Shedding New Light on Big Events
It's a long way from Terre Haute's Wabash Avenue to
Hollywood Boulevard. But outside the 84th Academy
Awards, Gerald Rea helped movie stars show off their
fashion exclusives with a revolutionary lighting system that
the 2004 Rose-Hulman graduate describes as "sunlight in a
box."
Rea, co-founder and CEO of
Indianabased Stray Light Optical Technologies, was
invited to help the Oscars go green. The lighting device was
powered by another company's cutting-edge fuel cell. And,
if that wasn't cool enough, "I got an all-access backstage
pass."
Not bad for a native of Scottsburg, Indiana
who attended Rose Hulman because "I've always loved to create
stuff. I just didn't know what kind of stuff I was going
to create." He studied optical and mechanical engineering, and
got several hands-on experiences at Rose
Hulman Ventures.
After graduating, he started a
consulting business, doing research and development for
large
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manufacturers and industrial firms. "About four years ago, I
started to look at my skill set and that of my
team members [including Chief Technology Officer Robert
Drake, a fellow mechanical engineering alumnus], and started
to make a real business out of it. We went into
high-efficiency plasma lighting."
Rea's description of the technology sounds
much simpler than it is: "We essentially create a small ball
of plasma and float it in the middle of a quartz crystal.
It's sunlight in a box," he says. The light fixture is
long-lasting, energyefficient, and bright. "This is
disruptive technology. It's not
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a new concept the surface
of the sun is plasma-but its commercialization
is really new."
This year's Academy Awards wasn't
the only high-profile event lit by Rea's
newfangled light. It also illuminated the last manned
shuttle launch for NASA.
Getting Stray Light Optical
Technologies to this point clearly required exceptional
engineering talent, but also lots of strategic planning and
business smarts. And, that kind of learning, Rea says,
could be an even bigger part of Rose-Hulman's future.
"Rose-Hulman already does a
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worldclass job of preparing students for the real
world," he says. "It really isn't about making it better, but
deciding if Rose-Hulman is going to go beyond engineering, looking
at entrepreneurship, and bringing more business-oriented processes
into the curriculum." Engineers who can think entrepreneurially
could be valuable to a lot of employers, he points out. "A lot of
small players are very nimble, and a lot of companies are trying to
make small departments more nimble."
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