Dr. Karen Swider-Lyons is head of the Alternative Energy Section in the Chemistry Division at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington DC. She earned her PhD in materials science and engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 for studies on high-temperature fuel cells.
She currently leads research programs on advanced battery materials, low-cost catalysts for polymer fuel cells, and the use of fuel cells for long-endurance, energy-efficient unmanned air and undersea vehicles. She has served as a technical advisor to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR). In 2010, she received the Dr. Delores M. Etter Top Scientist Award from the US Navy for her work on the Ion Tiger, a long-endurance hydrogen-powered fuel cell system for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs). Dr. Swider-Lyons has authored more than 80 technical publications and holds 12 patents.
Brett Stern: Can you give me background, your education, and your field of study?
Karen Swider-Lyons: I went to Haverford College for chemistry and to the University of Pennsylvania for graduate studies in materials science.
Stern: Would you say growing up you were an inventive child?
Swider-Lyons: No, but I always liked to do projects.
Stern: What types of projects?
Swider-Lyons: Well—frankly, to be sexist, as a girl—when I was left to myself, I did a lot of sewing and making clothing. As a teenager in college, I decided to refurbish my car, which I didn’t know anything about. I just tried to get out there and do it.
Stern: In layperson’s terms, can you talk about your field of study and the inventions that you work on?
Swider-Lyons: I work on electrochemical technology. Everything I’m working on now has to do with fuel cells and batteries, or derivatives of them. Because I work for the military, they are generally used in military systems. Sometimes, they’re just general improvements to technology. So, the applications of my work span everything from consumer use all the way to military systems.
Stern: Do the problems come to you, or do you go out into the marketplace and look for the problems?
Swider-Lyons: We go look for the problems, absolutely. For instance my main focus now is on long endurance unmanned vehicles. There’s a general need for longer endurance in unmanned vehicles. There’s no current solution, and there’s acute awareness of the problem.
Stern: Does someone in the military come to you and say, “Think about this”?
Swider-Lyons: Yes. I go to conferences and people bring up their needs for technology improvements: more efficient, cheaper, lighter. But there is usually no solution provided.
Stern: What was the state of the art in UAV [unmanned air vehicle] propulsion at the start of your work?
Swider-Lyons: I want to be clear that I am focusing on what is called small unmanned air vehicles—from about 15 to 100 pounds. These are powered by batteries and combustion engines. Batteries don’t have enough endurance. The engines with heavy fuel offer better endurance, but they are very inefficient and unreliable—so both are inadequate for long-range military reconnaissance and surveillance. Traditional batteries can only sustain flight for a couple of hours. Traditional combustion engines can sustain flight for up to 24 hours, but they are noisy and emit a lot of infrared energy.
Stern: Could you describe the particular work that you’re doing now?
Swider-Lyons: In 2009, my team flew an experimental but practical fuel-cell UAV, the Ion Tiger, for twenty-four hours with a five-pound payload using compressed hydrogen. Now we are gearing up for demonstrating about three days of flight with liquid hydrogen fuel. These experiments could revolutionize electric flight. Everyone wants to move to electric flight. I remember going to a meeting in 2004 at which people were talking about autonomous systems. There was a big push, especially for autonomous airplanes. They wanted to take the pilots out, mainly just to get them out of harm’s way. Autonomous planes have to get to the location and they have to send information back. You need a lot of endurance to do that. People came to me because they knew I worked on energy systems and they said, “How are you going to do that?”
I was like, “I haven’t the foggiest idea.”
With a colleague of mine, I was working on a supporting program of fuel cells for portable power projects. We’d go out to companies to visit their labs. One day my colleague, Bob Nowak, came to a meeting and held up a small black piece of plastic, and said “Look at this little fuel cell that this company, Protonex Technology Corporation, is building.” I thought, “Oh. I wonder what we can do with that?”
An important invention a few years earlier from NRL was based around a two-gram video camera and what sort of airplane we could wrap around that. From this, they built, the Marine Corps’ Dragon Eye, was a small battery-powered UAV in 2001. This was the first portable drone and is now on display in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Rich Foch is the lead inventor on that project. I was not part of that project.
We now had a really small fuel cell from Protonex. The Protonex fuel cell was about 100 Watts—equivalent of the power need for an incandescent light bulb—and it needed to run on hydrogen. The military had been focusing on 25-Watt fuel cells for portable computers, and also wanted them to run on heavy fuel, like diesel. Coincidentally, around that time my post doctoral fellow, Peter Bouwman, was bugging me to put a fuel cell on an airplane and fly it around. Until I saw that Protonex fuel cell, I hadn’t thought it was possible because all of the fuel cells I had been seeing were too big and low power. And that’s when we got the idea to do the first little fuel-cell-powered UAV, which was called Spider-Lion. Because we didn’t have much of a research budget, we didn’t have funding for reforming fuels or anything. We just carried compressed hydrogen in a paint ball cylinder–which resulted in us building a relatively simple system that worked quite well. Spider-Lion was just a six-pound toy to see if a new technology could work. Innovations are based upon such miniaturized experiments.
We were then able to fly it and people were, “Wow, that’s really interesting that you could do this!”
Stern: It sounds like you had a solution, but you didn’t have the problem yet?
Swider-Lyons: We kind of just wanted to do stuff and no one knew where you could go with all this. I’ve talked to a lot of people from the Air Force and they have a lot of their decisions from top down, “We want an airplane that can go eight hours.” And we’re more like, “Hey, let’s see if we can go for twenty-four.” It was just a technology push.
I think what we enjoy here is just trying to do stuff that’s kind of nuts. The nice thing about working at NRL is that we didn’t have a big acquisition plan. We’re not part of the formal Navy process and the Navy protects us. They recognize that it’s because we’re not under these restrictions that we come up with really innovative ideas. Many of our ideas transition to the military through the private sector.
Stern: You talked before that you have this team you’ve put together. When you start the project, I assuming you are the project manager? How do you decide which people to pick?
Swider-Lyons: That’s a great question. Well, I started off, of course, as a bench scientist. Back in the Spider-Lion days, I was on what I call the C team: me and my postdocs trying to get this together. Then someone says, “Well, that’s interesting. Let’s put an engineer on that.” I gradually moved into what I would call the A team, and because I am the biggest advocate of the technology, I became the principle investigator, responsible for the whole team. You don’t get the A team at the start. You don’t get the best engineers, because they are all busy. Now, I’ve been able to have all the A-team engineers because everyone wants to work on my projects, because they work. But a lot of it is that I have to push it along to get these things to work. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for hands on work myself anymore either.
I was in a recent dilemma about another program we’re working on for an unmanned undersea vehicle, also known as a submarine. This is going to take forever to build—it’s pretty big. And I said, “Let’s just build something. Let’s cobble something together and get it to go, because all my engineers are getting distracted with other shiny object projects.” We have the shiny-object problem. The goal is to make your project the shiniest, and a lot of that comes down to getting out the PR and representing it well. But, really, it’s just cool, and I’m just generally enthusiastic about this stuff. We just got the thumbs up, and should have a comparable “Spider-Lion” of the UUV built in a year.
Stern: Where does this enthusiasm come from?
Swider-Lyons: I don’t know.
Stern: Do you just like learning new things?
Swider-Lyons: Yeah, I just like what I do. I’ve got paperwork on my desk here I’ve got to sign, and I’ve got to slog through budgets, but NRL management does a good job in providing a good environment for inventors here.
Stern: Could you give some examples?
Swider-Lyons: We have some freedom to do different things. So, for instance, I’m working on this current project, which is a huge grind. There are 40 people on it. We have engineering review after engineering review. It’s a new technology, but it’s a grind. I have just decided that I’m going to do a sabbatical next summer at the University of Hawaii and work on new energy systems, and everyone’s like, “Okay.” None of my management will stop me from going there. The UH energy institute at UH does R&D on all the alternative energy systems in the United States: solar, thermal, hydrogen, everything. So, that’s the place to do alternative energy. So NRL will give me a chance to get back in touch with my energy roots, and step away from management for a while.
Stern: When you have this team, you obviously have a lot of bright people. How do you coordinate the decision-making process with all these individuals?
Swider-Lyons: It’s tricky—and, to tell you the truth, it is all men on these big engineering teams. It’s me and the guys. Me and seven mechanical engineers. Me and twelve mechanical engineers. First of all, I give them credit, which they are very grateful for. Unfortunately, when a principal investigator gets a big name in a field, they’re often talking like, “No, I did this by myself.” I’m so grateful to the pilots and to all the people who work on the project.
Stern: Do you think they appreciate the team effort after a while?
Swider-Lyons: Yes, everyone likes being on a team. But what a project manager has to do is to spend a huge amount of time communicating with everyone and making sure everyone is on the same page. Recently, for example, someone on the team brought up the fact that we didn’t have the right cables for the vehicle. I mean, could you think of anything more boring than electrical connectors? So I set a meeting and then we all came to agreement on electrical connections. If you don’t sort out all these details, you don’t invent anything. You have to be disciplined to deal with the incredible minutiae and boring stuff.
Stern: When you’re trying to come up with ideas, where do you seek inspiration?
Stern: But do you try to find analogies from things that are outside the lab?
Swider-Lyons: Give me an example.
Stern: Baking. There are chemical reactions in baking.
Swider-Lyons: Well, yeah. When I was doing my thesis, I couldn’t figure something out, but then I realized the solution when I was baking. You just have to think about it all the time. You have to be curious and persistent about getting a perfect answer—an answer that meets all the questions.
Stern: Where there are equal signs between everything?
Swider-Lyons: Yeah, that’s what I’m interested in.
Stern: So, there is a perfect solution?
Swider-Lyons: In the process of trying to get something perfect you invent something. Does that make sense?
Stern: Well, it does, but isn’t there always an opportunity after you’ve invented something to go back and say, “I could do it even better?”
Swider-Lyons: Yeah, of course.
Stern: So are you then making it more perfect?
Swider-Lyons: Yeah.
Stern: Do ever feel that you’re making mistakes or failures?
Swider-Lyons: Of course.
Stern: What’s the motivation when you do an experiment and it doesn’t work?
Swider-Lyons: Well, this is an interesting question. As an example, we were developing a new technology for efficiently charging batteries that we thought we could patent, but we couldn’t get the experimental data together quite right. I had an intuition that it was going to work. I had a very good summer student working on the program, and he got it to work. Then I had a more senior engineer come look at it and realized that the student’s results were probably due to problems with the equipment. He got it to sort of un-work. All he found was problems—they were legitimate, but we never found our way around them. I’ve noticed there are people who get things to un-work. Does that make sense?
Stern: What is un-working?
Swider-Lyons: Well, there are certain people who like to find problems.
Stern: Is this a glass-half-full-or-half-empty situation?
Swider-Lyons: I would say it’s a different type of research. Some researchers, and I have done this often myself, just find problems. This is a valid type of research, and is important to find problems. The key to inventing though is to take the same problems, and basically turn them inside out into a solution.
Stern: You just talked about having intuition? Where does that come from? Maturity? Life experience?
Swider-Lyons: Just having a weird brain. You just have to think about stuff. For me, it’s a question of hitting a space and starting to think about something and you go, “Well, that’s so obvious to me.” Sometimes I do a search on it and find no one has done it before, and it’s so odd. But usually I find that I’m in a place where my idea is somewhat innovative. For instance, I have an idea about how to charge batteries more efficiently based on work I did for my PhD. It’s something that the average electrical engineer isn’t going to know because my PhD research was in this very high-end research area. So I talk to my electronics people and they go, “Well yeah, that actually might work. But I never thought of that because I don’t have the background.” So, for me a key part of this process is working with a whole bunch of different people and linking together different fields.
Stern: Going back to failure. How do you get over that?
Swider-Lyons: I haven’t failed yet. I just keep working it.
Stern: So, they’re not failures. They’re just things that didn’t work?
Swider-Lyons: Well, this project right now with the battery charging would be my first failure, and I refuse to give up.
Stern: What is the motivation?
Swider-Lyons: You just want to figure it out. It’s just like a puzzle. Imagine you have a jigsaw puzzle and you have some pieces fitting together here that look like a bow and you have some pieces fitting together there that look like a stern and you’re trying to fill in the middle. I wouldn’t give up on it. I’d be so stubborn until I got the whole boat.
Stern: So, is it a personality thing?
Swider-Lyons: Yeah.
Stern: Is it something you learn in school, or someone says work harder?
Swider-Lyons: Maybe it’s luck to some degree. Maybe it’s having a positive experience early on. A lot of stuff is just luck. I’m very lucky that I work here at NRL and I work with a very good UAV group.
Stern: Do you have a definition for what innovation is?
Swider-Lyons: No. Don’t you think a lot of success is the result of being in the right place at the right time? Like Silicon Valley. They’ll tell you it’s percolation therapy: people who were interested in silicon properties and computers started to get connected. But if they hadn’t got connected, innovation would have dribbled away.
Stern: I believe creativity is the connection of tangential things and so you never really know what those connections are, but you have to be willing to be out there and put those things together.
Swider-Lyons: Right, exactly. You just have to slog through a lot of stuff. I hate to be trite, but it’s ninety-nine percent perspiration, 1 percent inspiration. It’s just a lot of work and then every once in a while you’re sifting through all the sand of your job and you go, “Oh, look! There’s a little diamond.”
Stern: Is it just a matter of just absorbing information into your body?
Swider-Lyons: Yes, of course. Just being totally interested. Things like trash fascinate me. Why do we have all this trash? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to work on bioremediation: huge industrial-scale processes, chemistry, knowing how people live, and things like that.
Stern: When you open your eyes in the morning do you just see chemistry in every facet of your life?
Swider-Lyons: No.
Stern: Do you see problems all day?
Swider-Lyons: Yes. I would say I’m a very critical person. I definitely see problems.
Swider-Lyons: Yeah. But what people don’t realize is I’m foremost critical of myself.
Stern: How do you deal with that all day?
Swider-Lyons: You have to be aware of it. But a lot of things in science are critical. To get a paper accepted, you criticize. The criticism is the process. It’s a question of holding yourself to a high standard.
Stern: Your projects never really commercialize in a sense. The government is never going to make these things. Does that change the final product at any point?
Swider-Lyons: It changes what we patent. We patent here for a different reason than industry might. For instance, if we work on a material for the Navy, we will say we want to patent that just because if we paid for the research and that goes out to industry, we’re not going pay for it again.
Swider-Lyons: All the time. Ten at the moment.
Stern: Why is it important to you to work on multiple projects at once?
Swider-Lyons: It’s like your eyes are bigger than your stomach. There’s so much I want to do and I can’t do it all myself and that’s why I’m very focused on building up a team. I don’t even know how to do a lot of stuff.
Stern: Do you delegate?
Swider-Lyons: I both do the work and delegate. If I’m not the inventor that’s fine, too, although, not to have hubris, but my group really hasn’t put out any inventions without me. One of the guys in my group has a very nice way of doing very, very careful measurements that no one has done before. But it’s not patentable. I looked at what he is doing and I said, “Hey that’s really interesting. Why don’t we do it like this and then we can translate that to a measurement method that big Navy or an automotive company could use.”
Stern: So, you’re bringing finesse to it?
Swider-Lyons: I think that I have more experience. I also always try to figure out something practical from the basic research.
Stern: Along the way, have you had mentors? What do you seek in a mentor? And when do you become the mentor?
Swider-Lyons: Yes. I’m a mentor now. I mentor probably eight people informally. I don’t like formal mentoring very much, but even find the informal mentoring exhausting. I had a wonderful experience in college. My professors were super-positive. They gave a lot of positive leadership and I respond very well to that. But in terms of mentors now, I haven’t sought out too many mentors here. I think you try to look for colleagues who you can learn stuff from, and you always have to be learning stuff from different people.
Stern: Why do you think people now are coming to you as a mentor?
Swider-Lyons: Sometimes I inflict myself on them. I have a guy in my group getting his PhD and he just wasn’t getting to a clear thesis. I had to insert myself into it. I said, “You have got to find a question to answer.” And I gave him three questions to answer, and I said, “Pick one. I don’t care.” He was just wandering. But it was funny because I had been wandering in graduate school without much help from my advisor, and then, Fernando Garzon, who had been my undergraduate research advisor when he had been a graduate student, was off at another job but decided to intervene with my graduate research, and basically got me to answer a question. It really saved my graduate career. So hopefully I passed on some of the mentoring I had had before.
What you can’t teach is that you have to work hard at anything to be good. There is no way to be successful without working hard. But you have to work in a certain direction and be disciplined. You have to open your mind in different ways.
Stern: Does being in a military environment broaden your horizon or close it in at all?
Swider-Lyons: Well, both. When you work for the military, you have a sense of being part of a very large organization.
Stern: I meant more the strict discipline and chain of command and following orders.
Swider-Lyons: Oh, not so much here. Here it’s very loosey-goosey in a sense. They recognize that creative people don’t need to be browbeaten. We do have a chain of command and obviously security rules that you don’t have with a university. I set up a system in my group and said, “Just follow it.” And when people complain, I’m like, “Fine, don’t work for the military. I don’t write the rules.” You just learn not to fight the rules. I think that comes with maturity as well.
Stern: You said before there are creative people here. Do you have a definition of what a creative person is, as compared to a non-creative person?
Swider-Lyons: You know there are intuitive people.
Swider-Lyons: I think it’s personality-based. You might be able to learn it. I don’t know. What do you think?
Stern: I think it’s inbred in you. You can get better at it, but if you’re not sensitive to certain things—if you’re not inquisitive—there’s no way to teach it.
Swider-Lyons: And you need a certain amount of confidence short of hubris. I guess in that respect it’s personality-based, and that is somewhat just what you’re born with.
Stern: How do you find new projects? Do you have the liberty to develop your own problems?
Swider-Lyons: Yes, that’s what we do here. I have to pitch new ideas every year or two to get research funding. They don’t just shower money on us and we just do things. We have to write a proposal and have a schedule and meet milestones.
Stern: Have your projects gotten out into the marketplace with actual usage?
Swider-Lyons: Not my Navy ideas yet. We’re working on it. Although I did work for a year at Johnson and Johnson, and was on a patent there, which I believe made it into the consumer market for children’s chewable Motrin.
Stern: Do you think that anything will change once it gets out there—once you have, in a sense, consumer feedback from soldiers in the field?
Swider-Lyons: Yeah, if hydrogen fuel cells go off, I may not even know what happens.
Stern: When you say “go off” you mean?
Swider-Lyons: If they’re deployed. I don’t know what they will be doing. The issue with the military is that they often they want things which, because of budget constraints, you can’t offer them. It’s a very complicated process to get something into the military. The chief of naval operations sent down a query two weeks ago saying. “Why hasn’t this transitioned?” Well, there’s no requirement. Someone in an office has to basically develop a requirement saying, “We need a thirty-five-pound UAV that can fly for a day.” Even though there is a military want, there has to be a formal requirement process. And that takes a while. In some circumstances, people have done better by going out through the private sector and having the military pick it up later when it’s a tangible object that they can see and has a SKU number on it.
Stern: Any advice you would give to be an inventive person?
Swider-Lyons: Put yourself in an environment where you’re going to succeed. You have to be patient, and don’t be a prima donna. You have to work within the system. You have to respect everyone one in your chain who is helping you—from the administrative people to the budget people. I don’t like people who come in here and say, “Why do we have to do a blah-blah review?” You know what? You have a boss and your boss has a boss and your boss’s boss has a boss. Everyone has a boss and everyone is responsible to someone, and what I don’t like is when some scientists think, “Oh, well, I’m doing science—like I’m an artist. I should just be able to do that.”
In my case, I am working for the US government, and there are rules in place that I need to follow. You can be very inventive within the rules, but you have to be respectful of all people who are helping you make this environment for you. You have to be grateful that you’re in a position where you can invent something and accept the downsides. You have to slog through paperwork, the usual thing of any job. The major advantage that we still have here at NRL is that we can have multi-year development cycles. As I said before, I can work on things for years, sometimes only a little bit, but it helps to be in an environment that has some patience.
Stern: You mentioned patience as an attribute. Why is that important?
Swider-Lyons: Sometimes it’s this puzzle and you’re missing a puzzle piece. Sometimes you might have to shelve it for a while until that puzzle piece becomes apparent. It doesn’t always come just like that. [snaps fingers] Often you have to circle back a year or two later and take another look as a new technology comes out. You’re relying on other things to come from other people. You have to patient and keep trolling for new stuff.
Stern: This technology you’re developing now. Do you ever think where will it go in twenty years or thirty years?
Swider-Lyons: If the stuff we’re working on with the unmanned air vehicles and the unmanned submarines works, it will revolutionize the Navy.
Stern: Could this technology be applied to cars?
Stern: Could it go into the consumer marketplace?
Swider-Lyons: Yes. This is a type of thing where the consumer market has been pushing it, but it’s not getting picked up fast enough. The military can adapt it faster than the consumer market.
Stern: Why do you think the consumer market is not picking it up?
Swider-Lyons: Because, after more than 100 years of development, gas engines are cheap. Hydrogen fuel cells are expensive for the consumer market, but they’re cheap for the military because they enable new missions. I cannot understate but if we can do long-endurance unmanned vehicles for the military, they will revolutionize the Navy twenty to thirty years from now. They will change how they do business.
Potentially you could send out vastly cheaper unmanned systems to do the job instead. The Navy could have a persistent fleet of unmanned air and undersea vehicles out all the time. They’re cheap and relatively small. It’s like how you are using your iPad now instead of your desktop computer, a recording device, and digital camera. You still need the big equipment for high quality work, but you can get a lot of work done with just your iPad.
What’s fascinating right now with energy technology is that so much of the future of energy technology is the controls and autonomy. One of the things that I’m really looking forward to in my life is when cars become autonomous, eliminating the risk and waste in how people drive—stepping on the accelerator, swerving, and texting. You live in Oregon, right?
Stern: Portland.
Swider-Lyons: Not too bad.
Stern: We ride bikes all day.
Swider-Lyons: Yeah, here it’s different. I drive on Interstate 395 to get to work. And you don’t have the weather we have here either. Either snowing or 100 degrees is not good biking weather. But if you have people in autonomous cars? If you have a satellite or maybe a series of UAVs for a secure uplink, then you could literally just hand over your car and then it would drive. There are sensors on the car so you don’t get in accidents and you don’t get in traffic jams. You don’t have sixteen-year-olds dying while texting, and it helps older people, too, because they could actually have a lot more freedom. I don’t know how to do autonomy, personally, but lots of people are working on it all over this place.
Stern: You see your technology as being part of that?
Swider-Lyons: Yes. So, this whole movement for long-endurance electric systems that my work is part of is going to enable autonomy, and autonomy is going to free us from drudgery and danger and waste. Thirty years from now you will not be driving your car. It is going to be huge energy savings because the controls will drive you the most efficiently. We’re doing pieces of this technology for the military. I think it’s going to just revolutionize how people live.
Stern: Any advice that you’d want to give to an inventive person?
Swider-Lyons: Oh, I do have some advice for science. My father was a theoretical physicist. I struggled with quantum mechanics in college. He said, “Don’t worry about it. You don’t need it.” “I don’t?” “Yeah.” So, I think if you want to do science or technology, don’t get intimidated by what you don’t know, because you can find people to help you. A friend of mine said recently she dropped out of chemistry because she didn’t understand quantum mechanics. I’m like, “Well, I understand it a little bit, but I am still a professional scientist.”
Stern: There’s someone you can go ask to solve a quantum mechanical problem if it ever comes up?
Swider-Lyons: Yeah, the guy next door here does it. There are geniuses upstairs from me. These guys just sit around developing the code for quantum-computing things. They are right upstairs. I don’t have to do it. I think that’s probably my piece of advice: If you like to do stuff, keep doing stuff, and just ask for help. In the worst case, you have to put another person on your invention. Don’t be a sole inventor. That’s stupid.
Stern: Outside of the work you’re doing, do you have a favorite product or technology out there—or non-technology?
Stern: Everyone loves their iPhone.
Swider-Lyons: I know, but look at this thing! It is so awesome. I’ve worked on this portable power stuff that is big and clunky and I’m like, “Wow, I can hold this in my hand and it feels great.”
Stern: When you’re at a dinner party, what do you tell people that you do?
Swider-Lyons: I tell them I’m a scientist. Yesterday I was in a pool with a girlfriend of mine, and I told her I sold a program to build a submarine. She’s an accountant in a law firm and she’s like, “Yeah, whatever.” I’m just so excited we get to build this little sub because there’s a big submarine next. I want to build a little one first.
Stern: How big is little?
Swider-Lyon: Twenty-five feet. I’m like, “Whoopee, we get to build something!” And all the guys are like, “Whoopee, we get to build something!” It’s just exciting to build something. Who gets to come to work and build stuff? It’s fun. I can’t imagine what it’s like to just be doing accounting for thirty years.
Stern: Do you plan on retiring, and what would you do?
Swider-Lyons: Good question. I’m forty-six, so I have a way to go. That’s actually a very good question, because right now I’m thinking, “I could retire so I could sleep.” I talk to people here, and when they hit thirty years with the government they say, “Now that I can retire, it’s not so bad, and I don’t know what else I’d do.” I guess you need to know how long you’re going live, right? What are you going to do? But this is a dilemma. In my neighborhood everyone has perfect lawns and their houses are all clean. I don’t want to die and be known as the person with the clean house. I’ve never seen anyone’s obituary that said, “They had a very clean house.” I mean, you don’t want rats in your house. My house certainly isn’t messy or anything. I love my Roomba. Oh my God, that’s an amazing autonomous invention. One of the best uses ever of DARPA funding. Yes, I love my Roomba.
Stern: That was invented by Helen Greiner. She’s Chapter 7.
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