Willy R. Kaye: Council of Outstanding Early Career Engineers - 2015

Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer H3D Ann Arbor, Michigan

Willy Kaye traces the genesis of his successful enterprise, H3D, back to the connections he made and the opportunities he was afforded as an undergraduate at Oregon State.“All of my professional success dates back to the time when Todd Palmer recognized what I was capable of and connected me with an Oregon State alumnus who turned out to be a really big help for my career,” he said. That alumnus was Eric Smith (’94 Nuclear Engineering, Council of Outstanding Early Career Engineers) at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, where Kaye worked beginning in his sophomore year. “He took me under his wing and taught me everything I needed to know about radiation detection.”Smith also introduced Kaye to Zhong He at the University of Michigan, who became Kaye’s Ph.D. advisor and co- founder of H3D, a spinout from the University of Michigan’s Nuclear Engineering Department.H3D developed the world’s highest performing imaging spectrometers. The co-founders first tried shopping the technology around, but no one who purchased it could create a successful product. In 2011, the team decided to rein in the rights and do it themselves. H3D has already sold the technology in six countries. Thirteen power plants are using 20 Polaris-H units, and the orders keep coming in. The unit allows power plants to identify, quantify, and localize gamma-ray sources.One strength of the product is a friendly graphical user interface, which Kaye developed. His interest in and skill with user interfaces date back to the work he did on his University Honors thesis at Oregon State