Goddard Employee Spotlight: Hunter Sawyer

News & Insights

Hunter Sawyer, a long-time veteran of Goddard Technologies, began his career in the industrial automation industry. The design aspects of industrial automation intrigued him, so when the opportunity arose to try his hand at product development, he went for it. He pursued that passion at Goddard.

What Hunter loves the most about his job is the constant opportunities to solve interesting and challenging problems: “One of the toughest challenges I faced in my career was early on, during my time at an industrial automation company,” he elaborated, “We received an order to build a duplicate of a turnkey automation work cell that was built a year prior to me working at the company.” The system took raw material and transported it along a conveyor system. It used pneumatic actuators to clamp the parts and move them into position; then, a lift mechanism moved parts from one level to another, controlled by a PLC system.

“As I started the process of ordering and designing the system, I found out that the design version on file was the first version of the design and not the version that was built. It turned out the as-built design wasn’t documented anywhere. I spent the next few weeks manually searching through production records, old purchase orders, and recreating CAD files that were lost or misplaced.” They built the new working system through hard work to match the first without affecting the project timeline!

With over six years under his belt at Goddard, Hunter has worked on various product development projects. Two particularly memorable ones were an injection molding system for medical devices and the suspension system for a flying car. For the former project, Hunter worked on the initial engineering and development for a “tiny” injection molding fluid system that maxed out at one inch tall with two reservoirs and chemical mixing. For the flying car (yes, an actual flying car!), he developed the car’s suspension system, focusing on the technology through knowledge of material science, including composites, exotic materials, and durable materials. He did the FEA and simulation on the parts to ensure that the car’s suspension could withstand a car crash and an aircraft landing.

Hunter has a lot of projects he’s proud of, but one of his first projects here is his favorite. He was selected to fill a position to keep a project on track temporarily. “My performance was so good that the company chose to keep both of us on after the original engineer returned from vacation.” Goddard’s partnership on this project helped ensure a timely and adequate ROI, and the client expanded Goddard’s support to provide the same assurances on additional activities.

Embedding Goddard engineers on staff through Goddard Augmentation “allows a customer team to maintain ownership of a product while receiving the additional resources they need,” explained Hunter. “We, as Goddard engineers, are trained to integrate ourselves and provide value while maintaining the product requirements and project goal.”

Goddard prides itself on its diverse team of out-of-the-box, creative thinkers who face challenges head-on with enthusiasm.

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