What we talked about
In this episode we talk with Steve Rodgers, Founder & CTO from EmergenTek LLC. Tune in to gain insights into Steve’s unique perspective on engineering, leadership, and innovation. Discover the driving forces that fuel his passion for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the world of materials and process engineering. Whether you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, an engineering enthusiast, or simply intrigued by the intersections of science and technology, this episode promises to offer an enlightening and inspiring conversation with a true visionary. He is a former International President, global board member and current trustee of the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering (SAMPE) and recipient of the Utah Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology.
Show notes
Steve Rodgers wanted to be an actor, dropped out of theater school when his tuition fell through, and ended up spending 35 years as an internationally recognized authority on graphene commercialization, without ever earning an engineering degree. His path from plastic shops to the Hubble Space Telescope to the National Graphene Association advisory committee is a case study in how generalist curiosity compounds into deep expertise.
What we covered
- Steve worked directly on the Hubble Space Telescope, iterating the fiber angle on carbon fiber tubes over and over, checking each time whether they had achieved close enough to zero coefficient of thermal expansion, because at 17,850 miles per hour, a 25-foot aluminum tube exposed to sunlight would bend two inches from the temperature differential between its hot and cold sides.
- A technique he learned for pre-stretching thermoplastic sheets in vacuum forming translated directly to superplastic titanium forming a decade and a half later, and the titanium team had just applied for a patent on the same concept, demonstrating how cross-discipline knowledge often travels unseen.
- Graphene is not a single material. By 2019, one researcher cataloguing permutations of layer count, stacking orientation, oxygen content, and impurities had arrived at 60,000 distinct variants, each with potentially different performance characteristics, which means buying “graphene” without specifying the type is largely meaningless.
- Steve’s practical advice for anyone investing in graphene applications: before spending on research, first confirm your supplier can actually deliver the volume you would need at commercial scale, because finding a second source that behaves identically is often impossible.
- Adding just one tenth of one weight percent of graphene to a neat epoxy resin produced a 76% improvement in stiffness, a result that only makes sense at the nanoscale, where very small changes produce very large Newtonian-world effects.
- His career advice is to stay curious about how everything connects, resist over-specializing too early, build a network by attending society meetings and conferences, and find mentors, he credits society meetings with giving him access to the people who wrote the books, which compensated for the formal education he never finished.
About Steve
Steve Rodgers is the Founder and CTO of EmergenTek LLC, a former International President of SAMPE (Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering), and a founding advisory board member of the National Graphene Association. He has worked across aerospace composites, titanium, and nanomaterials for 35 years without a formal engineering degree.
Episode 1 of the PreVetted Podcast.