The GE Brief: May 11, 2021
FAMILY SPOTLIGHT
Sally Flowers has worked at GE Renewable Energy’s wind turbine plant in Pensacola, Florida, since 2001. To celebrate Mother’s Day on Sunday, she gathered for dinner with both her mother and her daughter. What made the coming together of three generations even more special, though, is that Flowers’ daughter, Heather Sasser, joined her mom at the Pensacola plant in 2018, where they both assemble components for wind turbines.
Energy generations: Sasser grew up hearing her mom talk about work around the dinner table. She says that when she started working at the Pensacola plant, “people kept saying, ‘You look like someone else who works here.’” Both mother and daughter say “the people” and the team spirit are perhaps the best parts about coming to work. “It has been a really good experience having my daughter working with me and following in my footsteps,” Flowers says. “It makes me feel good to know she’s with a good company.”
What does it take to build a wind turbine? Find out here.
THREE CHEERS FOR SARAH LUKENS
Sarah Lukens earned her PhD in mathematics from Tulane University, and her postdoc work at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and the University of Notre Dame involved building data-driven computational models to forecast infectious disease and control. But a chance meeting at a brewery brought her to GE Digital, where she is devising clever ways to sift through piles of industrial data and human “domain” knowledge to extract valuable insights. “The future of analytics and artificial intelligence in industry isn’t AI itself,” she says, “but how the data is used in industries by people and by domain experts.”
The human element: Recently named one of 25 leaders transforming manufacturing by SME, a nonprofit industry group for professionals in manufacturing, Lukens is making sense of both the machine and human experience. And at GE Digital, she has the tools to do that. “The data we have at GE is amazing,” she says. “I feel like I’m in academic heaven. Every day, I get to play with and explore data that I believe no other company in the world has.”
Read more about Sarah Lukens here.
THE COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Cool Color
Purdue University engineers have created the world’s whitest paint, with light-reflecting capabilities that can cool a building from the outside.
2. Hot Rocks
Denmark’s new GridScale demonstration plant has created a way to store electrical energy produced by wind and solar sources as heat in stones.
3. Robot Muscles
Scientists at the University of Wollongong in Australia have developed artificial muscles for miniature robots inspired by DNA’s “supercoil” structure.
Learn more here about this week’s Coolest Things On Earth.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“Another use case I’m passionate about is codifying knowledge.”
— Sarah Lukens, data scientist for industrial software development, GE Digital
Quote: GE Reports. Images: Sally Flowers, Sarah Lukens.