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Canary Media’s Charging Up column chronicles gender variety and notable profession strikes within the climatetech sector. Obtained a individual or occasion you’d wish to see us cowl or a scorching job tip? Allow us to know!
Celina Mikolajczak: Battery trade veteran and knowledgeable
Celina Mikolajczak is chief battery expertise officer at Lyten. This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity.
How did you find yourself on this profession path?
After I graduated from Caltech in 1991, expertise like laptops and cellphones had been scarce, and lithium-ion batteries had been simply getting into the market. My diploma was in mechanical engineering with a deal with fluid mechanics and combustion, so I thought I would go into aerospace or mechanical engineering like my father, who labored on gasoline turbine engines. Nonetheless, the early-’90s recession led me down an surprising path. I bought a proposal to hitch Schlumberger doing wireline logging within the oil enterprise. Understanding within the discipline in southern Louisiana was a actual crash course in management and the way an trade works.
A few 12 months later, I determined to go to grad college at Princeton to review mechanical engineering with a deal with combustion. By 1999, I discovered myself engaged on battery security. This led to regulatory work with the Rechargeable Battery Affiliation and a deep dive into battery failure evaluation. My experience in battery security caught Tesla’s consideration, and I joined their group in 2012, overseeing cell high quality at a pivotal time for electrical automobiles and whereas Tesla was nonetheless a comparatively small firm.
After six years with Tesla, I joined Uber to develop batteries for electrical plane, after which I moved to Panasonic on the Gigafactory in Reno. My journey continued with QuantumScape, and now at Lyten, I oversee your complete battery enterprise, from R&D to manufacturing.
What’s the most effective piece of recommendation you’ve ever obtained?
I typically share this with interns: You’re going to have at the very least 4 or 5 completely different careers. The stuff that’s taking place proper now gained’t be taking place in 20 years, so don’t stress a lot in regards to the future and making your subsequent transfer — if a position doesn’t match, you’ll be able to all the time change course. My very own profession journey, from astronomy analysis at Caltech to the oil discipline, graduate research, engineering consulting and battery expertise, displays various technical shifts and studying curves. Staying versatile and open to new alternatives prevents stagnation.
What’s a barrier you confronted, and the way did you overcome it?
There are many limitations for ladies. The factor that you just run into most as a girl is that folks don’t count on you to be a chief — and a lot of instances, ladies themselves don’t count on to be leaders. It’s not till you begin doing it that you just notice, hey, I’m fairly good at this. However wherever you might be in your profession, in case you stroll right into a room with a bunch of tall guys, most individuals will assume you’re the admin or the dumbest individual within the group, and since that could be a fixed, I suppose you will need to discover ways to cope with it early on. After I went to Caltech, the ratio of ladies to males was 7-to-100, and nonetheless, to this present day, I typically sit in boardrooms the place I am the one girl in a room full of individuals. So it’s important to foster credibility and energy in your self and what you convey to a group whereas not being perceived as weak or weak.
What do you suppose are some fascinating, neglected profession alternatives in climatetech?
It is a actually nascent trade. Particularly on the battery facet, the trade is huge. From uncooked materials extraction to processing to end-use product manufacturing, every of those could possibly be a large trade all on their very own, so if you are interested in mining, chemistry or engineering, you will discover these jobs all up and down the worth chain. However you can too discover all of the gross sales, finance and administrative roles that you can think of. And the truth is, these firms are usually not going to search out individuals who have 20 years of expertise within the battery trade — I’m like the one one who has that a lot expertise — so there’s a large alternative.
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