Dr. Renee Hale: R&D Chemical Engineer at PepsiCo

Although she grew up in a STEM-focused family, Renee shares her journey of discovering her love for engineering...and food!

Click on the YouTube video above to view my interview with Dr. Renee Hale.

Click below to listen to my interview with Dr. Renee Hale.

Introduction

Welcome to Origins with Dr. Natasha Wilson, where we explore the unique origins stories of leaders in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (also known as STEAM). Today, I will be a conversation partner with our guest, Dr.

Renee Hale

. 

Dr. Hale holds a doctorate in chemical engineering from The University of Austin, where she focused on the thermodynamics and transport phenomena associated with heat pipes. She currently works for PepsiCo as an R&D Principal Engineer, where she manages and coaches cross-functional teams to support PepsiCo’s snack production businesses.  

Dr. Hale started a Substack called The Nightstorm Files, where she writes about science books and podcasts she enjoys. She applies her research background to find books and podcasts that would interest the technically minded; that have enough depth and technical knowledge to interest scientists and engineers, such as herself. 

We welcome Dr. Hale to Origins and invite her to share with us the touchpoints of her childhood and early career that have led her to where she is today. 

Dr. Natasha Wilson (NW): Welcome Dr. Hale to Origins. As we start off, we like to begin in childhood. Perhaps you can start by telling us a bit about your childhood. 

Childhood

Dr. Renee Hale (RH): Sure. Well, I grew up in upstate New York and then later in life moved to the Oklahoma and Texas area. I grew up in a family that was full of people with engineering tendencies. So my dad is an engineer and all of my siblings ended up being engineers too.

So we were quite the household full of tools and tinkering. And so I grew up around a lot of STEM-focused activities. 

NW: Because you grew up around people who were interested in STEM, were you automatically drawn to it or did it take some time for you to build the interest? 

RH: Yeah, I didn't want to be an engineer because everyone else in my family tended towards mechanical engineering, which is a lot about building things and designing hardware tools, and I wasn't drawn to any of that. And I thought that all engineers drove backhoes because my dad likes to work with heavy equipment. So I thought, well, I don't want to drive a backhoe. So I guess, yes, engineering is not the thing. 

But it wasn't until I started looking for universities that my dad said, well, you know, there are more branches of engineering than just the one. And I said, no, you didn’t tell me that. So I had happened on it accidentally. And so I looked at the options and thought chemical engineering sounded interesting because of the medical applications to it. So that's what brought me in. As I went through the program, I realized that wasn't as much of an interest, so I pivoted away from that. 

But growing up, I did a lot of music and dance. And so I was thinking way more in that direction than I was in any sort of science-focused career, to be honest. 

I was homeschooled growing up. Mostly because of the academic flexibility. My siblings and I were ahead of the curve since we were young. My parents chose to see how homeschooling would work, and it worked well for us. So all of my subjects were fairly challenging because they kept me at the limit of what I knew all the time. 

Homeschooling and career preparation

NW: So how do you think that your homeschooling impacted your career? It sounds like your classes were a bit more challenging and you were, like you said, pushed to the limits. Maybe you were also given a little bit more freedom to explore things that you were interested in. Maybe you can speak a little bit about that because perhaps a lot of people do not have experience with homeschooling and do not know how that works. 

RH: Yeah, and it works differently in a lot of different places. The way it worked for me was that it taught me to be very self-motivated for learning. I was given a lot of flexibility to pursue areas of interest. We had our core subjects, but then we went to the library a lot. And I love to read, and so I picked up books of all sorts. So very early on I had, and still today, I have a high curiosity about things. I love to learn, and I love to learn broadly. So homeschooling was a really good way for me to have the freedom to do that. Not to say you can't have that freedom in other places as well, but that was something that was highly encouraged: independent learning and just following where your curiosity takes you. 

And that has served me well throughout my life and especially in my career because there are many things to learn in this world. And I've enjoyed getting to explore even as I grow. 

STEAM, a family affair

NW: So you mentioned that your family was very STEM-focused, engineering-focused. Is that true of your siblings? How many siblings do you have? 

RH: Yeah, I have an older sister and two younger brothers, and they are all mechanical engineers doing various things with their careers. And [one of] my sister[s] married an engineer, and I also married an engineer. So we are pretty well inundated.

My mom homeschooled us and then became a professional photographer later in life. And so she tries to hold down the non-engineering side of the conversations. And she does a great job at it. 

NW: Yeah, that's interesting. And what is it like with your siblings? They're all in mechanical engineering, and you're in chemical engineering. So I guess when you get together and you're sharing about what you do, what is that like? 

RH: It's a lot of fun. Honestly, we have dorky conversations that I enjoy. Mechanical and chemical engineering do tend to have a lot of overlap in the foundational understanding of what we're taught and in a lot of the applications that we work in, it could be done by either mechanical or chemical. So we often find a lot in common to talk about, and I enjoy hearing about what my siblings are working on, and then sharing what I am [working on]. And so I learn a lot from them, and occasionally they'll come to me for advice. 

It's been fun to have a commonality there that we can encourage each other in our careers and give advice and sympathize when things are going wrong in a way that other people can’t who are not in the engineering field. So that's been a real positive. 

NW: That sounds great. It must be an encouraging and very supportive environment to have your siblings and your spouse all in the same field and have those opportunities grow together. So that's great. As you were moving through school and graduating high school, you mentioned it a little bit, but how did you think about your next steps moving into college?

Engineering, the unlikely major

RH: I was looking primarily at universities in Oklahoma because that's where we had some extended family. I remember looking at a couple of different universities. We took the typical university whirlwind tour where you go to each one of them and talk. I was looking personally for schools that had good music and dance programs because I knew that even if I didn't major in that, which I knew I wasn’t solely going to major in music or dance, I did want a university that had some sort of program I could get involved in and keep those skills up. And then, at the time, I was thinking about business as a degree. My mom did a business degree, and it's a good solid degree.

Oklahoma State is where I ended up, and we kept it on the list because it's my family's alma mater, and they said I should at least go look at it. And so it was during that visit that my dad pulled some connections to the engineering department where he went. And they recruited me into the program and said, “So have you considered engineering?” And I said, “No, because I don't want to do engineering.” And they said, “Why not?” And I said, “Because you could only do tools.” And they're like, “Oh, that's not true.” So I was recruited into engineering over lunch with the dean. And yeah, that's how I ended up in engineering. 

It was a surprise to me that I ended up there. I still am kind of surprised that I'm here, but I am glad that they took the time to try to show me that there were more options than I knew in life and give me some new opportunities. 

NW: So engineering can be an overwhelming discipline when you first start, especially the first couple of years. At least that was my experience, I think, as a chemical engineer. Lots of classes, lots of very tough classes. It seems as though you're taking classes from almost every hard science in the beginning. And so as someone who wasn't necessarily planning to take that on, what was it like for you? 

RH: I guess I didn't think about it much. I just kind of signed up for what I was supposed to sign up for. And I think I had a natural aptitude. I was good at math and science. I didn't know that I was. Here are the classes, start the classes. And as long as I don't completely fail the classes, I guess I'm good. 

I don't remember enjoying the classes, but I don't remember hating them either if it makes sense. I didn't know what I was gonna do with the degree, and so it was hard to envision, oh, I'm taking these classes because I can see where they're gonna go. I just kinda took the classes, and I think I found them interesting enough to enjoy it. I enjoyed understanding how the world works. I think that's what's satisfying to me, and that comes in so many different ways. 

So biology was fascinating because of [for example] the photosynthesis cycle. I'm like, ‘This is amazing how this works!’ And then you get to chemistry and you understand how the molecular bonds work, and I'm like, ‘This is amazing how this works!’ So everything was just like, ‘This is fascinating!’ And you just move on. I do remember there were classes I didn't particularly gravitate towards. Physics was one of those. I never quite figured out physics, so I just kind of made it through those. But there wasn't any one particular class that popped significantly more.

So I went through and figured I'd find something. 

NW: Did you still end up being able to do music and dance while you were pursuing your chemical engineering degree? 

RH: Yeah, I didn't end up dancing, but I did continue music. So I grew up playing violin and piano. And so throughout Oklahoma state, at least, I took piano and violin lessons from the professors there. You could, if you were not a music major, you could still sign up for one credit hour and they would teach you, which was fun. And I played in the symphony on and off as I had time. After Oklahoma State, I didn't have as good of an outlet for  [music]. So I haven't done as much of it now, but yeah, throughout my undergraduate, I was able to keep it up. 

Discovering her passion for food engineering

NW: Where did you go from college? 

RH: Ah, okay. So I went to Oklahoma State for my undergraduate and finished chemical engineering. I had a scholarship that supported me through my undergraduate but also included a year of master's study at the University of Cambridge in England. And so the premise was, if you can get into Cambridge, we will fund your master's program. And so I was successful at that. 

So I went. Their programs in England are shorter than they are in the US. So it was just a one-year program, but that was a lot of fun. And I picked chemical engineering. Again. I don't know why I didn't think to look for more options because they have such fascinating [options]. I've looked at them now after the fact, and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I could have done all these different things. Why did I?’

Anyway, I did chemical engineering, but it was a good program because it wasn't just chemical engineering. They also had some business classes. And I continued my music through that as well. Some of the colleges at Cambridge have choirs that sing weekly. And I have a decent singing voice. So I got to jump on one of the choirs. I sang for Sidney Sussex College choir, which was a lot of fun. And we did performances every week, and then we did some tours and things. I had to learn how to sing in Latin, which took a while. I mouthed a lot of words before I sang them.

I didn't know how to pronounce Latin, but I caught on. And then after that, I knew I wanted to do a Ph.D. because I had interned at ConocoPhillips in their R&D center between [my time at] Oklahoma State and Cambridge. And that is when I figured out that research was what I wanted to do as a career. They had a big research center, and I was working in their carbon dioxide capture group, looking at different materials for amine scrubbers.

I got to visit people who worked in algae biofuels, and there was a group that worked on methane hydrates and there was a group that worked on, I don't know, something else and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I could spend my whole career here and never get bored. Because if I get bored with my group, I just go to a different group, and they're doing something completely different. And I thought, ‘This is phenomenal.’ So I said, “What do I need to do to come back and work at a place like this?” And they said, “Well, you probably need your Ph.D.” Right. Go get a Ph.D.

I visited Austin when I was at Oklahoma State. I loved the city and the town. And so I thought I would love to live in Austin for some time. UT Austin (The University of Texas, Austin) happens to be a highly-ranked graduate engineering program. And so it all came together. Nobody told me you were supposed to apply for multiple graduate schools. I just did the one. I don't know why nobody told me that, but I was like, it's either this one or it's nothing because I don't know where else I want to go. So it's not recommended apparently. Then it's fine. So it worked out. 

And so I did my Ph.D. at UT Austin. I got my degree in chemical engineering (ChemE). I never worked for a ChemE professor. I worked for two different mechanical engineering professors because they were doing more interesting work to me personally than the ChemE department. So I had this crossover thing happening, and my first professor didn't get tenure and left, and so then I had a different professor—also not recommended—but it worked. 

Then PepsiCo came down and recruited [at my campus] a couple of years before I graduated. They held an info session. And honestly, the only reason I went was because it was in the morning, and I knew they would have bagels and coffee, and I just really wanted some free bagels and coffee so I figured might as well, you know, I could sit here for an hour for bagels. But it ended up being fascinating and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, you can work on Cheetos™ for a living?’

And they were explaining some of the technical challenges behind food. And I thought, this is the most fascinating thing I've ever heard. They also described a company culture that seemed healthy, open, collaborative, and welcoming. And so I thought I'd give it a shot. And that's how I ended up, how I ended up here.

Yeah, coffee and bagels were honestly the only reason that I discovered the food industry. But here we are. 

The engineering of food

NW: Well, speaking of the food industry, can you tell us more about what chemical engineering has to do with food? 

RH: Yeah. So I was thinking about how to describe chemical engineering in general, and then how it applies to food. So usually when people say, ‘Well, what do chemical engineers do?’ I describe it as taking something that you can do in a small amount, like on your kitchen counter, in a chemistry lab somewhere, or your garage, and figuring out how to do it at bigger scales so that you can create more of it at once. So that's called ‘scaling up’ in industry speak, but as it applies to food, food is chemistry too. It just happens to be chemistry that you can eat at the same time. And so a lot of the transformations, the chemical reactions, those are all similar to what you learn in school. And it makes sense once you think about it. No one had ever explained it. 

So a lot of what I do, and what food engineering, is about is taking a food product that you could make in your kitchen and figuring out how to make it in vast quantities so that you can supply it to many people. 

NW: So you're on the research side, correct? 

RH: Yes.

NW: What kind of research do you do? 

RH: Okay. So I do two main types of research. One is developing new food products to bring to the market or improving the products that are out there. So we do a lot of experimentation with different ingredients, different shapes, different colors, and textures, to figure out what the best combination is to put something new out there that people have never seen, or to make something that's already out there better. So I do a lot of experiments where we're running through all of the different variables and factors and seeing how it affects the end product and then picking the best combination of them. 

The other type of project I do is figuring out how to optimize the process itself. Maybe the product I'm making is the same, and I don't want to change that, but maybe there are ways to make the equipment more efficient or help things be more precise. Or a lot of what we do is try to take the load off of the people who are running the equipment so that they don't have to make as many decisions at once, and it reduces their cognitive load so that they can run things more smoothly. So I do a lot of research on that too. 

NW: I think most of us think about food. We may use our parents’ recipe to make something. And now you're saying, ‘Well, I do this in the lab.’ So is there a way to think about where you start? I mean, does it start in someone's kitchen and then end up in the lab? In terms of thinking about how to create this new product, what is the thought process that goes into that? 

RH: Yeah, no, generally in the new product development cycle, and this can be broadened outside of food to any consumer goods that you're creating. When you create something new, you first want to ground it in the people and be human-centered and say, ‘We are all people, and so I'm making this product for someone to enjoy. So who is that person? What do they need in their lives that I can help fulfill for them?’ And you ground it in the needs of the person. And so we have some groups that help us do consumer insight work. We go out and ask people and say, ‘Hey, what do you feel like you don't have a good product for today? And what would you love to see?’ And then we take that back in, and we use that to craft a design and say, ‘Hmm, if I were to create something that helps people….’ For example, I get hungry in the morning right around 10:30, I don't eat breakfast. And so I drink my coffee, and at 10:30 every morning, I'm like, “I gotta have something before lunch.” And so I have my set of granola bars and things that I like to eat, but that's something I need, and I am not always particularly happy with what I have to choose from for that. So I have some ideas about what I would like to eat at 10:30 [as compared to] what's currently available. 

So you start there and then you ask questions and say, ‘Well, what kind of things would you want in that product?’ And then you also think, ‘What ingredients do I have available to me? What do I have in my pantry that I can use?’ And you kind of marry those two together. And then we usually prototype or make small amounts. Sometimes it is in an actual kitchen or sometimes it's using small versions of our equipment that we use at a large scale. We make a variety of prototypes and samples, and then we show them back to consumers and say, “Hey, does this fit what you were thinking? Do you like it?” And they give us feedback and we iterate from there. 

Eventually, you find something that people say, “This is amazing. I would buy this. It fits my 10:30 in the morning hunger cravings. And then you're like, great, we have hit our target. And then my job ramps up where I'm like, okay, once again, I've made a few of them. Now I need to make a bunch of them. How do I do that in the best way? 

Does that answer [your question]? Does that help? 

NW: It does. Yeah, it does. Definitely. Then when you're trying to make it bigger, someone might think, ‘Okay, you just use a bigger pot.’ How do you think about making food for millions of people? 

RH: Yeah, sometimes you do just use a bigger pot, to be honest. Especially when you're cooking things. Like if I cook something on my stove, it's in a pot. There are companies that make massive pots. They're called kettles, and you can cook a bunch of stuff in there. You have to think about whether the time is going to be the same if the temperature is going to be the same because the way the heat moves around a big pot is different than how it moves around a small pot. So those are the things that engineers or chemical engineers are trained to think about and figure out how to scale. 

I have been really surprised at how much creative equipment there is in the food industry. And so I've Googled a lot of How It's Made videos. They are helpful in learning about things. For example, when people make pasta, sometimes they will squeeze it between two rollers, and you get this really thin sheet of pasta, and then they have to squeeze it multiple times. There are massive rollers that you can use to squeeze the pasta, and I didn't even know such things existed. So you go buy some of those, and then they're like, “Well what kind of surface do you want on your rollers?” And I was like, “I didn't even know we had options. What are my options, and what do they do?” And so a lot of times it is similar to what you have in the kitchen, it's just bigger or slightly different.

There are some technologies that are very difficult to do on the kitchen scale, but that you can do at high volume, but those are less common to find. 

NW: So what are some of the challenges in scaling up such processes? I imagine that some of those challenges may be the physical constraints of what you're working with. 

RH: Yeah, one of the biggest challenges that I didn't think about until I got into the industry is how much variability you have in the ingredients inherently that you have to work with. It's very difficult to make the same quality of food with the same outcome when the ingredients you're using to make it change on you. Every engineer's nightmare is to have an uncontrollable input to your process. But a lot of food, because it's grown and made in the world [have] seasonal variations. There are, depending on how much rain a crop has gotten or fertilizer a crop has gotten, you have different differing things coming into your manufacturing line. So that is one of the biggest challenges is figuring out how to make the outcome of your process, the food that you're making, the same quality with the same characteristics every time, even when what you have coming in tends to change. Sometimes you have wheat that has a little bit more protein in it this year and last year it didn't have quite as much or maybe it's a little bit wetter because of the conditions in the place it was grown. And so all of your process has to be able to react to that in a way that still creates the same outcome. And that can be a big challenge, but it's a fun challenge to try to deal with as an engineer. 

The synergy between music, dance, and chemical engineering

NW: Have you ever sensed any synergy between your music and dance talents and chemical engineering, even if it's just how you think about problems, or how you think about the world?

RH: It was funny that you asked this because it's only been in the last year or two that I started to pay attention to how it might show up. And I think in my life, it shows up in two ways, at least in engineering. One is that I am super fascinated by how people use what they hear and what they feel to operate equipment. And so when I'm in a manufacturing plant for work, I will pick up on how equipment sounds, and how it feels to be around it. And often you can learn a lot about how things are working by paying attention to what comes into your senses. So it's a lot like music and dance. It is about paying attention to what you hear, how rhythm works, and responding to things. And it's a lot like driving your car. You know, when your car sounds funny and you're like, something's not right. I don't know what it is, but it's not right. And you can do the same thing in so many different ways, and people do it all the time. And I'm just fascinated by that. And I think that partly comes from my attunement to music early in life that I hear things, and I sense things in ways that maybe other people don't pay attention to. 

The other thing is that it's satisfying to play in a band or a symphony orchestra and have lots of things coordinated precisely. It's so satisfying when that happens, when everything comes together. And so as an engineer, I really love optimizing systems and making them run together really efficiently. And so when, when things are out of sync, and you can bring them all into sync and it's running like it's supposed to, it is one of the best feelings in the world, I think.

So there are some similarities there between performing music and everybody working together and having a system that comes together and operates well. 

NW: Those are great reflections. I used to work in a manufacturing plant as well. And I can't necessarily say that I had that great attunement, but that sounds like a gift from your music background to have that attunement to the vibrations, the frequency of the vibrations, of different equipment in the plant. I never thought about that, but that's a good reflection. 

RH: Yeah, and it's not like I have super sensitivity, but I do pay attention to it. It occurs to me more than it occurs to other people. I think I was in a manufacturing plant one time, and we were installing a new piece of equipment, and we were trying to figure out how fast it was cycling. It had these blades that were moving up and down, and my coworker was trying to time it by visually watching these things and counting how many times they moved up and down within a minute. And it was so fast he was losing track [of the] count in his head and staring at this machine trying to figure it out.

But you can hear it. I said it makes noise every time it moves up and down. It was a rhythm. And so I just stood there, and I counted the rhythm, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. And I had a more accurate count than he did because it's a lot easier to listen to a rhythm than it is to try to catch it with your eyes, depending on how fast it was moving. So I couldn't believe he wasn't going to use the sound. Maybe he's just being stubborn. I don't know.

NW: Yeah, it is such an interesting insight because you have that experience. You have the experience of listening to a rhythm and basing your actions and your flow off that rhythm, [while] somebody else may not think of [it] until you bring it up. And that's an interesting insight. 

And then also about optimizing, that is a good feeling when you optimize your process. It's such a great feeling when you get something going. So yeah, that's great. 

Successes and Challenges

NW: What successes have you experienced in your work so far? And then what challenges do you generally face? 

RH: Yeah, success is an interesting thing to define. You might think success would be putting a new product out on a shelf that people can buy. I honestly don't quantify success that way because sometimes products go away. You might launch something, and it stays for a couple of years. It might stay for a while, but eventually, the product gets pulled from the shelf. And then you think, well, if that was my success, what do I, what do I see for it? So I've learned not to quantify success in that way. I consider success to be moving collective knowledge forward and getting to do work that I find fun. So as long as the work I'm doing is high quality, and it teaches us something that we didn't know before that helps us make good decisions or helps us accomplish whatever we're trying at this particular moment in time to accomplish, then to me that's success.

Honestly, because I'm a researcher at heart, I love knowledge for the sake of knowledge. So even if I'm doing an experiment, and it doesn't come out like you think, you're like, ‘Well, that's still fantastic. Well, look at that. Something we didn't expect. What does that teach me about the world, and where do I want to go from here?’ So nothing is ever really a failure. It's always just something you didn't know before.

Other interests

NW: This is a question from Dr. Shenell Tolson. She asks, “If you were not employed in your current field, what would you be doing?”

RH: Oh gosh. Well, when I was eight, I wanted to be a Riverdance person and be an Irish step dancer and go on the Riverdance tour. So that's like if I had a second life. But more seriously, if I was not in food R&D, and I was still in engineering, I would be more in the teaching or instructional design space. I think it is really interesting.

If I was not in engineering at all, then probably something related to journalism, particularly anything that has me in front of a camera. I enjoy performing. This is from music and dance. There's a performing aspect to me that enjoys being in the spotlight. And so I've thought about the How It's Made show would be fun to be a host of and get to go and see all these different things. America's Test Kitchen is interesting as well. They have people who are in front of cameras, but then they talk about the food. So all of those are still tangents of what I currently do. But if I was not in my current field, I would probably gravitate towards something [having to do with performing] with a teaching aspect to it. 

Large scale does not always equal bad

NW: Yeah. Oh, that's great. What is something that you wish that others understood about what you do? 

RH: Oh, we talked about this a little bit about manufacturing at large scale. I wish that more people understood, or I could somehow communicate and teach that just because something is made on a large scale does not mean that it has any less quality or care or passion or attention to detail put in by the people who are making it and designing it. I think many times in the media, I will read about Big X, like Big Pharma or Big Oil or Big…whatever the thing is, and it's often in a negative light. And just because something is big doesn't inherently make it any more bad or wrong or less curated. 

There are so many assumptions that go into equating large scale with a whole list of characteristics that I have not experienced to be true in my interactions with working for a large scale company. So I wish that more people knew about large-scale manufacturing. 

NW: That's a very good point. I think that those terms do get used very easily in the media and conversation, not recognizing that there are people like you who do care about the end user and start with the person who's going to be enjoying that food and wants to see [him or her] enjoy something at a high quality. It's just this big impersonal industry that's happening and doing things behind the scenes, and assuming something sinister for that matter. 

RH: Yeah. So, I've been toying with this idea in my mind, and I may end up later in my career, putting together some thoughts around it, but I think it'd be really interesting to explore what inherent assumptions we as a society have about things made at a small scale versus things made at a big scale and, and exploring the tensions between those two. And I think a lot of people interact with small scale all the time. We go to a coffee shop, we see a barista, they're making a coffee. We know what that looks like. We know what that feels like. You know, heck, I have my own espresso machine. I can make my own coffee.

It's so familiar to us because we see it. The vast majority of people don't get to go inside of Folgers® coffee roasting plant and see what that looks like or something on a massive scale. And so you don't know what it's like. And I think it'd be really interesting to do. This is one of my passion projects. I would love to do a How It's Made for food, but not just how it's made at a large scale, but take something at kitchen scale and then show how it translates to a large scale. Like making cranberry sauce in your kitchen. How do you do that? How does Ocean Spray® [make] their cranberry sauce, and what's similar and what's not similar? Because it's just a pot, it's just big. It's still a pot. It doesn't need to be as mysterious and like you said, unknown as I think it is today. 

NW: Yeah. And I think it's just as important even for those who are going into engineering. Because I know when I was doing my heat mass transfer class, for example, I always complained like, “I don't know what a pump looks like. And you're expecting me to do calculations around a pump.” So it would be great if we could go visit a plant so I can see what these things are, what they're doing, and how they're connected. So even just from that perspective, just helping those of us who need a little bit more hands-on experience as we learn. 

Learning and growing through life experiences

NW: What's something that you learned recently or later in life that you wished that you knew earlier?

RH: Oh, this is a good question. I had to think about this one this morning for a bit before I came up with what I wanted. I've learned a lot of things I couldn't think of. What would I have rather known earlier? Because a lot of things you just learn, and you're like, this wouldn't have helped me earlier. So it's fine that I didn't know it then.

One of the things that I wish I knew earlier was that there will be growth and learning opportunities in life without me having to orchestrate every single one of them. I think when I was younger, you're in school, you go to class, and you read your textbooks, that's how you learn and grow. It's all you have to go and do the thing. And in college, if you don't sign up for the classes, you're not learning what's in the classes. So I guess I expected, and it's also taught to you, you have to go out and get an internship and take these classes and read these books and grow yourself. And so I came up with the idea, subconsciously, that any way that I'm going to grow is because I have orchestrated it for myself. And therefore, if I don't orchestrate things, I won't grow. 

What I've learned now is that in my career, I've been given projects that I didn't have to come up with. And they've grown me in a lot of different ways, just by virtue of being in the company, you're going to come across things and work on things and you don't have to figure it all out. 

I've also had a lot of life circumstances come to me whether or not I wanted them. Like we own a house now and my grass is dying in the backyard because Texas is hot, and so now I'm learning how to work with a landscaping company, and so there we go. You know, I didn't have to think I should learn how to do landscaping. Let me figure out how to do that. But now I know how to do that. 

Not all of them are pleasant growing experiences, but they weren't things that I could have anticipated, and I don't always have to work to set up opportunities for myself all the time. It's not to say you do nothing, but I wish I knew to relax a bit more and to know that I can set some things up and that there will be opportunities for me to learn and grow and that I don't have to necessarily go out and work. 

NW: Yes, that's definitely true about life and work. There will be plenty of opportunities to grow, be pushed to your limits, and think, ‘I'm not sure at this moment if I can get past this thing, and then you realize you can get past this challenge. You're doing an experiment, and maybe it keeps failing and you're thinking, ‘Gosh, am I ever going to…is this always gonna fail? Is this just a failure?’ And then you have that eureka moment of just being able to learn things like resilience and perseverance and then those collaborative skills as well, come out of things that you don't orchestrate. 

RH: Yeah, the quality of people that you work with, especially during a career, are really important because they will make the difference between something being a crisis and completely going off the rails and something being a challenge you can overcome together. I have learned—this is not something I wish I knew earlier, because there's really no way I could have learned earlier or needed to know it earlier—but there's very rarely a catastrophe in work unless you're working with something really….There are some careers where things are catastrophes, but very rarely is something, at least in my line of work, and there are always more solutions than you think there are. And so many times on projects, I, especially [when I was] younger, was like, “Oh my gosh, this is horrible. I have no idea how we're going to, you know, we have this deadline and we're not going to meet the deadline and this isn't going right.” And I've been fortunate to have wiser, more experienced people say, “Okay, you're not gonna meet the deadline. What deadline can you meet?” We can move a deadline? Yeah, you can move a deadline. What? So now, okay, now I know we can move a deadline. So now it's in my list of solutions to balance as we go forward.

I remember having a project where I was doing process design. We were trying to put in this new line to make bread, and there was a big oven. And we were tearing out a bunch of equipment and putting in new ones, but some of it we were leaving in place. And so the oven was one that we wanted to leave in place because it was newer and expensive, and okay, we don't want to move that. But we were having a really hard time fitting everything into the physical layout with what we had left. So I remember telling my manager, “Man, it's really hard to fit all this in." And he said, “Well, what about the oven?” And I said, “Well, we can't move the oven.” He said, “Oh, yes, you can. It will be expensive. But that oven will move if you need it to.” And it's all about your trade-offs. So there will become a point at which it is more desirable to move that oven than to try to do what you're trying to do with this thing. And that just blew my mind because I didn't even know that was an option. He taught me that there's always an option on the table. It may not be a great one, but there is always another option for you to consider. 

NW: Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, that's what I loved about my training in engineering and my experience in engineering is that problem solving, troubleshooting, being solution-oriented, and how important that is, and how it keeps you moving forward. It's something that I…it's probably the thing that I like the most about being an engineer and having that mindset. 

RH: Yes. There's very little that you can't do. There are some hard and fast lines. You cannot put people in danger, you cannot…

NW:  You cannot violate the laws of physics and thermodynamics.

RH: There are some hard and fast things you cannot do, but it is a much shorter list than you go into your career thinking that it is. 

NW: Exactly. Definitely. 

Her legacy

NW: So just a few more questions. What do you hope your legacy will be? 

RH: I did a lot of thinking about this because I did some leadership coaching and she asked me, what do you want your 80th birthday to be like? It's like, ah, I have no idea, but, it got me thinking. I was like, I'll be retired by then.

What do I want, at my retirement party, to look back on as my set of accomplishments? I want to be remembered as someone who helped others learn well in ways that helped them flourish. So the same leadership coach and I worked together to develop what am I uniquely positioned and created to do. Where my personality, my skillset, all of that, where does that come together in something that I can uniquely bring to the world? It ended up centering on that I am created for and enjoy absorbing lots of information. 

I read a ton, I learn a ton, and I'm just so curious. I like to absorb it and understand it, but then I love to share it with others and teach them in a way that produces flourishing and joy. It doesn't always have to be things that I particularly know, even if I can help point someone to someone else who knows it or a book they should read. That is what I want to be known for: [being] someone who learned broadly, but then more importantly used what I knew to bring others along and bring joy and flourishing. So yeah, that's what I'd love my legacy to be. 

NW: It's a great legacy.

The Nightstorm Files

NW:  I got connected with you through your Substack called The Nightstorm Files. And so would you mind just telling us about The Nightstorm Files, and what inspired you to get started with the Substack? 

RH: The Nightstorm Files is still somewhat of an experiment, to be honest. And I'm enjoying it, and I'm learning as I go. I decided to start it because I was looking for something like it on the internet, and I could not find what I was looking for anywhere. So I thought, ‘Well, fine, I'll just try it myself because maybe there are other people out there that are like me who are looking for something like this and they can't find it. And if there's no one, that's fine too. I'll just enjoy writing it for my own sake.’ I enjoy it because I enjoy learning, and I'm highly curious.

I am an engineer, and I wanted something deeper than a newspaper article, but not a textbook. And occasionally I'll find podcasts that hit on that good sweet spot or books that hit in that sweet spot, but they're hard to find. And I was like, I know they're out there. Who is recommending these? Where is the recommendation page for these types of books and podcasts? And I could not find it. You can Google science podcasts, and they'll bring up a list, but what they won't tell you is which ones are at that level of depth and which ones are any good because a lot of them are not as good as you think they are. Similarly with books, sometimes the books are not written very well so I thought I'll go explore on my own, and then I will write about what I'm finding so that hopefully other people who are like me who want to listen to these podcasts and find these books, but can't figure out where they are.

So that's why I started it. I also enjoy sci-fi and fantasy, so I figured I might as well throw in recommendations for those while I'm at it. And then I enjoy board games and other superfluous things. So The Nightstorm Files is a recommendation [blog] where I recommend a podcast, a nonfiction science book, a sci-fi or fantasy book, and then something in a bonus category for people to explore and enjoy. 

NW: And how did you come up with the name? 

RH: Oh, Nightstorm. It's kind of my husband and I's team name for ourselves, and it sounds cool. My last name is Hale. And so if I had a nickname, which I don't, but if I had one, it would be Hale-Storm. And he [her husband], for the longest time, has used the video game title ‘Nighthawk’ because he's an aerospace engineer. So we started playing escape room games together while we were dating. And whenever they would say, “What's your team name?” We would be like, “Nightstorm” I guess, because that's like a squished hybrid of both of those. And it stuck. I'm not terribly creative. So coming up with names is hard for me. So I had a name, and I figured I'd go with it. So that's where The Nightstorm files came from. He doesn't have any input to The Nightstorm file. So it’s not representative in that way, but it is a cool name that I enjoy using.

NW: It is a cool name. And so do you have a favorite book or a favorite podcast that you've recommended on The Nightstorm Files so far? 

RH: I have not recommended any. If I had to come up with my favorite set of books, they would be anything by Isaac Asimov, and I haven't recommended anything by Isaac Asimov because he's just so well known in the sci-fi fantasy world. He is one of my favorite authors to read. 

Other than that, there are so many.

Wrapping up

NW: So this question was inspired by the podcast, The Diary of a CEO.  What question would you like us to ask the next person that we interview? 

RH: So the question I would love to ask someone is a question my friend asked, and I thought it was so good that I've now put it in the back of my head.  ‘What is the hardest part of your job, and how do you tackle it? As in, do you delegate to someone else? Do you work on upscaling yourself in that area? Do you push it off until you can't handle it anymore? What's really difficult and then how do you, how do you manage it?’ 

NW: Yeah. Great question. Definitely. Do you have any recommendations for us about who we should speak to next? 

RH: Sure. You can, I had two that came to mind. I have no idea if either one of them will tell you yes because I haven't told them I'm going to recommend them, but you can, you're going to hit them up and see what happens. One of them is my older sister. She also has a doctorate in mechanical engineering, and she took a different path than me in that she is more in the entrepreneurial startup, consulting world. She co-founded a company out of MIT, which is where she went for grad school and then pivoted, and she now runs a small consulting business, focusing on helping people translate concepts into first prototypes. So she would be fascinating. She would have a similar background to me, but it would be interesting to see how she answers the questions differently. 

There is a friend of mine who I think is currently in New Zealand. Her name is Dr. Anne Hulsey, and she is a civil engineer with a Ph.D., but she also has a focus on public policy. She likes to focus a lot on the intersection between things like building design and policies about it as it relates to natural disasters. How do you make decisions about the right building codes and the right response to disasters? That's my explanation of what she does. She'd probably correct me as to what it is, but she's just a fascinating human being. She's sharp, also loves to learn broadly, and she's doing a postdoc right now in New Zealand. 

NW: Oh, great. Thank you for those recommendations. They both sound fascinating. The work that they're doing also sounds fascinating. 

NW: If you could write a book about a well-known person in science, technology, engineering, arts, mathematics (STEAM), who would it be about? 

RH: I had a hard time. I was thinking about it this morning. I had a hard time coming up with one person. Honestly, the book I want to write and may eventually write one day, I have no idea, is about lesser-known people in STEAM. So going back to that interaction in the manufacturing environment and how people use their bodies and their sensory cues to understand and run equipment. I think it'd be fascinating to write a book that is a series of interviews with people who are highly experienced in their craft at large scales. So there are books on people who are good at their small-scale, creative craftsmen. I love those.

I go to plants all the time, and there are people who can tell when it's right, just by how it feels and how it sounds. They've just gained so much experience about how the system runs. They're like, “Oh, it's not ready yet.” Like it doesn't sound or it doesn't feel right. I would love to explore people who work in the STEM fields, but who have developed such a feel for things in ways that we don't usually express, what that knowledge looks like, and how comes out. So that's the book I would write. I know it's not quite the answer to the question, but I would write it about the people who just know, who have developed a feel [for things] and what that looks like.

I think we watched Top Gun Maverick the other night, my husband and I, and so I thought about fighter pilots. You got to have a feel for it. It's not just all in your head. There's a feel for something. Yeah, anyway, that's what I would write. 

NW: Yeah, I think that in science, there are often places where it's a little bit more of an art than a science. We can't necessarily come up with a calculation or some type of machinery or whatever that's going to do it. It's just a bit of intuition, a bit of serendipity, things like that. So yeah, that'd be very fascinating to learn more about people who have such great experience, such a long, successful amount of experience in their field, and to find out [from them] that play between the science and the art side of the whole process.

So yeah, that sounds great. I hope you do write it. 

NW: So would you like to tell our audience where they can find you and learn more about your work? 

RH: Sure. The best two places, if you want to read all of my recommendations, I am on Substack at The Nightstorm Files, which we just talked about and the other place is LinkedIn. I am on there as Renee Hale. And you can find me, you can shoot a message if you just want to chat. I love connecting with people and learning more about what they do. I never have a decent list of questions that I feel are going to pop in some sort of introductory email. So I'm always shy about reaching out to people because it feels more like, can we just  have coffee, and I'll ask you questions? Which I'm like, nobody in their right mind is going to say yes to that. I feel like I need to have something more than that to do with them to make it worth your time, but I have a feeling a lot of people are probably more like me, which is just why I'd love to connect anyway. So LinkedIn and Substack are the two best places. 

NW: Well, thank you very much for making time to speak with me and our audience here at Origins. Thank you for enlightening us about the food industry and food engineering, and telling us about what it takes to bring those foods to our markets. It's fascinating. I'm thankful that you were my first chemical engineer on the program. As a fellow chemical engineer, I'm excited to get people exposed to chemical engineering. So thank you for that. 

RH: Thank you.