Profile
Jarrod Hart
My status is: safely arrived in Santa Clara, California!
Curriculum Vitae
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Work History:
After 3 years working in Africa and South America in mines, I moved to London to work in a dotcom startup where I programmed computers – after 3 more years I moved to materials science and found it endlessly fascinating, so I struck with that ever since.
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Current Job:
Right now I have a long job title “Global Manager Process Development & Innovation” for a multi-billion Euro materials company called Imerys.
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Employer:
www.imerys.com
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My Work
I understand the properties of all the stuff around us – plastics, glasses, iphones, and how to make them from rocks and crude oil.
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I am an engineer, but also a scientist. If anyone tells you you can’t be both, they are probably boring.
What gets me up in the morning is learning about how the world works – how does electricity work, how does sunlight work, how does sound work?
I somehow figured out a way to get paid to try figure these things out!
I am also lucky that the stuff I help make is all around us, from car bumpers to house-bricks to pints of beer – which is rather satisfying, even if nobody knows about my teeny-tiny contribution.
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My Typical Day: I have no typical day!
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I have lots of different days – OK I guess some days I stay home, log into my computer once the kids are at school and tackle my to-do list (usually emailing people who have problems with help, or more often, the names of experts they can call).
But most of my work-days I am travelling – I work for a big materials science company and we make all the ingredients for all the stuff around you – bricks, glass, cars, computers, facial scrub… and we have to get these ingredients from mother earth.
Nature has helped us: over billions of years, the earth has twisted and melted and boiled all the rocks so that sometimes, in some places, useful materials can be found – gold nuggets, coal, clay, diamonds and so on. They are all over the place and so I travel a lot, visiting interesting quarries and the interesting factories where they are turned into TVs and magazines and xboxes.
And yes, I *am* saying magazines are made of rocks… you will have to join my chat to find out if that’s really true!
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What I'd do with the money
Help get an engineering mentoring portal working…
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I would love to see if we could somehow get a mentoring network working, a place where young engineers can find more experienced engineers to discuss their career, their subject, anything. I would have loved to have had more mentors when I was younger.
Mentoring portals exist, but they are not known about, and for sure not working as well as they could.
I already spend quite a big portion of my time mentoring, but I would love to make it easier for others – especially I would like to tap into retired engineers. My best mentor was 76 when I met him!
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Love, solving, problems.
What's the best thing you've done in your career?
I am most proud of the first project I managed, which was an additive to beer that stops it going ‘off’.
Were you ever in trouble at school?
I used to sneak out of boarding school in Johannesburg to go clubbing. Inevitably I got caught…
If you weren't doing this job, what would you choose instead?
A physicist of course, we covered this already ;)
Who is your favourite singer or band?
ELO? Too old fashioned? Are Mumford & Sons more cool? Actually there is something in the song ‘Stressed Out’ by Twenty One Pilots that really appeals to me – I’ll go with that.
What's your favourite food?
Flame-grilled steak with fine red wine, please.
What is the most fun thing you've done?
Survive a full-on dust-storm in a desert!
Tell us a joke.
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don’t…. Ok, that one’s a bit nerdy I admit.
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