| Hybrid Power Train Inventor Next to Join the Hall |
 Soon after Alex Severinsky arrived in America
as a refugee from the Soviet Union in
1978, he recognized a major problem
he believed he could help
solve. Severinsky landed in
Dallas during the national oil
crisis and recalls sitting in
line at gasoline stations.“I’d just come from bread
lines and now I was in gas
lines,” says Severinsky, who
decided to tackle the problem of
gas consumption. Although his Ph.D.
was in electrical engineering from Moscow’s
Institute for Precision Measurements in
Radioelectronics and Physics, he set about
analyzing the Periodic Table, searching
for practical alternatives to
internal combustion. He concluded
that a fully-electric
vehicle would never be
practical, but an electric
hybrid could work. He
took a job in power electronics
engineering, where
he could immerse himself in
the field of high-voltage semiconductors
that was crucial to his
ideas for a hybrid.
Looking for support for his newly-founded
company, Viteq, in 1986, Severinsky connected
with the Technology Advancement Program, a
leading venture program of the Clark School’s
Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute that
partners with regional entrepreneurs to build
early-stage companies. Through Viteq, he developed
uninterruptible power supplies for computer
systems; later the company was sold to a
Texas-based firm. With the help of then-
Assistant Dean Herbert Rabin, Severinsky
formed yet another company, Power-Assisted
Internal Combustion Engine (PAICE), to create a
hybrid power train. Starting in 1992, Severinsky
began filing numerous patents for the
Hyperdrive power train system and received
additional help from Mtech in arranging a meeting
with staff from the National Institutes of
Standards and Technology and the U.S.
Department of Commerce. With funding from
Baltimore-based Abell Foundation, he made a
physical prototype of his engine and on
October 14, 1999 demonstrated the PAICE system
in Detroit. Severinsky proved that the system
could effectively reduce the gas consumption
of a Cadillac Coup de Ville by half in city
driving while retaining its driving performance.
Engineers at U.S. and Japanese automakers
were interested in Severinsky’s invention, but top
management resisted. A visionary staff engineer
at Toyota later developed the same idea as
Severinsky for hybrids. When the Toyota Prius
was introduced, Severinsky fought to protect his
patent rights. After a protracted legal battle with
Toyota, he won the civil case in 2005.
Severinsky is satisfied with the turn of
events. “I bought my car from Toyota,” he
says, smiling. “My wife loves it. It uses several
of my inventions.” He credits Toyota for creating
an unusual working environment in which
in-house competition of ideas is fostered.
With his new company, Fuelcor, he has
returned to an old interest that is even more
relevant today: using electronics to improve
oil production. The idea behind Fuelcor,
launched in 2005, is to “make fuel instead of
hunting for it” by synthetically manufacturing
hydrocarbon compounds from their ultimate
products of decomposition – carbon dioxide
and water. Fuelcor is already in the early
stages of commercialization on two continents.
“This is the ultimate technology in
transportation fuels,” he says.
Alex Severinsky will be inducted into the
Innovation Hall of Fame at a Clark School ceremony
on October 30, 2008. The ceremony
will be immediately followed by the Charles
and Helen White Symposium on Engineering
Innovation, which highlights the impact of the
inductee’s innovation. For more information,
see
www.eng.umd.edu/ihof/new.html.
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Ask the Experts
How does innovation happen? It would be
hard to find a better group to ask than the
members of the Innovation Hall of Fame.
ROBERT FISCHELL
“It takes hard work, good luck, money, and
persistence to change the way medicine is
practiced,” explains Robert Fischell, M.S. ’53, physics, and honorary doctorate of science ’96. He is the biomedical pioneer who
with his family established the Clark School’s
Fischell Department of Bioengineering and
the Robert E. Fischell Institute for
Biomedical Devices and was inducted into
the Hall in 2002. (See related story, p. 4.)
Fischell brought all of these resources to bear
in the development of a rechargeable pacemaker,
the flexible coronary artery stent and
his favorite invention, the AngelMed
Guardian system, an implantable cardiac
monitor which tracks a patient’s condition,
alerts him or her of an impending heart
attack and signals emergency services.
Where other people are confounded by
the frustrations of malfunctioning
devices, Fischell says, an innovator sees
opportunity. “The process is a continuing
alertness to things that don’t work,”
explains Fischell. He quotes industrialist
Henry Kaiser in saying, “Problems are
only opportunities in work clothes.”
 RAJIV LAROIA
Another key to innovation is taking advantage
of the rich potential for learning from
fields outside your specialty. Rajiv Laroia,
M.S. ’89 and Ph.D. ‘92, electrical engineering,
and 2006 Hall inductee, credits his
breakthroughs to browsing journals while at
the Clark School. That’s how he drew the connection
between the field of source coding—the
subject of his dissertation research—and
data transmission. Once he saw how the
two fields related, he understood how the
coding solution he described in his dissertation
actually worked better and with greater
impact in data transmission. In drawing
those conclusions, he developed his process
for discovery. “First, gain a broad picture of
the situation to identify the space where
innovation is needed, then focus on where
the technical solution will fit and develop
it,” says Laroia, chief technology officer of
Qualcomm Flarion Technologies.
The result: Laroia’s method of precoding
data and shaping data constellations for
voiceband telephone modems improved the
speed of data transmission in the early
1990s. “My first patent came from my work
in the Clark School,” Laroia says. “That
experience taught me the value of intellectual
property and innovation.” Laroia’s
telecommunications contributions include
the co-invention of the Orthogonal
Frequency Division Multiplier, a high-speed
data transmission technique that makes
broadband wireless Internet access possible.
 JEONG H. KIM
For Jeong H. Kim, Ph.D. ‘91, reliability
engineering, professor of practice and the
head of Bell Labs who joined the Hall in
2004, the essence of innovation goes
beyond any one individual. “Innovation is teamwork,” says Kim, who
learned the value of collaboration while a
navigator for a U.S. Navy nuclear submarine. “That kind of work requires knowing
your own role within a tightly functioning
group as well as good communication
among team members.” He brought those
lessons to the Clark School, where he
received “a top-notch education” and laid the
groundwork for his pioneering work on
advancing the asynchronous transfer mode
(ATM) switch, which enabled cost-effective,
universal connectivity to wide area networks
by consolidating multiple traffic types such
as voice, data and video on to a single ATM network infrastructure.
Kim helped fund the Jeong H. Kim
Engineering Building to promote the kind
of interdisciplinary thinking required for
innovation in today’s world. “One of the
challenges in innovation is the curse of
knowledge,” Kim explains. Experience
guides our knowledge, he says, but it can
also limit how we think. “We think outside
the box by collaborating with people from
different disciplines.”
ROMALD BOWLES
The importance of strong mentoring while
at the Clark School still resonates with
Romald Bowles, B.S. ‘47, M.S. ‘48 and
Ph.D. ‘57, mechanical engineering, who
vividly recalls his entry into the Hall of
Fame in 1989. One reason the award was
so meaningful was because he joined John
Younger, his mentor and professor of
mechanical engineering, who had been
inducted two years earlier for developing
the retractable aircraft landing gear and tail
wheel, the all-metal wing and a device for
damping wing flutter.
Bowles is considered the father of fluidics,
which explores using fluid to perform
functions similar to those performed
by circuit components in electronics. His
favorite innovation: the wall interaction
amplifier that uses fluid to amplify a small
signal effectively.
The Clark School helped him get his
start, Bowles says, when Younger and other
faculty members “gave great meaning to
the work of engineering and the way it
impacted your own life and the lives of
others.” Returning to school to accept his
award, Bowles especially enjoyed sharing
his own experiences with undergraduates.
“It’s wonderful to see how the school is
getting students to think creatively and
walk down new avenues to improve the
quality of life in the world,” he says.
 RAYMOND KRIZEK
Last year Raymond Krizek, M.S. ’61, civil
engineering, became the first civil engineer
to be inducted into the Hall. That may be,
he says, because civil engineers’ contributions
rarely result in patentable products but more
often involve ways of doing things.
Krizek is self-effacing about his own
innovations. “It’s a mundane thing,” he
says of the environmentally safe disposal of
industrial wastes, including dredged
marine sediment, “but it poses a challenging,
perennial problem.”
After the Environmental Protection
Agency determined that many dredged materials
contained unacceptable levels of pollutants,
Krizek helped to develop alternatives to
open-water disposal.When the Ft. McHenry
Tunnel under Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was
constructed in the 1980s, Krizek’s ideas led
the state of Maryland to use the three million
cubic yards of material dredged for the tunnel
to construct Seagirt Container Terminal,
effectively confining any pollutants. Dredged
materials are also being used to restore
eroded islands in the Chesapeake Bay.
He still speaks fondly of the pivotal years
he spent studying engineering. “My years at
Maryland were among the happiest four
years of my life, and they set the tone for
what I wanted out of life,” says Krizek,
who is now the Stanley F. Pepper Professor
of Civil Engineering at Northwestern
University in Evanston, Ill.
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