Maurice Snyder

Madison is very memorable to my wife Miriam and I since both our children, John and Lucy, were born there. When I earned my PhD in 1969 in bioengineering, one possibility was to do research and/or teaching.

However, my first job was in business development at Electronic Associates in New Jersey. This company supplied real-time simulation computer systems similar to those I used for my PhD research in cardiovascular blood pressures and flows—a state-of-the-art computer at that time for all real-time simulations. My advisor, (the late) Electrical Engineering Professor Vincent Rideout, was the driving force to secure NSF funding for this real-time computer lab, the largest such lab at any U.S. university.

With Electronic Associates, I helped develop and expand the company’s simulation business. After five years, I was relocated to our office in Sydney, Australia, to expand our Australian and New Zealand simulation business.

Although I had never lived outside the United States before, Miriam and the kids could not wait to go. After two years in Australia, I relocated to the Philippines as marketing director for Asia, including Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and India.

After one year, I resigned from Electronic Associates and started a Philippine company, Universal Computer Services, for sales and service of computers and computer-related equipment. My family and I were in the Philippines for 12 years during the Aquino assassination (1983) and the revolution that ousted President Marcos (1986). John and Lucy went through grade school and high school in the International School (IS) of Manila, a K-12 school with 55 nationalities—a great education with awesome international exposures. Miriam was president of the IS Manila board at that time—its first female president.

Our company, Universal Computer Services, at that time had 22 employees and had become the fifth-largest computer company in the Philippines. But in 1989, we moved back to the United States, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and I became international director at Applied Dynamics International, a supplier of state-of-the-art real-time simulation computers.

For the next 18 years, I traveled to Asia (which by now was almost like home) four times a year, two weeks at a time. All of our simulation computer products were designed and manufactured in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and exported to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, India and Australia.

After 18 years with the company, I resigned, and for the next four years, taught international business in the Eastern Michigan University College of Business in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I used my international export experience to teach practical aspects of international business.

Part of my current work is with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the East Michigan District Export Council to help small and medium businesses begin to export or increase their exports.

Mount Fuji

Only a very, very low percent of small- and medium-size U.S. businesses export their products. Yet, exports are a great way to increase business and are the main purpose behind President Obama’s National Export Initiative to double exports within five years.

My challenge is to use my 30-plus years of export business experience to change the mindset of most small- and medium-size businesses that regard international export business as mysterious, inherently difficult, filled with corruption, can’t get paid, can’t find overseas customers, etc.

I tell these companies that most large successful companies have 50 to 75 percent of their sales outside the United States. After all, the United States is only 6 percent of the world’s population: Most of our customers are outside the United States!

I am forever grateful for the education and guidance I received from Professor Rideout and the faculty of the (then) electrical engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Kristin Myers

Kristin Myers was on a fast career track. Just 31, she has a biomedical-engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison; spent five years in engineering, marketing and sales for the cardiac rhythm management division of the medical device giant Medtronic; got her MBA from Harvard University; and spent four years at the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm of Skyline Ventures, where she did due diligence on potential investments, served on the board of directors of several portfolio companies and made partner.

She made jaws drop when she announced she was leaving Palo Alto for Ann Arbor and Arboretum Ventures LLC — which this morning will announce that it has hired her as principal to lead new investments from the VC firm’s newest fund, Arboretum Ventures III, which was planned at $125 million but ended up being oversubscribed at $140 million when it closed fundraising last August.

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Jeffrey Graves

Jeffrey Graves, was recently named CEO of MTS Systems after a search including internal and external candidates. He has nearly a decade of chief executive experience at technology companies that deal with government contracting compliance.

Most recently, since 2005, Graves has served as president and chief executive of C&D Technologies in Pennsylvania, a manufacturer of energy-storage systems for the power market.

Earlier in his career, Graves served in various management positions at General Electric and Rockwell International. He has a PhD and a master’s degree in metallurgical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a bachelor’s of science in engineering from Purdue University.

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Steve Zinkle

Steve Zinkle, a senior materials researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, (ORNL) is one of 68 members elected this year to the National Academy of Engineering. It is one of the highest honors an engineer can receive.

Zinkle earned his BS, MS and PhD in nuclear engineering and an MS in materials science from UW-Madison from 1980-’85.

Chief scientist in ORNL’s nuclear science and engineering directorate, Zinkle was cited by the academy “for advancing understanding of radiation damage in metallic and ceramic components.”

“It’s obviously a tremendous honor,” Zinkle says. “If you consider that there is on the order of three million engineers and each year they have 65 or so elected, that’s a very tiny fraction. So it’s a great privilege to be in that select group. The academy is often asked by congress, federal agencies or other bodies to weigh in on the subjects of national importance. It’s viewed as being a trustworthy and unbiased source of information and I look forward to making a contribution.”

Zinkle’s materials research has focused on “deformation and fracture mechanisms” in structural materials, as well as radiation’s effects on ceramic materials and metallic alloys for fusion and fission reactors.

“This is wonderful news for Steve and for ORNL,” says ORNL Director Thom Mason. “Steve has made outstanding contributions to the understanding of radiation effects in materials for fission and fusion energy systems, and this prestigious honor is an indication both of the impact of his work and of the scientific excellence to which we aspire.”

Zinkle joined ORNL in 1985 as a Eugene Wigner fellow. He was director of the Materials Science and Technology Division from 2006 to 2010. He is author or coauthor of more than 240 peer-reviewed publications. In 2006, he received the prestigioius E.O. Lawrence Award for his contributions to the scientific understanding of the effects of radiation on the properties of materials and for identifying performance limits for materials in radiation environments.

Zinkle and the other new members will be formally inducted at the academy’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in September.

James McCarthy

Bone is a remarkable organ, says orthopedic surgeon and engineering mechanics graduate James McCarthy (BSEM, ’86).

It grows and heals itself, and not many organs can do that. It can be cut and gradually lengthened. The bone fills itself in. If done at the right rhythm, a bone can grow to be just about as long as you want it to be.

Bone protects internal organs including the heart, lungs and brain. It transduces sound so that we can hear. It provides the scaffold upon which to hang all our other parts, and works with muscles, tendons, ligaments and joints to generate and transfer forces so that our bodies can move in three-dimensional space. In general, bone is a sort of dream material for the engineering mechanics major. But it wasn’t a fascination with bone that motivated McCarthy to become director of pediatric orthopaedic surgery at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

“After graduating, I applied for and got two jobs,” he says. “One was with Saturn, which was a new, innovative company, and the other was with Hewlett Packard making sonograph equipment. I also had the opportunity to go to medical school. My theory at that time was that if I took a job, I’d never go back to school because I’d be comfortable. So I thought I’d just try medical school for a year, and if I hate it, I hate it.  I became more and more intrigued in medical school. Really, it was with the idea that I would be doing biomedical engineering for a company.”

Part way through his medical training, he did some cardiology research in North Carolina and spent some time in pediatrics. All of the sudden, all of the pieces came together. It all made sense. His engineering physics training was math heavy and very theoretical. It allowed him to go many different directions, but his medical training forced him to do things he was not comfortable with.

“What I was good at was figuring things out. I could sit in a room and work forever and get to the right answer. That came relatively easy, but what I wasn’t good at was memorizing long lists,” McCarthy says. “I was not comfortable with interfacing with patients on a very personal basis. So in some ways, medicine forced me to round out skills that I didn’t think I had. And I don’t know why, but that intrigued me to some degree.”

McCarthy’s specific clinical interests have an engineering focus. One is cerebral palsy (CP), which is a neurologic disorder that affects the way kids walk. About two children per 1,000 live births have cerebral palsy. In the United States, the average lifetime cost for people with CP is about $900,000 per individual, including lost income.

The overlap between CP and engineering is very strong because doctors analyze the biomechanics of the way children walk. Using gait analysis, digital cameras, sensors and force plates, a team of therapists, engineers and surgeons synthesize all the data and try to figure out the best list of surgeries to improve the patient’s function.

“You might think a better way would be to treat them earlier so that they don’t develop issues but we’re not there yet,” McCarthy says. “In the right patient, you can make a fairly significant improvement in biomechanical functioning. A lot of them walk more upright. A lot walk with less of a limp. You can make some pretty significant improvements in overall gait. That part ends up being fairly dramatic. It’s also possible surgery won’t help them at all and that is where the gait analysis comes in and is very useful.“

McCarthy’s other interest involves much less common limb deformities. Approximately one in 20,000 children have significant deformities of the lower extremities. His team works to correct those through placement of external fixtures. The devices go on the outside of the leg and the leg is manipulated either by cutting the bone or another technique that changes it over time.

“It’s very mechanical and very three-dimensional. What’s even more intriguing is when we ask if there are better ways of doing it,” McCarthy says. “Can we use an implantable device? That’s what I worked on at UW-Madison with Heidi Ploeg and Michael Zinn in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. We’re trying to correct the deformity without having a large device attached to the outside of the leg by developing an implant.”

This approach would have huge advantages, especially for children, because the patient would not see anything on their leg such as braces or pins. McCarthy says the challenge is to devise something that can be lengthened at a controlled pace and rate and is strong enough to support the stresses of the body. Since only about 5,000 of these products would be needed per year, there isn’t much interest or funding available.

The research is progressing, but McCarthy says it’s not ready yet. But of course, he and others will keep trying.

Babutunde Ogunnaike

Noted for his contributions to advances in process systems, process engineering practice and systems engineering education, Babatunde A. Ogunnaike (PhDCBE, ’81) has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Academy membership is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer, placing Ogunnaike among an elite group of individuals who have made outstanding contributions to engineering research, practice or education. Read more…

Dr. Jacqueline L. Gerhart with patients Tocarra Kimball and her son A'lon.

While her heart is most definitely in the world of patient care, Dr. Jacqueline Gerhart serves as a superb example of the flexibility and potential of a biomedical engineering degree from the College of Engineering.

Like many biomedical engineers, Gerhart has been captivated by medical gadgetry since her first day on the College of Engineering campus in 2000. But just being familiar with the hardware and software of the medical world wasn’t enough for her. “I realized that being in research and development of medical instruments was fascinating, but it didn’t allow me to see how the patient used the end product,” Gerhart says. “Seeing how medical devices are used in a hospital and seeing how patients benefit from them became my passion.”

Gerhart came to that epiphany during a summer internship with Kimberly-Clark Medical Systems, where she worked to develop better percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG) feeding tubes at its Lake City, Utah location. Gerhart realized that if she wanted to follow those designs out of a lab and into the lives of actual people, she would need to consider a career in patient care. “I really became interested in the aftermath of those designs, and seeing what the device was able to do for patients long term,” says Gerhart.

She returned to campus that fall, determined to head to medical school after graduation.

Gerhart advising her patients.

A month after earning her biomedical engineering degree in May 2004, Gerhart arrived at the Mayo Medical School in Rochester, Minnesota.  She finished her medical degree in 2008, interned at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, for a year, and then did a family medical residency at the Wingra Clinic through the UW Department of Family Medicine, graduating in spring 2011.

Gerhart sought the day-to-day variety of patient care, and she certainly found it in family medicine. Currently, she sees patients as a family at the UW-Health Windsor-Deforest Clinic and works at Meriter Hospital, where she does everything from delivering babies to treating serious injuries. “I see patients that are anywhere from one day to 100 years old, which is amazing,” she says.

And, somewhere in between the clinic and the hospital, she finds time to teach UW-Madison courses on patient relationships and how to share bad news when patients are diagnosed with cancer.  She also teaches physical exam skills to medical students and writes a medical advice column for the Wisconsin State Journal. “I found myself excited and fascinated by the ability of medicine to go beyond the clinic and beyond the hospital, and tried to answer some of the questions that patients may feel either embarrassed, uncomfortable or silly asking,” Gerhart says.

In her clinic, she has started a reading program focused on encouraging reading as early as six months of age.  While she no longer does research in the field of engineering, she does clinical research in family medicine and is currently a fellow in the UW Primary Care Faculty Development Fellowship.

Gerhart with a few of the books she's distributing to patients as part of an early childhood reading program.

Like a handful of other engineers who have decided to transition into medicine, Gerhart believes the technical literacy that comes with her engineering degree comes in handy when a patient asks how a pacemaker functions, or what a family can expect from the placement of a feeding tube in their loved one. “I think that my background in engineering has allowed me to recognize how important these questions are and helps me to gather further research for my patients” she says. “I notice I’m naturally interested in reviewing the newest procedures, devices and medicines to stay abreast of the ever-changing medical field and how engineering affects it.

She doesn’t necessarily measure the impact of her time on the engineering campus in facts and figures, though: Gerhart has plenty of fond memories from her tenure as an undergraduate here, including seeing the glass walls of the Engineering Centers Building slowly taking shape. “It was really neat to see the campus grow,” she says. “That building is crazy in terms of the colors and materials being used. I remember finally having a class in the Engineering Centers Building after having most of my classes in Engineering Hall. It was a great transition to a beautiful facility.”

She fondly recalls professors who both challenged and engaged her here, particularly Biomedical Engineering Professor David Beebe and Camp Badger coordinator and Engineering Professional Development Professor Phil O’Leary. “I remember Beebe’s class being tough, but essential to my understanding of engineering for the human body,” she says.

And she calls O’Leary an amazing professor. “He was someone that I felt that I wanted to become—because not only does he have an amazing sense of research and engineering, but an amazing ability to apply it to future generations,” she says.

In addition to her professional success, her time here on the engineering campus forged a lifelong bond with the university and Madison as a whole. “It’s part of the reason why I think I’m never going to leave,” says Gerhart. “I love it here.”

Daniel Adamany

Increasingly, information technology services are moving to what’s known as “the cloud.” The term means different things to different people, but president and founder of IT company, Ahead, Daniel Adamany (BSME, ‘97), says basically, it’s outsourcing.

“In one sense, the cloud means having nothing to do with the technology,” he says. “A person logs into a website, the data exists remotely and is protected and the person feels good about that. It could also mean I manage all my software, but it runs on infrastructure that’s actually external. At a lower level, I might keep all my infrastructure, but I send my backup to the cloud. So there are different kinds of levels, but it’s all cloud.”

Although these easy solutions often seem like a giant leap forward in productivity, they can also be very dangerous. Often, the people buying the solutions don’t fully understand what they’re getting and when something goes wrong or an employee quits or the code is lost, the business can be brought to its knees.

Adamany’s company, Ahead, guides companies through the complex decisions of managing information as data moves to the cloud, whether that means using external resources or building a firm its own private cloud.

Demand for the service is great. Last year, Ahead had more $130 million in sales. But success did not come overnight for Adamany, whose background was in mechanical engineering, not information technology.

Adamany’s first co-op in the mid 1990s was with Ford Motor Company. He worked in advanced manufacturing, doing rapid prototyping, and found that he was bored out of his mind.

“It was mainly because there was no human interaction,” he says. “It didn’t fit my personality. I liked being around people. I liked talking to people about ideas, concepts, things they want to do.”

His next co-op was in the sales office of Siemens Power Generation. He worked with the sales staff selling steam engines, turbines and large power generation equipment. He loved it.

“I loved being around the sales guys, doing business, things like that. I thought, I can’t believe people get paid for this.”

Degree in hand, he interviewed with consulting companies and finance firms. He landed a job in sales with IBM in the company’s data storage division. He worked there for a few years and was recruited by EMC², a global leader in information technology services. In the 1990s, this fast-growing company had between $3 billion to $4 billion in sales. Last year, it’s sales were on the order of $20 billion.

“I went there and loved it,” Adamany says. “It was pretty technical. I had an engineering background and loved numbers and loved entertaining, so I did pretty well in different jobs at EMC², some in management. After about nine years, I decided to take a chance and go out on my own. I’d always wanted to do that. This seemed like a market opportunity for a partner.”

He recalled how IBM had started IBM Business Partners to encourage people to form companies to sell IBM products. EMC², he thought, would do well with a similar program. He left and started Ahead IT.

EMC² focuses largely on the data storage sector of the IT business, offering hardware and software packages as well as backup. But as Adamany became more familiar with the marketplace, Ahead IT expanded beyond storage, backup and disaster recovery into computing, management and the orchestration of all of those pieces using software.

“Because we build the systems ourselves, we understand it and can articulate what things do and don’t do, in a way others can’t. We sell and implement it and show the customer how to run it. We help them to help themselves.”

The ultimate goal is to develop a relationship with a customer, find out what their needs are and figure out what the best solution is for them. It could mean customers buy the technology themselves or put all of the data to an external cloud. Whatever it is, Ahead guides customers through the process.

“It’s conceptually simple, but I’ve invested millions in a consulting practice to bring people together and figure out what a company really needs,” Adamany says. “In large companies, people don’t really talk to each other. Our methodology gets everyone together to cut through all the contentious issues and figure it out.”

Fred Kiekhaefer

Fred Kiekhaefer describes the demands that racing places on marine drives, engines and systems this way: “It’s like motocrossing a fully loaded semi over the Continental Divide, only the mountains are moving.”

Kiekhaefer is president of Mercury Racing and a 1972 UW-Madison graduate with a master’s degree focused on engine design and noise control. He is the son of legendary entrepreneur, engineer and Kiekhaefer Corporation  (later renamed Mercury Marine) founder Carl Kiekhaefer, but his path to the top of marine racing and manufacturing was anything but certain.

He started his education as a physics major at Ripon College, but finished his degree at UW-Madison after plans to attend MIT hit a snag.

“There was a brochure at Ripon that said I could spend three years at Ripon and two years at MIT and graduate with a degree from MIT,” he says. “After a couple of years, I went to ask about the transition and the staff looked at me like they’d never heard of it.” 

The program had faded away, but Kiekhaefer managed to cut a deal with Ripon and UW-Madison to create a similar program. He met with Mechanical Engineering Professors Gary Borman, Phil Myers and Otto Uyehara. Having spent summers working in his father’s engineering department, he tested out entry-level engineering courses and went to work designing snowmobile engines.

“The core of my racing-design life really began under a mentor from Germany who was really good with pulse-tuned, loop-charged, two-stroke engines. His background was in motorcycles,” Kiekhaefer says. “I was told to adapt one of Mercury’s outboards to their first snowmobile engine when I was still a summer intern. I’m not proud of it because it became what is known as the ‘lead sled,’ the worst and heaviest snowmobile Mercury ever built.

“Just about the time I was to graduate, my dad had a blow-up with the people who bought his company. He quit. The only area in two-strokes where he didn’t have a non-compete clause was snowmobile engines. So he started another company to make snowmobile engines.”

Fred’s second effort, when he had control of design decisions in his father’s new company, resulted in twin- and triple-free air-cooled race engines that went on to win three consecutive USSA world championships.

Kiekhaefer in a friend's Baja, Biscayne Bay, Miami, Florida

His father landed a big contract with Bolens (owned by FMC Corporation) and built a factory in anticipation of the new contract. But a new FMC chairman and board voted against continuing in snowmobiles.

“Basically, they told us to shove it. I was already working on a next-generation engine, an inverted V-twin, which turned out really cool, but we never put it into production,” Kiekhaefer says. “We almost merged with Bombardier, but the economy was going in the toilet, so that didn’t happen. And I looked around and thought, ‘This is just dying.’ So I went back to business school at Northwestern and got an MBA in marketing and operations.”

Kiekhaefer went to work for a medical imaging company and followed his girlfriend, (then Carol Stafford) to Boston. Stafford served her medical residency at Harvard.  He met her while at UW. She was the only woman in his engineering class. Stafford was dating a medical student at the time, but Kiekhaefer says a professor helped him steal her away by telling her he had a boat.

Kiekhaefer was having a great time exploring a wide variety of interests while consulting for Price Waterhouse. The company sent him back to Chicago, where he had just settled in when his father died. At the funeral, he had a life-changing conversation:  If you want to run your father’s company, he was told, move quickly. He did, and soon found himself up to his neck in alligators.

“I acquired assets from my Dad’s estate, but because of the way he set it up, it was as though he was reaching out and swatting at me from the grave,” Kiekhaefer says. “The estate trustees were not able to fund anything. Minority shareholders were imposed on me. I was told to go find the money and they would dictate the ownership. I surprised the hell out of them and came back a day later with a bank commitment. It was a big move, a little gutsy, and in hindsight it was probably naïve. There was absolutely no reason we survived the first year.”

Zero Effort Digital Throttle

In debt from buying the company, and with no cash on hand, Kiekhaefer took a hard look at the business. What he saw was not pretty:  A contract machining house and low-volume manufacturer of very specialized marine racing components, including a limited range of stainless steel propellers and a high-performance throttle control that was not profitable. Kiekhaefer called the employees in and told them the company had 30 days to turn things around or he’d have to close the doors. He wanted their ideas by the end of the day and a plan by the end of the week.

The team cut out racing engines and quit making controls.  A contract with Outboard Marine Corporation was behind schedule and over budget but his crew turned it around and produced gearcases of such high quality that OMC extended the contract until its own centers could match the quality. That extension gave Kiekhaefer time to develop a profitable line of marine accessories and gain a commitment to develop a racing stern drive. And to marry Carol.

But the turnaround threatened to stall when the company’s European distribution partner missed payments on the stern drive program and stopped returning calls. Kiekhaefer was forced to return to the bank for financing. He got the money, and brought Stern Drives by Kiekhaefer to the market. The product attracted enough customers, but Kiekhaefer knew that to build credibility, he needed a racing team to adopt it.

The foray into racing was anything but smooth. First, a European team improperly mated the drives to Lamborghini engines and had so much trouble with the engines that it could not showcase the drives. Then, a U.S. team mated the drive to a boat plug. It was 50 percent heavier than it should have been. A third team was having trouble getting competitive speed out of their boat.  Kiekhaefer could not figure out why — until he overheard a racing mechanic on the phone.

“He said, ‘We just have to tell them what we did!’ The mechanics had used smaller turbos without telling anyone,” Kiekhaefer says. “So we caught them out and they used the bigger turbos to get the boat competitive. We took that boat from a slug to 1988 world champion.

Mercury Racing 1350, full package

The company’s success in sales and racing over seven years attracted Brunswick Corporation, which purchased Mercury Racing in 1990. Kiekhaefer stayed with the company to facilitate the merger and help to grow the new business. He has been there for 21 years.

In that time, the technology has changed dramatically. The first marine racing systems were based on engines built in Detroit in the 1940s and 50s. They evolved with aftermarket hot rod kits until teams were pulling 1,200 horsepower from an engine designed to produce 300.

“We did a pair that got close to 2,000 horsepower,” Kiekhaefer says. “They only lasted eight minutes. But that’s what people were doing. They run them, hung on and prayed a valve didn’t come through the side.”

Today, the engines are designed from the ground up for racing. They have become so powerful that racing organizations are imposing limits to reduce speed and lower the risk of crashes.

Understanding and advancing racing technology is an intense game “where cat and mouse meets Sherlock Holmes.” Crews watch each other closely to get a leg up on the competition — and each observation can spark a whole new area of inquiry and experimentation that moves the entire industry forward.

For example, when a team from the Middle East partnered with U.S. engineers who specialized in drag-racing transmissions, the result was a system that substantially lowered parasitic losses.  “They walked all over everyone,” Kiekhaefer says. “This brought stern drive losses in line with surface drive losses. People started to say stern drives had too much drag, but it was about parasitic loss.”

Verado 350SCi

Kiekhaefer’s team went back to the drawing board and with the help of consultants, produced a dry sump version of their own. It didn’t truly dry sump and it didn’t have a remote tank; instead, it used a pump on the nose of the prop shaft to spot oil gears. It reduced the gear-case oil volume to 20 percent and eliminated the need for a remote tank.

“Our joke was ‘How do you keep 20,000 pounds of canaries below the weight limit on 10,000 pound rig? You have to bang on the trailer to keep half of them flying.’ So that’s what we did with the oil, we kept half of it circulating and moving around inside the drive so the drive housing itself became the dry sump. As a result, we didn’t need a tank or the complexity of our competitor. It’s a dry-sump drive without a dry sump. It had way better drive efficiency, I was blown away because I had no idea we had that level of losses. We didn’t have the tools to do the analysis back when it was an independent company.”

Kiekhaefer says the trends are clear for offshore racing. The company’s quad-cam, four-valve platform was born of the realization that power is still increasing, and Detroit-iron-based engines will not keep up because automotive displacement continues to decrease and the valve train in pushrod engines is the weak link. He says the rocker arms fly off pushrods and valveheads.

“It’s all just radical, off-the-edge stuff, because when you’re running a race boat, it’s not like running a race car where you back off for the corners. It’s the most brutal environment. You’re just all out, all the time, pushing a condominium through the water.”

Carol and Fred Kiekhaefer have a home in Middleton. Carol Kiekhaefer, M.D. Ph.D. is a post-doc research scientist in the DeLuca lab at UW and just published in the December issue of Clinical and Experimental Immunology.