract research over there. And while I found it very technically challenging and interesting. Over time, I felt like I needed something more. And at the time, we were setting up a medical products group that was focused primarily on medical products was solely on medical products. And I got a chance to land there. And that's been really enjoyable. For me, it's, it's fulfilled one of my needs, and I think a lot of people have the same need as you want to see the work you do benefit people. And I think the medical industry is probably one of the better places for that. And that just kind of keeps me going. I get to see people use stuff that I've done.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, that's the sentiment that's been shared by several medical device engineers that we've had on the show. Well, I feel like I keep bringing it up 40 years, 40 years, 40 years, I'm not trying to make you feel old I promise, last time, I'll bring that number up. But as a 40-year veteran engineer, one question I had for you was how important is process in your daily role? What do you mean by process? I mean, processes. In fact, before we started the podcast, one of your questions to me was, I'd like to understand your process. How do you do this? So we all have processes that we follow every day might be a process for how to carry out a test procedure? Or how to write a document or, or something like that. But how important are processes to do you use them constantly? It could be just a checklist, what what place is that found in your deep engineering experience?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, certainly in the medical device world, processes are very important. We get towards the later stages of a commercial launch of a product. And for a medical product. That means following a lot of processes that obviously people will tell you about along the way. You know, people talk about the design history file, all the thing that goes into that, and the amount of paperwork and requirements specifications and test reports. And obviously, those are processes that are used, but I tend to look at a lot of other ones that are maybe more informal and less written down like, Okay, how, what's the process for doing a brainstorming session? Or what's the process for solving a challenging problems when when you don't really know what you've never done it before, and you don't know what to do and, and those are the really the more informal ones that you kind of got to take on a case by case basis.

Aaron Moncur:

I actually am interested to hear what your process for brainstorming is, this is something I've actually thought quite a bit about, would you mind sharing that?

Bill Atterbury:

Sure. So we typically will obviously have an objective to achieve out of our brainstorming, and it can be anywhere from, we're trying to come up with new concept approaches to do something and it can be very undefined, that can be really blue sky stuff, down to we have challenged with one specific design are one specific problem we're seeing, let's come up with all the different ways we can figure out on how to solve it. And, of course, as you know, brainstorming the same kind of standard rules apply. You're trying to be productive in a very collaborative environment, you're trying to build on other people's ideas, no ideas, a bad idea. You know, that sort of thing. And as far as that goes, it's you know, the facilitator will usually, you know, step up and create some sort of problem statement, I'll call it an objective statement to define or bound the nature of the problem that we're trying to solve. And then everybody just goes for it. I found that having a bunch of different perspectives, from the people who are in the involved in the process can be helpful. So a lot of times different disciplines, you know, you'll have w e software, maybe somebody who's in a totally different part of the organization, provide a different perspective. And it'll give you insight to a problem that maybe you didn't have before. And that you can build on

Aaron Moncur:

Tell me a little bit more about the role of facilitator because that's not a role that I always see in brainstorming sessions is that formally set up at Battelle to always have a facilitator as part of brainstorming.

Bill Atterbury:

We almost always have somebody play a facilitator role. And it can vary from somebody who's intimately involved in the problem who has, let's say, the technical knowledge in the background. Maybe he or she is the person who is interacting with the client and kind of understands, you know, what our client wants to get out of the brainstorming session can go from there. All the way up to, I think you've probably been involved in some brainstorming where you bring in a facilitator, and this person has no idea what you know, the type of solutions you might be working towards, but their job is basically just to get the most out of the people, you know, they're trying to get the people to interact and, and figure out ways to generate as much ideas that are pertinent to the problem as possible.

Aaron Moncur:

So the facilitator, he or she is not necessarily as focused on coming up with his or her own ideas, but more so focused on managing the people in the room?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, you bring them to the table to get their ideas. And so yeah, you want to you want to farm as much as you can out of them. Now, maybe they also have very good ideas, which, which, you know, sometimes it's best to keep those to later, sometimes it's best to interject them along the way, sometimes, the cylinder will help put up guardrails to keep us from driving off the road. So it can be any one of those things.

Aaron Moncur:

Nice. I read, I can't remember the name of the book. Now, it was like a Five-day Prototype or something like that. Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the author, but they had a really, really interesting idea for how to do brainstorming. And we tried it recently, and I thought it was, it was pretty effective. Everyone gets a pad of like a sticky pad pad. But the larger ones, you know, like four, four by six size, and you'll take 10 minutes or 15 minutes in silence and just write down all your ideas. So no one is speaking, you're just in your own head, writing down ideas, and you generate whatever it is, you know, 6, 10, 20 ideas on these individual sticky notes. And then one by one people go up onto like a big whiteboard or wall and they start putting them up there. And you start seeing patterns, right and trends, because some of the ideas are the same between Yes, you have three or four people brainstorming. And then you can start to group and organize these ideas into you know, different paths. And then you can start having conversations. And really that's the point at which people start talking is when we start looking at all the different sticky notes that are stuck to the wall or the whiteboard, and we say oh, what do we think about this one, and, and maybe the person whose idea it was provides a little bit more context about that. But I thought it was a great way to get a lot of ideas out really quickly without, you know, groupthink or any biases that might occur when one person says something, and maybe that person is kind of a leader in the group, and people kind of flocked to that idea and follow it. Anyway, that was, I thought, a really effective method of brainstorming that we tried recently.

Bill Atterbury:

I have to agree with you that that's a nice technique. Yeah, if you have one strong personality in the group, and they dominate the meeting, it doesn't really draw ideas from maybe the quieter ones that are more creative, in some cases. But But yeah, having a little bit of independent time to think about it either before the meeting or started the meeting is a good thing. Another technique, we also use those warm up exercises, so you'll give somebody a, it's may not be related to the topic that you're going to be working on at all, but a couple of minutes to do here come up with all different ways you could do this. And it gets people in that mood of one on a lot of ideas. And I wanted to call out a bunch, a bunch of bad ones here. But there might be a pearl in there, too.

Aaron Moncur:

It's a great idea. I had never heard of that before. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. You, you've, you've held several different roles in your career. And at this point, you are a team leader, as well, as an engineer, at what point in your career did you start to feel like you were ready to take on more of a leadership role.

Bill Atterbury:

It kind of happened organically in a lot of ways. I mean, have you slowly develop your technical skills in one area and, and maybe some people like the idea of working kind of as a lone ranger, all their lives in certain areas, and then you learn that you need, you need a bigger team to pull off a lot of these projects, you need people of different disciplines, you may not always have the right skills necessarily to do everything that needs to be done. And so then you get an opportunity to work with other people. And so you kind of build on that. And if you're lucky like I am, you still get to work in the technical roles with a lot of the other staff that that are on your team. And that's very enjoyable for me.

Aaron Moncur:

I know to mean, I've had the the the blessing to enjoy that same situation in my job. I'm a mechanical engineer. And I like to think that I'm pretty good when it comes to mechanical design. But we do a lot more than just mechanical design. Now we're doing automation and motion control and scanning and reverse engineering and I don't know how to program I don't know how to do reverse engineering. I'm terrible with you. Cool. So there are all these things that I can't do. And luckily, we have a team built around, you know, in the company that everyone has their role, we can all do much bigger things than we could as individuals.

Bill Atterbury:

My my aha moment there was, I was put in charge of managing a software project at one point in my career was a really big project. But it was interesting. This is a, this is embedded code stuff is it was hex code. And so I can't, I can't do the work, I can't see the code, I can only talk to the people. And so forcing you not to make a technical contribution really, really does enhance that role and makes you appreciate what everybody brings to the table when you put these teams together.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, oh, what an interesting experience that must have been, not not really having visibility into the technical side of things and just managing the project. Well, this is a good point to take just a real quick pause here and share with the listeners that team pipeline.us is where you can learn more about how we help medical device and other product engineering and manufacturing teams who need turnkey automated equipment or custom test fixtures to assemble, inspect, characterize or perform verification or validation testing on their devices. We're speaking with Bill Atterbur today. And Bill, can you share with us maybe one or two of the either the most interesting or most challenging projects you worked on, and maybe what you learned from those.

Bill Atterbury:

So we've obviously been doing medical products for quite a long time. And it varies theories we get into it varies from diagnostic equipment to surgical one and other hospital equipment and drug delivery devices which which are kind of what I'm going to talk about drug delivery can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. For us. Lately, it's been developing things like insulin pens, reusable and disposable insulin pens, and auto injectors, we've been doing a lot of auto injectors lately. So you know that the one I'll talk about is an insulin pen that we did. This is a little ways back. But I won't give any dates. And it was a pen that had some electronics on it, and some software and memory involved in it. And so you know, is a really neat exposure to all the disciplines you need. And that's fairly typical this day and age, because almost everything is going to be is or will be connected in some way, shape, or form. And I'll have many of those aspects on it. So it gave you an appreciation for kind of some of the challenges that you'd run into integrating with these other disciplines. It's not just your game anymore. They have certain requirements, and you have to help them solve theirs as well as solve your own. And, you know, integrating the software and that whole process, it was interesting to see that as well. But it just gave me a big appreciation for all the things necessary to bring a product together to market.

Aaron Moncur:

Excellent. Well, design tools. I mean, we all use his design engineers will use CAD. So that's pretty common one, but outside of that, what are some of your favorite design tools.

Bill Atterbury:

So I have to, you know, that design tools have really made a great improvement over the years. And, and and, you know, 40 years, I'll say the word 40 you get to see a lot of that. So, you know, when I was in college, I remember my first finite element program, it was on an IBM 360 it was done the punch cards, if you can imagine that. But, you know, since then the advances we have in a lot of the tools we use have, have really made a lot of things possible. Now and you mentioned CAD and you know, CAD used to be just automated drawing, but now 3d CAD especially, and 3d CAD that then drives your design, where you're manufacturing off of 3d CAD, and 3d CAD that enables you to do rapid prototypes, 3D printing, and have something in your hands the next day to be able to evaluate. It really is just an amazing an amazing change in the way things have have played out. You asked me about your question. Now, other tools that we use. Obviously, there's the standard engineering tools like math, CAD, MATLAB, and some of those. The ones we're taking more advantage of are some of the analytical tools. Finding programs, for example, ANSYS is one company that makes a bunch of those. And, you know, you start with the static analyses, things that maybe you couldn't have done 2030 years ago. And then you add in dynamic analyses and explicit diameter which is unlimited quarreled drop and impact types of evaluations. And that allows you to do some things that you couldn't have done even sort of 10 years ago. And my best example there is, you know, I run into people, many different people who say, you know, we've got this great medical device, we designed it, we tooled it, it's in, it's in, you know, now real material so that we can do our drop testing on it. We kind of boxed in because we've got the package defined, and we've got the human factors on it. And we drop it from one meter, freefall test, ISO freefall test, and something inside breaks. It's like, Oh, no, cuz it's a late stage, you know, issue that comes up. And, you know, having the kind of tools to be able to analyze that. From CAD, basically, to give you an insight into what's happening, and and more importantly, how to fix it, how to design around it is is a very valuable tool.

Aaron Moncur:

I imagine there are some people listening to this and thinking, 'Oh, FEA simulation. That sounds really hard. I've never done that before, that's gonna take, you know, years to learn and really be able to do well.' How much of a challenge is it to learn FEA and some of these analytical simulation programs?

Bill Atterbury:

I think it's becoming like any other tool that an engineer has in his toolbox, you know, you just have a different, a different tool to use. And they're really not that hard. I mean, it takes a while to get experienced with them. But like a lot of the CAD tools, it's easy to pick up and do certain problems fairly easily. You know, I don't see that as really being limitation. And we no longer have to be analysts dedicated analysts to use these tools now. And quite frankly, I find the biggest value in them, is putting them in the designers hands where they can do design synthesis with them design iterations, not just doing analysis and come up with a number. Here's the number, but rather use that to influence what the design looks like to optimize the design to make it do what they want it to do. In the real world.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah. Can you share? Do you have any any favorite vendors that others listening might find useful? It could be like the hardware supplier or I don't know, maybe it's a 3d printing service bureau or something like that, that you found particularly helpful in supporting product development efforts?

Bill Atterbury:

Yeah, we work with a lot of different vendors. So I'm not sure I can single one out. In particular, you know, obviously, engineers looking to getting parts, a lot of times parts, parts, custom parts to spec, getting them quickly. Other services, obviously, we use some of those we go outside for some rapid prototyping, we almost always work with Well, we always work with outside vendors that do prototype tooling, and contract manufacturing, that's always an outsource outsource condition for us. And so I guess I've worked with quite a few of them. And a lot of times they're teamed with the client, the client, select some and, and they just get a chance to work with a lot of them has really helped our you know, help us learn how to make that whole process work smoothly.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, I'll share one that my team really likes. There's a company called Fixture Works and I'm not getting paid to say this. They have no no idea who we are. We're just one of many, many customers for them. But they have all these really cool little mechanical widgets, these like quarter turn fasteners, that's probably what we use most often from them, and different knobs and things. But they're a really neat company. They have lots of just interesting mechanical solutions for fasteners and hardware and things like that, kind of like McMaster, but much much much more specialized in what they offer. What are some of your favorite materials to use for both low and high volume production?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, being in the medical industry, we work a lot with plastic parts and eventually get to a point where there are fairly high volumes that are that are made so you can imagine those are multi cavity tooling, a lot of injection molded parts, other types of processes as well. So we we certainly certainly use those and the materials that are dedicated to the purpose you know, the the I'll try to use generic names. The nylon, well nylons, the dow ruins the you know the tough lawns polyesters of course polycarbonate CBS has things like that. As far as smaller quantities go, you know, of course everything we have to prototype first Some of those materials obviously is whatever, whatever in the rapid prototyping machine today because you want to start tomorrow, it's best to pick that one. Yep. We work with some rubber parts there. Some elastomers will do machining for for not only prototype parts, but also test fixtures and things like that. And then a lot of those either plastic or aluminum or, you know, whatever, whatever we need that meets the meets the bills.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, if you guys are doing a bunch of test fixtures, you should check, check out the markforged machines. Do you know those?

Bill Atterbury:

I don't think so. Is that a prototype?

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, it's a it's a FDM technology 3D printer. But they put, they can put continuous carbon fiber in them. Again, no one's paying me to say this, but we use them. We have a few of those machines in house. And we use them all the time for test fixtures and jigs and equipment and things like that. And they're really just strong, chunky, blocky parts that are fantastic for that purpose.

Bill Atterbury:

Yeah, I think that's been a great use of the rapid prototype machine is the test fixtures, and we do the same thing. They're very heavy, clunky things that then can support our parts both in during testing, but we also use them for small volume assembly, things like that. real handy. And it's a little bit different way using the rapid prototype. Because Because it's now it's directly a product, but it's a it's very easy to make something very quick. And if I don't like what I got, today, I can have a different one tomorrow.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah, we make a lot of these device folders to go in our equipment, right all every piece of equipment has to do something to a device, which means you have to hold the device and the equipment. And we used to pay, I don't know, 20$500 or $3,000 for a custom, you know, aluminum machined holder that was nice and contoured to the profile of the device. And you take two or three weeks to get the part back. And now we just print it with these markforged machines. And it's like 500, or 500 bucks and a day or maybe two, if it's a big part. They're so valuable. I've really enjoyed using those. I'm going to switch gears just a little bit here. And can you tell me what what are a few of the most effective methods that you found to mentor Junior engineers and help them get up to speed, you know, quickly to the point that they are significant contributors to the engineering team?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, first of all, any any sort of training formal or informal, that you can provide is is very helpful. As far as the best kind of training, it's on the job, you know, you don't get any better than that. I can't, you know, train somebody for every specific situation that they're going to encounter. But if you've gone through it once or twice, you know, and I kind of make it up as I go to sometimes. It that's that's probably the best training. And but that takes obviously takes a career to do. In many cases. We also try to do a lot of internal training that we do we put it on ourselves, you know, there's obviously outside sources you can go to to get training, but if you want to focused on the the kind of work that your specific organization does, it's it's, it's oftentimes best to come from within.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah. In 2013, you were named Battelle's Inventor of the Year. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, that's that was a career-long goal for me and pretty rewarding. So I don't, you know, first of all, it helps to have somebody really good, right, the application can brag about you a little bit. But so I've been a distinguished inventor for a while, which means I guess I have a lot of patents and hadn't continued to generate more patents for both our clients and internal. And then every year Battelle, one Inventor the Year from each of its divisions, the national labs are now included as well. So there's one each from the national labs that we manage or co-manage. And, you know, basically as a career-long recognition for the creative work that's that's been done.

Aaron Moncur:

That's the being a distinguished inventor, or the Inventor of the Year?

Bill Atterbury:

The Inventor the Year. Distinguished inventor is a little bit easier in terms of definition. It's 14 patents or more...

Aaron Moncur:

Got it.

Bill Atterbury:

During during your during your career. So put your plaque up on the wall with the others that are there.

Aaron Moncur:

That must be very rewarding to see that.

Bill Atterbury:

Oh, yeah. Yeah, certainly. It's a it was rewarding for me when I got it and I can see the twinkle in people's eyes when they say, yeah, just two more and I'm gonna be you know, I'm gonna have my plaque on the wall.

Aaron Moncur:

Very cool.

Bill Atterbury:

That's that's a very motivating aspect of it.

Aaron Moncur:

Yeah. What trends are are you seeing in the industry these days?

Bill Atterbury:

Can you be more specific?

Aaron Moncur:

Not really, just a general question, any trends that you are in if you're not really seeing any, that's fine, too?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, one trend, unfortunately, has been the work from home. A lot of us have been doing lately and the tools you need to obviously be effective in maybe a different environment than what you're normally expecting. That's one, I can talk about that, you know, we talked about the transfer tools, and kind of some of the computer based tools that have really provided a lot of things and some cases you couldn't have done before. Yeah, many cases, it makes it a lot more efficient. And I am always encouraged to see different ways that those those skills can be can be applied to your work, you know, there's very creative ways to apply it. As far as medical industry goes, you know, we're seeing a lot of trends there to you know, the connected trend is one, but we're seeing in my world, a lot more monoclonal antibodies, which all require devices to get them into your bodies and kind of explosion in there. And that also means higher viscosity types of drugs. And so that's kind of generated a lot of interest in, caught on body injectors. And so there's a lot of trends that are kind of towards, towards on body injectors that we have not seen in the past. Yeah, beyond insulin pumps...

Aaron Moncur:

Devices, they're just they stay on the body for, you know, some period of time, days, weeks, months?

Bill Atterbury:

Oh, yeah, yeah, the two good examples are insulin pumps, it's that either on or a catch with the tube set to the body and, and how they've now our closed loop systems with glucose meters. And so that really makes managing that disease much easier and much more effective. But we're also seeing a lot of trends in terms of column bolus injectors are drugs that we delivered over long time periods. And it would just come in a call a small patch pump, with an adhesive backing needs to get on your body. And over a period of time it would deliver the drug.

Aaron Moncur:

Really, is there like a small needle that...

Bill Atterbury:

Either a needle or cannula is typically used. Yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay.

Bill Atterbury:

So yeah, there's one in there. Some people are, you know, phobic. So they don't really want to hear that. Yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay, well, I'm going to put you on the spot just a little bit. And if you can't think of an answer to this, that's totally fine. We'll just move on. But can you think of a time when you wanted to give up because something was just too hard or too stressful? Or you you couldn't figure it out? And you just wanted to throw in the towel and say,'Forget this? I'm done with it. I'm moving on.' But you didn't. And you overcame the problem, and kind of what what did you take away from that experience?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, the funny part about that story, the way you heat it up for me was that I look back on those times now. And and those were the best times. Because you're faced with a very challenging problem. And not every problem has a technical solution that comes to you the middle the night sometimes, you know, their programmatic or just takes a whole different way of thinking about it a whole different method of approach. But you look back on those times you say, yeah, that was, you know, figuring that out was Yeah, that was fun. That was challenging. It wasn't rote. It wasn't boring. It was, it was it was really a neat problem. It was a fun problem to solve. And so, you know, now I think of those situations, and I kind of think about Well, yeah, good times. So you know, we'll figure it out. We'll get through it. You know, a lot of times I don't have the answer. But I tell our clients, I tell them that he people I work with, you know, I don't have any answer to this one. But the 40 times in the past that this, this type of problem has been presented to me, we figured out a pretty good solution to it. And I know we'll get through this one too.

Aaron Moncur:

That's great. I love that attitude. Yeah, it's interesting that sometimes the in the thick of it, right, these grueling experiences, you just want to find a way out, but then looking back, it's just some of the the sweet memories that we carry around with us and look back on fondly even.

Bill Atterbury:

Yeah, when we're, we're down, down on our lab testing. You know, the fun part is when you get failures, be honest with you, early stage, I call it early stage design, and you're, you know, maybe testing out new concepts or different approaches. And, you know, I always tell the people, you know, you got a problem. You just got to go ask the parts, you gotta go ask right questions, but go to the lab and ask the parts what the problem is, and if you put together the right test or the right evaluation, oftentimes the parts will reveal what what the issue is.

Aaron Moncur:

It's a really interesting way of framing it, ask the parts what the problem is. Can can you elaborate on that just a little bit more?

Bill Atterbury:

So if you run into a problem, there's usually a test that you can run, or an evaluation that you can perform or an analysis. And in this case, I'm talking about, you know, we do a fair amount of materials analysis. So there's a whole bunch of techniques there that you can use, that will divulge maybe certain things that will help you solve your problem. He can go from anywhere from you know, running, DSC, differential, scanning calorimeter, to understand you know, what the constituents are in the material that you're working to, to, you know, looking at the surface, doing some surface electron microscope work and finding out there's residues, usually the answers there, you just got to ask the right questions to get it.

Aaron Moncur:

That's great. That's great. Well, one more question for you, and then we'll wrap this up, what are some of the biggest challenges that you run into at work?

Bill Atterbury:

Well, we always have the challenge of trying to obviously, you know, solve a problem in an efficient manner. both time and obviously cost and, and is, you know, in the medical world schedule, his schedule is always King, whether it's a no big client or a little client, you know, you really got to meet the schedule. So, you know, I guess doing things in an in an efficient manner is always a challenge. And getting everybody to walk in step, you know, with a common understanding is sometimes a challenge. We are able to address a lot of those types of things a lot of times with, with just some of the information that we communicate and how we communicate it. And that's that's kind of another challenge that we have. But once you do that, it seems like it, goes a lot smoother.

Aaron Moncur:

Communication, a lot of answers always find their way back to effective communication. Well, Bill, this has been delightful. Thank you for spending some time with me today. How can people get ahold of you?

Bill Atterbury:

I'm on LinkedIn. So you can find me there. That's probably the easiest way. But you're also welcome to email me directly if you want to. It's Atterberry. Last name, atterbury@battelle.org. We are an org. that's spelled BATTELLE. So you can reach me that way toO.

Aaron Moncur:

Terrific, thank you. Is there anything else that we should have talked about that? We haven't?

Bill Atterbury:

I don't think so. I think we covered a lot of it. Yeah.

Aaron Moncur:

Okay. Terrific. Well, Bill, thank you again.

Bill Atterbury:

Okay, good talk with you, Aaron.

Aaron Moncur:

I'm Aaron Moncure, founder of Pipeline Design, and Engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode. To learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines and with product design, visit us at teampipeline.us. Thanks for listening.