Tribology can be trendy
Dr. Ryan D. Evans, STLE President | TLT President's Report August 2022
Great technical innovation in our field can attract new talent to tribology, if we only spread the word.
My son just finished his freshman year at The Ohio State University and is excited about pursuing a major in electrical and computer engineering. His journey toward that direction was an interesting one from my point of view. He was always technical, logical and curious in his approach to understanding things and, not surprisingly, was great at math. For him to pursue engineering was a no-brainer. I did find his motivations toward deciding on a major interesting, however.
A few decades ago, I was in my son’s shoes. Engineering was a given, but the major field was not. In the early 1990s polymers were the trendy industry of northeast Ohio and especially so at my local undergraduate institution, The University of Akron. Granted, this was well after the famous quote from the movie “The Graduate” was uttered (“Just one word… plastics”), but my focus was the same. There were no undergraduate majors in polymer engineering at the time, so I chose chemical engineering as my path and earned a polymer specialization certificate along with my bachelor of science degree. As it turned out, I steered away from a career in polymer engineering after a few co-op terms in a polyester factory (now defunct) and found my way into tribology via an internship at The Timken Co. during my final undergraduate year.
In conversations with my son, I tried to understand his interest areas in engineering. What was his “plastics” that made him excited about a career in engineering? The answer was immediate and energetic—“electric vehicles and computerized stuff.” His major path would be electrical engineering. He had ridden in his friend’s dad’s battery electric vehicle and was enamored with it. He built his own personal computers starting in middle school. Can you blame him or any other budding engineering student for being excited about these fields, though? We live in a time of great technical innovation that will continue to directly affect peoples’ lives. Our STLE community is harnessing this same strong excitement about electric vehicles, and more broadly, clean energy trends and innovations as evidenced by packed STLE Annual Meeting session rooms, the first STLE Tribology and Lubrication for E-Mobility Conference in late 2021 and various webinar and STLE Local Section events all pointed at these same growing opportunity spaces.
I am proud of my son’s path so far. In addition, I do not feel like I have lost the war to convert him into a tribologist like his old man (me). Like polymer engineering in the early 1990s, there are no undergraduate major programs for tribology in most universities. He was going to have to choose a more traditional major path for his bachelor of science degree, and so there is still time to impress upon him the value of tribology education and a related career path in graduate school. That is what is so great about our interdisciplinary field of tribology—you can become a strong contributor in our field, whether you started in mechanical engineering, materials engineering, chemical engineering, electrical engineering, chemistry, physics, applied math, etc.
It is up to us current tribologists to impress upon students the importance of our field in enabling new, trendy and innovative developments like electric vehicles, clean energy and even modern logistics and supply chain technologies. I am proud that the STLE Board of Directors has created the Scholarship and Investing for the Future Fund (SIFF) this year to better help donors that share our mission to provide funding for student scholarships, STEM initiatives and many other investments in the future of our field. Please stay tuned for more information about how to engage and support STLE SIFF initiatives in the coming months. Until then, please keep encouraging students to keep an eye on our field of tribology and related career paths, regardless of the specific undergraduate science or engineering path that they initially selected. All are welcome to join and contribute!
Dr. Ryan Evans is director of R&D at The Timken Co. in North Canton, Ohio. You can reach him at ryan.evans@timken.com.