Taking Risks and Innovating Along the Way with Al Romig

0:04 Welcome to AMSEcast, coming to you from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a global leader in science, technology, and innovation. My name is Alan Lowe, director of the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the K-25 History Center. Each episode of AMSEcast presents world-renowned authors, scientists, historians, policymakers, and everyone in between, sharing their insights on a variety of fascinating topics. Welcome to a special edition of AMSEcast as we celebrate 250 years of American innovation. With much appreciated support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, or IMLS, we’re undertaking a series of AMSEcast interviews focusing on American innovations as part of our commemoration of our nation’s semiquincentennial.

0:55 On this episode, being recorded at the National Academy of Sciences Building in Washington, DC, I’m very honored to be joined by Dr. Alton D. Romig, Jr. With his BS, MS, and PhD in materials science and engineering from Lehigh University. Al has had a truly exceptional career, full of more awards than I can list today. Most recently, for example, the 2024 IEEE McClure Citation of Honor for engineering leadership, and more positions than I can include today, but they’ve included leadership roles at Sandia National Lab, service as vice president and general manager of Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs, better known to all of us as the famous Skunk Works.

1:37 And currently, Al serves as Executive Officer of the National Academy of Engineering. Al, it’s a real honor to speak with you. Welcome to AMSEcast. Well, thank you so much for hosting me. I really also want to thank our mutual friend and colleague, Guru Madhavan. Guru has been so good to AMSE, and to our mission there, and we really appreciate him connecting us with you today. So, I want to start back at Sandia. You know, we work a lot at AMSE and K-25 with our good friends at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and we know you spent time at Sandia, really an amazing place as well. A lot of innovation there, particularly in the fields of national security. From your time at Sandia, what can you note as some of that lab’s most significant innovative contributions to our nation?

2:21 And can you perhaps also comment on the more general role of national labs in spurring innovation in the public and private sectors? In the case of Sandia, it’s really useful to think about the history of the laboratory. It was actually born in 1943 as the ordinance division in Los Alamos, during the Manhattan Project. Part of the group was in Los Alamos, Part of it was at the Wendover field in Utah, and towards the end of the war, during the summer of 1945, the organization moved towards Albuquerque, New Mexico, and was part of Los Alamos until 1949, when the government made the decision that nuclear weapons were going to be part of the future defense portfolio, if you will, of the United States, which was going to mean some quite fundamental changes in how weapons were designed, and manufactured, and put into the hands of the military.

3:13 So, in 1949 the laboratory was spun out of Los Alamos and was taken over under contract by AT&T, Bell Labs, and Western Electric, and they actually held the contract until 1993, when it went to Lockheed Martin, and now recently it’s gone to Honeywell. So interestingly, it’s the one laboratory that’s actually had industrial leadership for the entire life of its existence, which is unique amongst all the national laboratories. But I think if you go back and look at that very reason why the laboratory was created in the first place, one of the issues was, to use the terminology and jargon of the day, is they wanted to create what they called a wooden bomb. If you look at the weapons, Fat Man and the Little Boy that were used in World War II, they were really quite specialized gadgets, as the term was used at the time.

4:01 And as a matter of fact, it actually took an engineer on board the bomber to arm the planes in flight, and certainly that was not going to be a suitable thing if you wanted to include nuclear deterrence as a way to deter aggression around the world. And that meant redesigning and manufacturing the bombs in such a way that they could actually be put into storage, and taken out and used as a way to, quite frankly, coerce an adversary into not starting trouble in the first place. And so, this notion of having wooden bombs and developing the Mark 4 weapon, as it was called at the time, was really at the heart of what made Sandia a tick. So, I think the first great innovation that it had was taking the nuclear weapon from being a bomb that was really a laboratory gadget, and making it into something that actually had a proper slot, if you will, in the nation’s arsenal of defense.

4:47 You know, as that went along, it was clear that things like electronics were going to be a lot more important to how these weapons worked. Along the way, in the late-1950s, one of the engineers at the laboratory by the name of Willis Whitfield invented the laminar-flow clean room, which, of course, is so predominant today in the manufacture of electronics, and, of course, in pharmaceuticals, and even cases of orthopedic surgery, it’s now used. But that was a creation that was done in 1959. The laboratory held the patent for it. And back in those days, it was long before the notion of tech transfer had entered the jargon or the lexicon of the laboratories, and so the license was actually, it was licensed for free to anybody who wanted it, but the only restriction mean that the laboratory and the weapons complex could continue to use it, which in fact, it has to this day.

5:34 And then during my tenure at the laboratory, one of the things that we created was a facility called MESA, which is an advanced facility for advanced micro systems and micro electronics, which still, in fact, makes use of that clean room technology. So, I think the wooden bomb and the laminar-flow clean room are two of the things from earlier in its history. One that came along when I was just starting my career, I hired in 1979, and this is something I worked on in 1980 and ’81, was something called SWERVE, which was the Sandia Winged Energetic Re-entry experiment. It was a guideable hypersonic vehicle that was, in fact, designed and intended to be used as a way to make a maneuverable nuclear warhead at the time. It was done under the Advanced Development Program.

6:16 It was done, it was flown to prove that it worked, and it was put on the shelf, but in fact, when people talk about our adversaries having flown hypersonic weapons, we flew the first one in 1981. And then it got parked on the shelf. And if you look at some of the ones that are about to be deployed by our own DOD, they are evolutions at that design that came out of Sandia in the early-1980s. I think if I look at one of the other things that came along during my tenure was the creation of what we called Intelligent Integrated Microsystems where we began combining silicon microelectronics memories, and microprocessors, along with laser or RF communications devices, MEMS devices, and so forth, all in a single chip or small multi-chip module.

6:58 And I think one other thing that I’m really quite proud of that happened during my tenure, and continued after I had gone to the Skunk Works, where the activities in creating all the architecture today that we know as parallel computing, which has been such a major advance in how we can do things computationally in terms of modeling and simulation nowadays, oftentimes called the use of digital twins. We built the first cluster machine, in fact, using that architecture with Dell computers back in the late-’90s or thereabouts. I might be off a bit on the time of it. But there’s just been sort of one incident after another that every few years out it comes. And although the engineers have come and gone, just because of age, the leaders have come and gone, the basic ethos of innovation that exists in the laboratory persists to this day.

7:41 I just recently completed a term on the revisiting committees, actually, for material science and engineering, it’s quite clear that the whole notion of sort of this pipeline of innovation has continued now for almost 80 years, from 1943 or certainly ’49, depending on how you want to start the clock running, and still exists today. So, I think if you look at what national labs in general can do, you know, most private companies, it’s very hard for them to make bets and investments for things that have time rises beyond maybe a few years. Universities tend to do things that have very long time frames, and they can build small prototypes, but there’s this so called—often called—Valley of Death that sits between the very basic research and the final product.

8:21 The laboratories, in fact, most of them, and if you take a look across the spectrum the labs, some are more towards the engineering spectrum, some are more towards the basic science spectrum, but across the broad suite, they’re very good at actually trying to nurture technology across that, and the government and its investments have the patience to do so. And so, I think one of the things that happened in the late-’80s and early-’90s, with the rise of tech transfer, licensing [unintelligible] , and so forth, was an attempt to have the university, industrial, and national laboratory communities work together to bridge this Valley of Death and more quickly and more efficiently and more effectively take technology out of the laboratory and put it into production for products, whether it’s for the government or for the commercial sector.

9:02 Truly a remarkable record. I was wondering, as you were saying that, when you were at Sandia, and we’ll talk about this more with your other positions, how do you encourage that among the people working there, that ethos of innovation? Of thinking of new, of thinking of better how is that instilled into the workforce at the lab? Well, you know, it’s interesting because the same thing that I’m about to say would apply to a place like the Skunk Works, that if you look at the times when they were created—and I’ll get into this maybe a little bit later in the dialog—but at the times that they were created, innovation was critical to what created them, and that created a culture. And what we’ve been fortunate in it happening is that culture that encouraged risk-taking, but prudent risk-taking, it’s okay if things fail, if you learned from it, but by the time you’re done, you come up with a version of it that, in fact, is as good or better than it was than originally maybe you had thought that it would be, and then not to break it.

9:58 So, you need to encourage people to take chances, and you need to give them the resources to do that. Now, that doesn’t mean you just throw money all over the place. It’s got to be prudent investments. You’ve got to manage it, you’ve got to nurture it through some kind of a gating process as it evolves, but I think right now, for laboratories like a Sandia, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Oak Ridge, a place like the Skunk Works, and Apple, et cetera, these cultures, they’re there, and so it’s now really incumbent upon the management not to break what’s been created over time. Let’s go to Skunk Works. When was that created? Under what circumstances was Skunk Works created? Well, the Skunk Works sort of had its pre-season, if you will, in the late-1930s when the government asked for a fighter that could exceed, actually, they said 360 miles an hour, but in essence, 400 miles an hour.

10:46 And there was a brilliant young engineer at the conference by the name of Clarence Johnson—who went by Kelly, so Kelly Johnson—brilliant designer, had gotten hired out of a master’s degree from the University of Michigan, went to Lockheed at the time, it was long prior to a merger that led to Lockheed Martin, but went to Lockheed at the time. Actually was looking at a design for a twin engine transport slash potential bomber, later called the Hudson, that he thought was not particularly stable in flight. He put it into a wind tunnel, showed that it wasn’t stable in flight, and then went along to making giant design changes to correct those issues. He did this all as a very, very young engineer in his 20s, I think it was.

11:26 So, he had risen to the top of being sort of the creative genius, if you will, of aircraft designer of his day, in fact, probably is still the greatest aircraft designer the country, if not the world, has ever seen. And so, by the time the late-1930s came along, he was put in charge of trying to create this fighter, and it led to what was eventually the creation of the P-38 Lightning. It was the only fighter during World War II that was produced during the entire length of the war, from 1938 to sometime after the end of the war. And the way he did it is he gathered up the best engineers at Lockheed, moved them off into the remote area of the work site in Burbank, California, where they proceeded to build this aircraft that was then later accepted by the Army Air Corps, and off they went.

12:07 And then the group disbanded. It was gone. Well, Then in 1943, we began to get evidence that the Germans were about to field the Me 262, the world’s first jet fighter. And the word went out, we need to be able to do the same. And there was an initial contract that led—with Bell aerospace—to build something called the X-39 that demonstrated you can make an airplane fly, but it certainly didn’t have the characteristics of the fighter. But then the call went out for a fighters, and the call came to Lockheed again. And this time, Lockheed drafted Kelly Johnson again to put together a team, which he did, to create the P-80, which was the first operational jet fighter. And when he did it, the plant was so busy building aircraft for the war, there was no room for him.

12:50 So, he went out and rented a circus tent, and put it at the very periphery of the Burbank Airport on Lockheed land. Put up this circus tent. So, you got a classified circus tent, and inside he had a little over a hundred engineers, and procurement officials, and so forth, and technicians, designing and building this airplane. It was called Advanced Development Projects at the time. And it just so happens across the street, there was a factory that made plastics that smelled really bad, and at the same time, there was also a comic strip that was being written that—Li’l Abner—that had a very smelly backwood still called Skonk Works with an O in it. And so, people began making the association. And one of the engineers there, an individual by the name of Irv Culver, took to answering the phone, “Skunk Works, your man, Culver here.” Of course, Kelly didn’t like it, but it was one of the few times in his life where his hundred employees said, “Too bad Kelly.

13:43 We’re going to use it.” And it stuck. At the end of the war, it turns out there was a copyright issue with the—or a trademark issue—with the term Skonk Works, and it flipped to Skonk Works, and the name was trademarked, and the little image drawn that you see in the skonk today, and it’s persisted ever since. If you’ve never read it, there was a book written by Kelly’s successor, an individual named Ben Rich, who led the Skunk Works from 1975 until 1990, it’s just simply called Skunk Works. But it’s a delightful read and really quite accurate in terms of capturing the culture of the organization. And then through time, of course, whether it was the U-2, the high flying spy plane, or the SR-71 you know, the Blackbird, which is a very exciting plane, and more recently, the F-22 and the F-35.

14:29 One of the projects that we started, just as I was leaving and retiring, was something called the X-59 which is a regional jet-sized supersonic aircraft being built for NASA that I like to describe really as much of a sociology experiment as an aeronautics experiment. The airplane is shaped in such a way that rather than having a sharp sonic boom, like most of us might be used to or had heard before, it produces a rumble more like distant thunder. And the idea—it should fly sometime, very soon, sometime later next spring, I would think. It got derailed a bit by the whole Covid event and people being able to work together on it. But in any case, once NASA takes possession of the airplane, the plan is to fly it around cities and monitor how crowds react to it.

15:15 Another very exciting thing that we did when I was there was, came out with a released design for a successor to the SR-71 called the SR-72, which was a mock five-and-a-half or thereabouts, air-breathing aircraft. And in fact, it is the inspiration behind the airplane that’s in the opening scenes of Maverick, Top Gun. So, if you look carefully at that airplane, you’ll see it’s got a skunk on the tail and a skunk on the yoke on the inside, and that’s a derivative of a design that was done when I was there. There’s also a whole raft of other things that have been done or are being done now that are classified that we can’t talk about. But the litany of innovations from one to the next is just quite remarkable. It’s different than a place like a Sandia, or a Los Alamos, or an Oak Ridge because there’s a lot less basic research done there.

16:00 Its really is mostly advanced development, and they look for a lot of the basic research to be done, say, in the university community. There’s some very basic rules about how the Skunk Works is supposed to operate, you know, meaning things like—there’s something called Kelly Johnson’s Rules, which you can Google and look up—the things about keeping requirements to a minimum, just specify what you really, really need, a strong, knowledgeable leader, managing your subcontractors, a list of 14 of these that all really are a great way to run a project, which have applied. And then there’s some tongue-in-cheek things, if you will, like only one miracle per program, don’t invent what you don’t have to. So, if you look at the F-117 Night fighter, the stealth airplane that many people know, the Darth Vader-ish looking airplane that was made public back in the late-1980s, if you look at that airplane, landing gears, engines, cockpits, guidance systems, all were things taken out of other aircraft.

16:51 So, don’t invent what you don’t have to. And so, the one miracle for that plane really was the stealth: the shape and materials for the stealth. And maybe there was a miracle-and-a-half because the second half is, how do you make a shape like that actually fly, which was actually done. But nevertheless, a great place for innovation. And one of the things that I think is interesting, if I think about these, Alan, is that—and it’s really in common to Los Alamos slash Sandia and the Skunk Works—and then if you go back to 1943, both the nuclear weapons program, Manhattan Project, and the Skunk Works were born in 1943. And at the time, think about it, the US was under an existential threat. No one knew if we were going to win the war or not, and because of that, money was no object.

17:34 So, what it was going to cost to build a jet fighter, or what was going to cost to build a B-29, or what it was going to cost to run the Manhattan Project didn’t really matter. Both in the area of Aeronautics and in the area of physics, there had been a couple of decades with the ’20s and ’30s—even a little bit further back in the [unintelligible] of physics—Were great advances in physics and in aeronautics. The fields really blossomed with a continuous stream of new big ideas, not all from those institutions, but just in general. And then there were a couple of charismatic leaders. In the case of the Skunk Works, of Kelly Johnson, in the case of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer. And so, that was really kind of a magic mix that actually led to the creation of both of those places back in the 1940s, and so far, leadership teams that have—and the government, whether it’s DOD or DOE—that’s worked very hard to maintain that innovative culture and not break it along the way, while still being safe, and compliant, and not harming the environment the best they can, and so forth.

18:29 So, tell me about your role in the National Academy of Engineering and how that mindset is here, that mindset of supporting and fostering innovation. Well, the National Academies of Engineering actually go back a lot further than that. So, a bit of history. We were all born in 1863—80 years before the Skunk Works and the nuclear weapons program—created by Abraham Lincoln under a charter from Congress that Lincoln signed in April of 1863. And what it did was create an organization called the National Academy of Sciences. And the reason Lincoln did that was, if you think about it, in many ways, the Civil War was our first technological conflict. Hot air balloons, the trains for moving troops and logistics, rifling of gun barrels, you know, prominently on the battlefield, iron bottom ships, all of these things encountered—as with any new technology of his day—encountered difficulties.

19:23 And what Lincoln found—let’s take the iron bottom ships because those were the first things that appeared on the radar screen at the Academies—he could go to the ship builders and said, “Give us more money. We’ll figure it out.” The two big problems were corrosion of the iron, and number two, how do you make a magnetic compass work on an iron ship? So, he goes to the ship companies. They say, “Give us money. We’ll figure it out.” Okay. He goes to the iron companies. “Well, give us the money. We’ll figure it out.” He goes to the Navy, “Give us money. We’ll figure it out.” And he wasn’t very satisfied with that, so he said, I’m going to create my own independent body, and I’ll pay their expenses, but I’m not going to pay them just to exist. And that’s the model that’s captured in the charter from Congress, and it’s one that we still live by today. If you look at that original charter, it gave the names of the original 50 or 60 members, by name, and by institution, and by what they did.

20:09 And so, it didn’t say, for example, engineer, but it might have said ship builder, something like that. And you can look at that original group of members, and they were scientists, engineers, and physicians and health people, and they came from academia, government, and universities. And over time, stimulated by the executive order that Woodrow Wilson wrote for the Academies on the eve of World War I to expand what it could do, the National Academy of Sciences eventually went on a trajectory of being more pure science and more pure academic. And so, that disrupted the balance that the government wanted in the body that gave it advice, and that ultimately led to the creation of the National Academy of Engineering in 1963, and then later, in a couple step process, the National Academy of Medicine.

20:52 And so, if you take a look at the National Academy of Engineering, about 40% of our members are from industry, about 50% are from academia, and about 10% are from government. Typically, DOE laboratories being the most prominent source of those, and places like JPL as well. And so, the charter all along has been, actually, if you think about the very first two projects the Academies were given were, what do you do about corrosion on an iron ship, and how do you make a compass work in an iron ship? Well, the corrosion one, they never really quite figured out. But they actually came up with a way to figure out how to use the compass on an iron ship, all by innovation. And you look at things that were done, you know, in the late-1800s it turned out everybody and his brother, there were, like, nine different organizations that thought they were mapping the land in the West.

21:36 And the government said, “Stop, stop.” And they asked the academy to figure out a way to rationalize how we were exploring and documenting the resources in the West. The Academy came along, did a study that eventually led to the creation of the USGS that still exists to this day. Things that were done during World War I. I mean, one very prominent project that ties back to your history at Oak Ridge, in the late-1930s and between ’39 and ’41, there was a series of three reports written that are broadly called the Uranium Reports, or the Fission Reports, about what could you do with this new thing called uranium and the fission that happened in it. And the first report talked about either powering ships with it or building a bomb. The decision was, we couldn’t build a ship in time with it to affect the war, but maybe we could build a bomb, and that led to the creation of the Manhattan Project.

22:22 So, while people might say the letter that was written by Szilard and signed by Einstein is what created the Manhattan Project, that really triggered the study of the Academy that said, “Yeah, you could really do this.” And [unintelligible] you look at that report, it’s written on a little mechanical typewriter, the equations are written by hand, but about half the committee ended up being Nobel laureates. Wow [laugh] . And, you know, and [unintelligible] goes on. And the one of the things that we do these days is a decadal surveys for NASA that tell us what are going to be the sequence of next experiments for the next decade: the Hubble telescope, the James Webb telescope, what’s going to come next after that, for example. A report that was just done on next generation small module reactors is another one.

23:03 A lot of things that are done in the area of health and medicine. In fact, anyone can go to the National Academies Press, and they’re about 300 or so between reports and studies and workshops that are done a year, maybe 250, 200, and you can download PDFs of any of these things for free, from the National Academies Press website. So very, very interesting things, indeed. Very good. I will be there tonight for sure. Let’s talk generally about American innovation. In all of our interviews, and certainly this interview, we see this remarkable record of American innovation. One of the questions we have is, how do we keep that going? How do you keep it over the next 250 years, and what are the big obstacles we need to be aware of and to be ready to confront as we start that next 250?

23:48 Well, I think there’s two things. I mean, one, of course, is you need to maintain a talented workforce. And if you take a look at our history of doing this, that requires two things. One, it requires making sure that we have a very healthy and effective education system in this country. Quite frankly, we do well, or have done well at the university level, although there may be some evidence that’s beginning to erode. We certainly have not done so well at the K through 12 level. And when you look at the scores we have for reading, math, science, and so forth, we’re kind of a middling-looking country, and it’s not really very good. A lot of our young people seem to catch up when they get to college, which is a good thing, but nevertheless, we need to find some way to crack the code to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency with which we educate our students in the K through 12, and at the same time keep our universities healthy and vibrant [unintelligible] . That’s number one.

24:39 The second thing is we’ve always relied on the fact that if the economy is growing faster than the population is, it’s going to really be important to import the right kinds of high-level talents. So, whether you know it’s been scientists, and engineers, and mathematicians from Europe, Eastern Europe, from Asia, et cetera, that’s a stream that needs to continue. If you take a look, for example, in the National Academies, the percentage of members that are naturalized citizens, you know, it’s somewhere between the mid-20s, and up to 40% depending on which Academy you’re talking about, that actually are naturalized citizens. So, the ability to cultivate our own talent, and the ability to continue to attract high end talent from around the world is going to really be important.

25:23 And of course, one of the subsets that I should have mentioned when it talks about retaining our own talent is, everybody’s got to get to the starting gate to do this. So, the notion of it can only be someone that looks a certain way, let me say, we need all brains on deck— Yeah. Yeah. You know, in order to pull this off. So, education is the first thing. Talent, broadly speaking. I think the second thing that we need is we need to have adequate capital to invest. And whether that’s a matter of government money that funds, you know, DARPA or NSF or DOE or NASA or the SBR programs, NIH, whatever it might be, the government needs to invest money in things that are longer-term, that are higher risk, recognize that some things are going to fail.

26:08 That’s why they call it R&D. And I remember one time being asked, “Why couldn’t I”—I won’t even say where it was, but someone to me said to me, “Why can’t you just invest your R&D dollars and things that work?” You know? And my reply to that was, “If I knew how to do that, I wouldn’t be here. I’d be on my own private island somewhere in the Caribbean.” And I think one of the things that’s happened is, in our entire acquisition system, everyone’s afraid to fail. And if everyone’s afraid to fail, that means you’re not going to take the risk to, sort of, keep that investment engine going and really keep driving the thing forward. And then the third thing, along with the workforce and the capital investment, the third thing is just really oneness of culture. And I just alluded to that. But so willingness to take a chance, it’s not bad to fail.

26:49 I mean the old line in the Silicon Valley, you got to fail two or three times before you succeed. It’s okay to fail. Just learn from it and pick yourself up and go on and do it the next time. And I get the real sense, at least in government circles because money is getting so tight that the appetite to tolerate failure has gone down, and I think we really need to avoid that. So, I would say, in summary, it’s talent, it’s investment capital, and it’s a culture that’s willing to accept failure and learn from it, one that’s really meant to say, “Let’s innovate. And if it doesn’t all work, that’s okay.” I’m in with an unfair question, which I often do, in terms of, when you look into the crystal ball coming forward, you know, next 25, 50, years, what are the sectors of the economy, the sectors of industry where you anticipate, kind of, transformative innovations?

27:40 We’re on the cusp of transformative innovations; what would you say those might be? Well, I think there’s three of them. You know, I think one obvious one is sometimes I describe the 20th century as the century of physics of materials, and I would describe the 21st century as the study of the and exploitation of the physics of life. So, I think we’ve already see it happening. The whole notion of how physics and mathematics and all the analytical tools give us a better understanding of how life behaves, and how that ramps into medicine, whether it’s personalized precision medicine, I mean, all these things are going to happen. You know, the fact that, okay, you know, we’re going to grow you a new heart because you need one, or whatever it might be. But I think things we’re going to see happening in the area of the life sciences and medicine, underpinned by physics, chemistry, mathematics, and engineering are going to really—I think that’s number one.

28:29 I think number two is going to be, who knows where artificial intelligence, and how quantum will impact. I mean those—and the two things that I just said are really, I think, pretty obvious. A lot of people would say those same, too. And once again, where AI and all the various quantum effects really go, I don’t know. You know, are we going to get to a Star Trek world where somehow you can all of a sudden communicate over infinite distances instantaneously using entanglement? I’m sure somebody could write a science fiction book on it, but whether or not it could ever happen over 200 years, I mean, who knows? And the third one is, I don’t know. There was going to be an unknown unknown out there that’s going to crop up. I’m fairly sure those first two are going to happen, but they won’t be alone.

29:10 There will be something else, of which there’s maybe just a twinkling out there in somebody’s eye, but only that one person, and we don’t know what it is. I certainly recall the days of high school where I wouldn’t have known any idea of what an internet might be, and now look at how that has changed the world. So, such a fascinating conversation, Al. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for joining us on AMSEcast. My pleasure, and I look forward to seeing you in Oak Ridge. Thank you for joining us on this episode of AMSEcast. For more information on this topic or any others, you can always visit us at AMSE.org or find, like, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

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