About Adam
Bio
My background is primarily in Electrical Engineering, though the past few years dabbling in 3D data visualization has become a new passion I wish to apply to tough problems.
With a Bachelor's of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from The Ohio State University, my specialization is in Sustainable Energy and Power Systems. Since 2010 I have played many roles in this field. As a student I worked part time with the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio, reviewing renewable utility and energy efficiency incentive applications.
I also completed 3 full-time co-ops as a student, 2 with Honda and 1 with US Steel, learning how to manage power throughout complex manufacturing facilities. This landed me my first full-time job out of college managing the power for a Honda manufacturing plant.
With a passion for international development I also joined several service learning project trips to Peru and Ghana as a student. In Peru we joined a collaborative project between Rotary International and Burners withour Borders, and spent a Spring Break doing earthquake relief work in Pisco, Peru. The two trips to Ghana were through the City & Regional Planning program, and I led two rural energy projects: one solar power system for LED lighting in an off-grid school, amd two bipgas digesters to generate an alternative cooking fuel. As many of these projects go, I returned two years later to find these systems not functioning anymore, and have refocused my efforts in aligning with local organozations that are already successfully engaged in not only installing utility based systems, but are also maintaining them.
This led me to leave my job at Honda, and join a Humanitarian Engineering Non-profit called Design Outreach. Their goal is to replace the India Mark-2 as the standard manual water pump for water scarce villages, so my job was to design and build a test stand to run diagnostics on each pump for quality and functionality. After successfully building this, as it is with many non-profits the pay wasn't quite what I needed to pay off college loans, so I got a job as the first in the Telecom Planning group of an Engineering Firm (EASi LLC) to plan fiber networks for the power grid.
At EASi we worked very closely with American Electric Power (AEP) which operates the largest electrical transmission system in Nortg America. In planning the fiber backbone, much of my role included determining who to engage with to plan each segment, and how to develop and communicate a work plan across several departments.
Parallel to much of this work grew my passion for creating data visualizations in 3D. It started as a pet project I umdertook when I graduated - eager to challenge myself in the free evenings where I no longer had homework or student org meetings. I had a way that I think of time long-term in my head, and I began learning what I needed to visualize that in a 3D javascript environment (three.js). From there, it grew into using the Unity Game Engine, and after purchasing one of the Oculus Rift development kits (DK2) i immediately fell in love with VR. This led me to attend several of the premiere VR/AR conferences, lead the VR Columbus Meetup group, lead several VR hackathon projects, and begin leasing my own office to experiment and develop further on evenings and weekends.
This past June, after planning fiber networks for a year and a half, I put in my six-weeks notice, trained my replacement, and booked a one way ticket back to Ghana for a few conferences there (IEEE Power Africa and the Africa Open Data Conference), folled by a trip to visit several innovative technology groups in Africa and Europe.
TED Global will be nearing the end of a two and a half month trip out here, and then mid-September I plan to dive head first into visualizing data in 3D environments. Over the course of the journey I have been studying blockchain systems as well, and networking with people who are developing a blockchain system for energy. I have a few ideas on visualizing this in itself, as a lot of people (myself included) struggle to keep up with what is going on in this field even on a conceptual level.