William Conley0:00
I was always drawn to the mechanical arts in a lot of different ways. I remember being maybe 11 years old and deciding I was going to disassemble my bicycle completely, because the book told me exactly how to do it. And then dropping all of the ball bearings out of the front wheel, all over the grass in the front yard. It turns out that finding ball bearings in the grass is a really bad way to do it. There's a reason you shouldn't disassemble your bicycle in the middle of the front yard. Going through high school, the number of times that I would end up laying underneath the car trying to do something, trying to make some sort of modification that seemed like a good idea at the time, just to gain that greater understanding of the system and how it worked. I think, again, was kind of part of how I was wired and part of how I grew up. I broke my back snow skiing when I was 21 years old. So I had just finished my first undergraduate degree, and everything that I thought my life was going to be... What does this now mean? It gave me the ability to step back, to reflect and say, am I on the right trajectory, the right path? And doing what I want to be doing? And ultimately in large part, that's what led me back to Purdue to actually study mechanical engineering. I found Purdue very comfortable. Understanding the world-class caliber of the faculty, the staff, the institution, the research facilities. And kind of viewing it as that 'choose your own adventure' book. That ability to say, these are the things I'm interested in, and pushing and challenging the professors to teach, to allow me access to all of that insight, and all of those different things that I wanted to learn. And they said, hey, you're doing really great work, we were impressed with what you did in class. Are you interested in doing some research as an undergrad? A really easy question to ask, it turns out a really hard one to answer. The fusion of physics, the fusion of applied mathematics, and the fusion of vibrations and dynamics in the mechanical engineering side. And so it was the Venn diagram where all three of those overlapped is really where the interesting research opportunities were, to go to explore, to sink our teeth into. That was really great, but how do we go and how do we take that knowledge, and how do we apply it? When I finished up in 2009, the number of roadside bombs, the improvised explosive devices that were roadside in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time, were substantial. And so many of the different tools that I had learned about really made a difference in terms of, how do we look at these devices, how do we understand them, and how do we actually defeat them. And so with that in mind, the knowledge, the analytics, the approach learned here at Purdue directly mapped over and actually allowed me to step into a Department of Defense role as a civilian doing electronic warfare. Generally if you're designing a new cell phone, if you're designing a new cell phone network, you want the network to reliably work. In comparison, on the electronic warfare side, you deliberately want to degrade an adversary's network. You deliberately want to jam and deny that access to the flow of information. The work that we were doing in terms of that counter-IED fight, absolutely made a difference in terms of making not only US soldiers safer, but a lot of our allied partners, a lot of Afghan and Iraqi forces safer. In the Pentagon, I ultimately was the director for electronic warfare, and had a purview of roughly a seven billion dollar portfolio of a variety of electronic warfare systems. So being in the Pentagon, you have several thousand people that are there every single day. But no different than a system, like we learned about in the junior level controls class. The system of getting people to make decisions is, in many ways, no different. You have inputs, you have outputs, you have gain loops that are in the middle, you have dampers that are in the middle, you have delay that shows up. And so we actually benefit in a lot of ways from looking at that and understanding that as a system, and how do we go ahead and make a good decision using that systems level understanding. Where is the innovation? Where is the technology that makes a difference? Where are those themes, those trends that we're going to bet on for the future? Very deliberately, I wanted to actually leave government to go into the private sector to gain a greater understanding of that. That very naturally led me to the role I'm in now, as the Chief Technology Officer for Mercury Systems. To design a computer that'll work here, on a 75 degree day, is one thing. To design a computer that you can put in a storage container, pull it out and it's going to instantly work, that can survive being on a ship in a maritime environment, can survive being flown at high altitude to the edge of space and come back, and do that multiple times. Working in the national security space, I personally really enjoy. And when you get to work on technology that actually means that someone goes home to their family that night, in my opinion, that makes a humongous difference. One of the critical things that we as engineers learn is how to start with the assumptions that we're putting into a problem, we state the problem, we state the assumptions, and from that we start deriving what the art of the possible is. I think mirroring that academic side with that practical side is really part of the magic here at Purdue.
