Let it shine
By Dr. Ryan D. Evans, STLE President | TLT President's Report June 2023
I encourage each member of the STLE community to think about how they can shine the light of our field in their own way.
There is an old parable that states if you have a lamp that creates light, it would be foolish to cover it with a bowl. Instead, you set that lamp on a table so the whole household can benefit from its light. For the more than 20 years I have been an STLE member, I have viewed the STLE community as a bright and shining lamp within modern industry. As STLE President this past year, I was blessed to be surrounded by people who are united in purpose to let the light of our community shine brightly.
I would like to thank my wife Melinda, who is my partner in faith, parenting and marriage. I have missed many wedding anniversary dates due to STLE Annual Meetings over the years, but I regard my life with her as a special occasion worth celebrating every day. STLE’s long-term steady strength is attributable to Executive Director Ed Salek, and his expert staff, including Karl Phipps, Rebecca Lintow, Gen Hedland-Hill, Manfred Jungk and Rachel Fowler, with whom I’ve worked most closely in recent years, as well as Nicole Gleeson, Merle Hedland, Susan Luers, Bruce Murgueitio, Emmett Murphy, Nadine Sanchez-Colon, Myrna Scott, and Tracy VanEe, who make it all happen. I thank STLE past presidents Mike Anderson, Greg Croce, Mike Duncan, Paul Hetherington and Ken Hope for their examples of volunteer service and leadership. I am excited to see how the incoming STLE Executive Committee, consisting of Hong Liang, Jack McKenna, Kevin Delaney and Steffen Bots, will create a path forward for the society as my term comes to an end. I have genuinely looked forward to our meetings on each occasion over the past four years, and eagerly and unsarcastically describe my Executive Committee experience as “great fun” to anyone who asks.
STLE’s community has a lot to be proud of, and at the same time, many opportunities are in front of us. Our society truly is a community of people who care about our field and related industries. STLE is not some large, impersonal, old institute that a tribology or lubrication engineer just associates with—STLE is all of us, consisting of our diversity of talents, experiences and even flaws. Tribology can be as trendy and exciting as we decide it should be, so this past year we focused our energies on attracting new members. We are thrilled to welcome 512 new members to STLE during 2022 alone, helping to create our overall community of 2,410 individual members located in 65 different countries, including 223 student members and 194 corporate members. This represents 14% membership growth over the prior year. STLE created a standing Scholarship Committee and the Scholarship and Investments for the Future Fund (SIFF) for student outreach. That team developed a fundraising structure and multi-tiered donation options to help direct our community’s financial gifts toward student scholarship grants and STEM. We celebrate the creation of a new STLE sub-community this past year—the STLE United Kingdom (UK) Student Section that is intended to connect student tribologists through a new peer network linking several universities in the UK. Recognizing that STLE’s diversity of members and expertise areas is a great strength, the STLE Board of Directors created the society’s first ever Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee to advise the board on opportunities to make our community more inclusive and welcoming to all. Planning is underway to revitalize and better facilitate the reach and success of our STLE Local Sections to help them shine in their local communities.
In addition to focusing on reaching out to potential new members, volunteer leadership and staff also listened by surveying current members this past year. The results directly informed the creation of a 2023-2026 STLE Strategic Plan with objectives that maintain current community excellence, but at the same time, created new stretch goals to address some of our more innovative ideas and aspirations. We continued to celebrate the content creators and educators within our community and worked to better connect them to our community with modern digital tools and media. We are particularly excited about the deployment of the new online STLE Learning Management System that is accompanied by new work to assess and revitalize our education and certification offerings. The next version of the STLE Emerging Trends Report also should be published this summer. Like the previous two Emerging Trend Reports, it is intended to shine the current benefits of our field to the world around us while inspiring new thinking and ideation for the future. As our mission “Perfecting Motion” suggests, this need to communicate tribology and lubrication engineering’s value proposition is an ongoing pursuit that we must continue to work on together.
STLE members honed their presentation skills and shared their technological progress at the Second Annual Tribology & Lubrication for E-Mobility Conference that was held at Southwest Research Institute in November 2022. With gratitude for the unique talents of our members, we held monthly STLE Industry Insights discussions this year to create camaraderie around specific subject matter and amplify the voices of experts in our field virtually without geographical limitations.
On a more personal level, I encourage each member of the STLE community to think about how they can shine the light of our field in their own way. Maybe this is by joining the group of 1,120 STLE professional certification holders or taking an education course in an adjacent area to your specialty or giving a presentation at a future STLE annual meeting. Tribology and lubrication engineering are exciting fields with an opportunity for making a positive impact on global sustainability and energy challenges. Thank you for allowing me to be your STLE president this past year, and may we all shine the light of the STLE community brightly!
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.