For awhile, Bill Hammack followed a normal path to becoming an engineering professor. Born in Greencastle, Indiana and raised in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, he attended Michigan Technological University and earned a B.S. degree in chemical engineering. Pursuing an academic bent, he went to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for a master’s degree and Ph.D., both also in chemical engineering.

After graduation, Hammack taught engineering at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, in particular chemical engineering thermodynamics. His research focused on materials at extraordinarily high pressure, 100,000-150,000 atmospheres. Then after a decade at Carnegie Mellon, he returned to the University of Illinois in 1997 and became a professor in the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department.

Sounds ordinary for an academic person, but this is where Hammack’s career veers from the normal. He came back to Illinois to teach because he wanted to pursue something different: he saw a need for a professor who focuses on reaching out to the public with mass media. When he approached U of I, they decided to give it a try. “It was a matter of wanting to reach a larger audience. When you’re in a specific research niche, it can be kind of narrow,” he relates. “I liked the idea of pioneering a new role. That aspect, which is somewhat entrepreneurial, really appealed to me. It was kind of a blank canvas to create what I wanted. I found it wide open.”

Now 45, Hammack explains engineering and technology to the general public, ranking as the first engineering professor tenured for outreach work. He does this through several venues, including commentaries on public radio, teaching a course to non-engineering students, public speaking, and books and magazine articles.

Hammack teaches his course, The Hidden World of Engineering, to a diverse mix of students, with business majors making up 60 percent of his classes. The popular course gives students an appreciation for engineering and how engineers think, as they work in teams and actually do engineering. In one class, he gave them parts to a VCR and had them reassemble it. “The real purpose there is to create citizens. To be a citizen today involves being able to make decisions on technological issues. It’s really a big picture type of thing I’m after,” he reveals.

For material to use in his outreach work, Hammack often looks up common everyday people who invent things and calls to interview them. In a keynote address he gave to the top 100 Graduating Seniors of the University of Illinois, he told the story of Dan Cudzik of Richmond, Virginia, who invented the stay-on-tap for the aluminum beverage can. Working for a can company, it took him five years to perfect it. He tried many alternative designs, many of which failed. Today, 100 billion pop cans produced a year use his tab.

But as popular as Hammack’s class and speeches have proven, he has probably had the greatest impact with his radio programs, and they have involved the most circuitous route to success. He tried television first and developed a show to sell to NOVA. He tried to reach the legal community and wrote a short book for lawyers, a primer on statistics. But neither worked well. He was a regular public radio listener, and he and his team chose radio because it’s easy to break into without steep startup costs. Radio can be done in small segments of minutes, and as an intellectual medium, it works well for presenting the nuances of technology.

Once he chose radio, Hammack took several years to master it. He listened to and studied several other programs. To sound as conversational and natural as possible, he took two years of voice lessons from a voice teacher at Carnegie Mellon University. He bought a sales book and learned how to sell, and he studied radio, media, and writing. In 1999, he approached the public radio station manager in Urbana, Illinois about presenting engineering-oriented programs, and he bought the idea.

Every week, Hammack produces an essay focusing on common items in everyday life, helping listeners see how technology affects their lives. Called Engineering & Life, his program lasts two or three minutes and is produced by WILL AM 580 radio station at the university and distributed across the state by Illinois Public Radio. He has a core audience of 120,000 weekly listeners, and the radio pieces are available on his website.

Having created over 300 commentaries, Hammack has covered a host of topics. He has talked about the polymers used in soft contact lenses, the importance of glass in our lives, how nylon revolutionized our lives, Tupperware, and thermosetting plastics. He has described how a walk in the woods that left an engineer’s socks covered with burrs inspired the invention of Velcro. Another piece described the story of Spam the canned meat. One piece he produced was about his visit to the Ice Hotel in the arctic circle of Sweden. In this 20-minute piece, he investigated every aspect of the hotel, from its construction to why anyone would build it.

Hammack’s radio commentaries have also appeared on American Public Radio's program Marketplace, which has a regular weekly audience of 6.5 million. Recently, he created a commentary about YouTube, the Internet video phenomenon.

As guest host of public radio's Afternoon Magazine, Hammack did an interview The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.

“It’s been rewarding on a lot of levels,” Hammack says of his foray into radio. The actual production of a radio piece is an interesting kind of problem solving, both in writing and gathering the information as well as thinking of a way to make it interesting and palatable. Working in the studio is a lot of fun, and even editing it afterwards, that whole process.” He adds, “If I work for a place like Marketplace, I can reach several million people at once. You get interesting responses and questions. You know you’re having an impact.”

In 2005, Hammack left the classroom and airwaves for a year to serve in the State Department as a science adviser as part of the new Jefferson Science Fellow program. One of five tenured scientists and engineers chosen, he worked alongside senior diplomats and policymakers. “It was difficult, but there certainly were some pleasures,” he recalls. One job had him working with a Department of Energy team in Vietnam to negotiate the removal of weapons-grade nuclear materials from reactors. They don’t want to use them for weapons, and officials don’t want the wrong people to get hold of them.

“This was experimental, and it was interesting, and I got to meet Condoleezza Rice,” Hammack says of the program. “I think where it needs to go eventually, and I’m hopeful it will, is really more into setting the actual policies instead of implementing them, more into the idea of how science can intimately form or change a policy. It will affect things like how we approach water quality, water issues, and export controls. The engineers, I think, ultimately need to be more integrated in the process.”

In reflecting on whether he has achieved success as an outreach professor, Hammack responds, “I think so, but it’s really a difficult thing to measure. We know we get responses, that people think differently, for the radio work.” As for the class he teaches, “We just finished a survey that covers the ten years it has been taught. The responses from that have indicated it made a difference in how people approach problems and how they engage in abstract thinking and also how they work in teams. So where we are able to measure, we have actually found it a tremendous positive response. This is the class they remember from their education.”

Looking ahead, Hammack says he wants to expand the radio commentaries. “I want to produce five to 10 hour-long programs that go out on the public radio and reach large audiences and can look more deeply into certain issues.” These could be technical or environmental issues and may focus on the need for educating more scientists and engineers, looking at it from a global perspective. “We hope to get to China and elsewhere and see what they’re doing with their education and use that cross-cultural comparison to talk to America about what it needs to do. These are in the early stages, but that’s what I want to be doing in the next five years.”

It doesn’t look like Hammack will ever get back to being a normal professor. But millions around the world will benefit from an increased awareness of engineering.

To see some of Bill Hammack’s works, visit www.engineerguy.com

Progressive Engineer
Editor: Tom Gibson
2049 Crossroads Drive, Lewisburg, PA 17837
570-568-8444 * tom@progressiveengineer.com
©2006 Progressive Engineer