Waves of Progress

This month saw the ever-growing New York Climate Week that drew several Chain Reaction Innovations (CRI) innovators East to network and attend panels and conferences. In between the busy events, we were able to sneak away and tour AIRCO 's pilot facility AF01 in Brooklyn, NY. Many thanks to Cory Phillips , Director of Engineering Development, and Jason Sluzynski , Director of Operations, for hosting us!

The field trip was fantastic on multiple levels.

First, I’m a big fan of field trips— I wish adults went on more field trips. (Not sure why we decided that only school children should have regular field trips.) There’s just something special about seeing how things are done in the “real world.” And to make the event even more special, you usually have someone passionate and knowledgeable giving the tour. I think we’d all have a deeper appreciation for the conveniences (and innovations!) around us if we could visit anywhere from a water treatment plant to an indoor farm to an automobile factory.

Second, this visit reminded me just how rewarding it is to see Ph.D. founders thriving from DOE’s early investments in basic research and education. Long before I was CRI director, I was the Director of Operations & Outreach of a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC). EFRCs were a pioneering effort by U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science Basic Energy Sciences (BES) to pursue large-scale, cross-disciplinary research across multiple institutions over a long period of time, all toward a unified goal. To give a sense of scale, the EFRC I was a director of had 20 principal investigators across 5 institutions and nearly 100 trainees (grad students and postdocs).

As the tour group started self-introductions, I couldn’t help but realize that we were all connected to that effort over a decade ago! Air Company’s co-founder and CTO Dr. Staff Sheehan received his Ph.D. from 耶鲁大学 , CRI innovators Dr. Karin Calvinho from 美国罗格斯新泽西州立大学新布朗斯维克分校 and Dr. Ryan Hackler from 美国西北大学 . These universities and their Ph.D. advisors were all linked to the EFRC and outreach work that paved the way for this gathering of successful entrepreneurs. How neat is that!

Third, as a startup founder, when you visit a company that is developmentally ahead of yours, you get the opportunity to pick their brains, learn from their experiences, and ask them specific questions. Seeing the pilot facility and hearing Cory and Jason describe their engineering and design philosophies beat anything early-stage founders can read in a textbook or find in a business case study. For that, I am grateful for Air Company generously opening its door to CRI’s innovators and me.

There’s a Chinese saying that captures this spirit beautifully and is the inspiration behind my “river of innovation” analogy in Ode to Science: “the rear waves of the Yangzhe River pushes the front forward.” Isn’t that how progress is made? When one pays it forward, we can all reach new frontiers.

Whether it is science pushing innovation forward or one innovator helping another get ahead, that day in Brooklyn was a banner day for me.

About Dick Co

Dick Co is a scientist, educator, and startup founder who believes in the power of entrepreneurship to improve lives and unlock the?human and technological?potential needed for a more resilient and equitable planet. As Director of Chain Reaction Innovations , Dick works with the?CRI?team and stakeholders to create and implement programming and vision that continually deepen and grow?CRI’s impact.?Dick is an Executive Scholar at the Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management , and he holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics and A.M. in Chemistry and Chemical Biology from 美国哈佛大学 , and a B.S. in Chemistry from the 美国加州大学伯克利分校 .