Ep. 39: Jeremy Walker of FLIR

This is Jonathan Kersting with the Pittsburgh Technology Council and Techvibe Radio that says here on my shirt hanging out with Comcast to tell our 50 Summer Stories of Pittsburgh Tech. And part of our jam doing this is find the companies that are just kicking butt. But you don't necessarily know that they're out there. And we're glad they're out there because the solutions they're providing the things they're doing, are literally keeping us safe every day in such as the case with FLIR and these guys, they have this awesome tagline. I got to start with this, because I think I think this just kind of puts this Capstone on where it's like, they call themselves like they want to be the world's Sixth Sense. And that, to me is just so powerful because they're detecting things that are harmful to us everyday and everyday. They're saving lives as simple as that. And today we're talking to Jeremy Walker. Jeremy, thanks for hanging out with us. You're in Pittsburgh. Up there in U-Park hanging out and I see you're a Penn State fan back there is I think it's pretty hot. I am Yeah, that's not so subtle, I guess.

A fan? Yeah.

Fantastic. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. I you were one of the most fascinating, coolest companies in Pittsburgh and I'm betting a lot of our viewers and listeners may not know a whole lot about you guys, you guys have to be quiet. I mean, you're, you're working with the government here to help keep us safe. And so you got to keep it on the hush hush sometime. But say you're allowed to talk. And tell us a little bit about what you guys are up to. So thanks for being here. It first off, what's your background real fast? What do you do? And what's what's your position with for?

Sure. Yeah. Hey, first off, thanks for having us. And you're right. Not a lot of people know.

Not a lot of people know we're here. We've been here for a long time.

So this site actually is a sort of a biotech site. So we focus on chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction or web detection. So that's chemical warfare agents like nerf agents, sulfur mustard, toxic industrial chemicals and then bio right. So that can be either naturally occurring or engineered biological threats. So a lot of viral threats that could either be deployed or under the, you know, sort of the current circumstances we're under where there's sort of some, some, some pandemic pandemic that arises because some virus has jumped out of an animal into people and it's spread around the world. Right. So we we do quite a bit of government work, do D DHS type of stuff, but yeah, to explain my role. So we have a group within clear, that is called detection cbrn Chem bio rad new explosives. cbrne. Actually, that sounds scary. Yeah. So we kind of have a portfolio where we're basically trying to detect anything that can harm you, right and at any given point in time in the world. There's different actors, you know, a lot of people were some of the terrorist groups and your your your ISIS and Taliban's. But then you have state actors, right. And so that could be like North Korea or Russia or Syria. And they span the whole sort of spectrum of all those sorts of classes of threats, right. And so we've got basically four sites that it all technologies to try to detect all those things both for the Department of Defense that's operating in theater and some of those places but also for sort of, you know, Homeland Security. So DHS, and then some of our Army National Guard units that actually functioned to to protect this domestically from from from a lot of those threats. So my job it's kind of a unique job within within clear, clears. More broadly, this about $2 billion largely in the known by the public as a thermal imaging company, right and it's about half Half commercial and half Department of Defense. So that commercial side of the business is really focused on infrared technology, so thermal, and that and then just things beyond, you know, what, what, what the eye can see. And then my group really does a little bit of that stuff in surveillance, but then mostly we we focus on lots of other types of detectors. So like I mentioned, biotech, it plays a big role radiation detection, portable field instrument, analytical instrumentation, and sensor rays, detecting explosives and drugs, radar, acoustic sensors. So just, you know, that whole sort of theme of war fences, right, the sixth sense of the world, the infrared, plus the other, all the other stuff, so that really is sort of the goal of FLIR to really helping enhance you know, your perceptional awareness of what's around you, because Particularly when you're in danger from some of these kinds of threats. So my job is to really oversee all of the new innovation that goes on in the company, and particularly in the business unit related to detecting these things. So I'm director of science and technology. So I kind of wear two hats. I really sort of oversee all the early stage stuff that's going on within this group. And then I spend a good deal of my time doing business development with the government agencies that are really the ones that sort of go out and solicit the technology that they want. And, and so I spend quite a bit of time talking to you program managers from agencies like the defense Threat Reduction agency or ditra, DARPA, DHS army research office, so there's, you know, anywhere between sort of six and eight groups that we work very closely with to try to try to seed new technology and develop it and then get it in the hands of the warfighter.

That's a lot of stuff and I think people need to know that. The Pittsburgh presence of FLIR is based on the Gentoo Ace, which was founded back in 1999. A spin off from University of Pittsburgh, which is really cool in the fact that they were scooped up by by FLIR I think it's just amazing cuz it shows you man that the solutions that a dentist was working on are pretty heavy duty stuff. I know recently, you guys are just a word like like almost $20 million contract based on some of the agentive technology to help for for nerve agent discovery or just disclosure spray, which is a fancy way saying you spray stuff on something to see if there's like nerve agent or a sort of harmful materials or things like that on equipment and clothing and things. I think it's just like I said, saving lots of people's lives. That's just so cool to me.

Yeah. So yeah, the company spun out a pen and 99 was acquired by a company called IC x technologies in in oh six shortly before I joined so I got I actually got my PhD in chemistry at Pitt and joined the company in 2006. And I've been here ever since. And in 2010, we were acquired by FLIR on. Yeah. And so, we, this particular site has really been focused on what we like to call advanced entomology. So, an enzyme is a protein and more or less every living things got enzymes inside it, and they sort of govern or catalyze a lot of different biochemical reactions in your body. So a lot of your you know, physiological reactions are modulated or governed by enzymes to, to make certain things happen. And so sort of the most poignant example in the program you mentioned that we that we want and are now in full rate production, sort of the number one example for us as nerve agents. You know, you just Back in the last four or five years of world history, right, you got this Syrian nerve agent poisoning. A lot of people you have Kim Jong on assassinating his brother in I think in a Malaysian airport, right? Exactly. Yeah. Video footage of him getting hugged by those two women and Exactly. And then you got the you know, the Russian assassination attempt that went on over in Salzburg in the UK that was God about it that was scary man like are the biggest and most recent one. Certainly, you know, whether it's a state actor or non state actor, the threat of nerve agent poisoning, particularly that, you know, that UK case where these were some fairly sophisticated and advanced nerve agents, right so that that's an ever present threat. And our technology sort of lends itself very well to helping the military in in domestic responders be able to be able to combat those those types of threats. So the way the sensor works is there's an enzyme in your body that really modulates all of your neuromuscular activity. So when your nerve sends an impulse to your muscle to basically fire, right or act, there's a chemical called acetylcholine at that neuromuscular junction. And there's an enzyme called acetylcholine esterase, that basically breaks down that signal. So that essentially resets that junction. And so that's the nerve agent. So it loses that connection so you can see exactly so right when you get poisoned by a nerve agent, that that nerve agent shuts off that enzyme, it's like a lock and key kind of mechanism. It shuts it off. And the binding affinity is like really, really high. So it's like super, super lethal, right? And so when when that happens, you get all these really nasty nasty Sort of physiological effects that we've all sort of read about or seen in the media, I noticed a really rapid intervention, ultimately that sort of that leads to, you know, a fatal outcome. And so, the ability to detect these things, and very sensitively on surfaces is kind of where we specialized early on. And so we we have been working with the government, a number of agencies, but probably most closely with with ditra. To develop this chemistry that uses enzymes to basically detect these these things very sensitively, and then it drives these color changes. And so the idea is I can spray a surface and it goes on to say a tank or Humvee, okay, it would be yellow. And if there's a nerve agent present pretty quickly, within a minute or two, it turns red. And so that goes the warfighter, right where, right where they're contaminating the tanks, they're, more importantly, they can spray it with a decontaminant. So like an ox dies or something, you know bleach or other types of chemistries and so they can get rid of it, keep it from spreading clean up the vehicle. And then typically if you're in that kind of scenario, you're probably in a situation where you your combat readiness has got to be pretty high. So the ability to do that very quickly clean it up, then Am I everybody's exposure so that nobody gets sick or spreads it and they get back to the fight is is is paramount.

That's Paramount, but does it leave a nice fresh pine scent afterwards?

Well, maybe could be a future version of you want a nice clean sent after you know there's no nerve agent on there. Right? That's what I find is amazing is that this is the type of thing being developed here like Pittsburgh, that is being deployed, you know, on the frontlines, it's saving know all our soldiers lives everyone's lives because like you said, more and more of these types of things are happening when it comes to these types of nerve agent attacks.

And I just find that amazing and it's here in Pittsburgh, the FLIR This. So how many folks are engineers offices in Pittsburgh?

Well, so actually clear, I want to say somewhere between 20 503,000 people worldwide, right?

Exactly. Yeah, we actually have two offices in the Pittsburgh area. Okay. Um, that actually came to flair by separate acquisition. So the office that I sit in in Harmer is about only about 20 people. So it's pretty small. It's very research and development. Right? We have a lot of people with bachelor's and master's and PhDs coming out of like the chemistry and biology and biochemistry space. So it's a really r&d heavy site. And then there's actually a second site a little bit further north of us. That is a like a manufacturing site out in Freeport. Yeah. So we're both like along the route 28 corridor and actually, yeah, right, the valley, the Allegheny Valley there. So yeah, and so the Freeport site actually does precision optics manufacturing for a lot of our infrared technology. So these really sophisticated What they call gimbels? No, I like helicopters and airplanes that either help them with navigation or help them with surveillance. So you've probably seen a lot of those videos where like some guys running from the cops and then yeah, you can see that the heat sinks to the person that wouldn't be possible without like precision optics that have lenses that have to go into that and that's what the site up in Freeport we're work since they're in a very different business group than us. But again, you know, at the same time they they're really serving the same purpose. We're really trying to protect, you know, people from from bad actors, right, sixth sense, man.

It's all about being that Sixth Sense. You guys keep Torah. You see it all coming together. And Pittsburgh's played a big part in that as far as it goes. So I know you don't know and we can't we can't talk to depth about this. But I think something that people need to know about new leaders on the front lines of temperature sensing, right and that's just Paramount right now. Being told Like what's happening in that area? If you can anything in particular, you can let us know about.

Oh, yeah. So that one's a little easier to talk about. It's not related to, you know, defense or national security related, but as people are aware, and if you watch sort of a lot of the financial news channels and your MSNBC and cn ns and stuff, it's all over the news. The bigger company specializes in thermography or reading, reading, reading temperature, really right. And there's a lot of commercial markets for that. But since the covid pandemic is blown up, one of the tools that are available to screen people are using thermal cameras to read people's what we call elevated skin temperature. So it's not diagnosing it's not saying that somebody is sick with something but what it's doing is just kind of detecting that that person might have a fever. And in that case, you should pull them aside for sort of secondary screening. And that's right. Like one of these diagnostic essays might be performed. So it's really meant to just sort of screen people who might have a fever. Instead, it's being adopted in a lot of airports, a lot of secure buildings. So it's been in the press that we've done some deals with some really large auto manufacturers, and people with very large warehouse facilities and manufacturing facilities in United States as well as a lot of Department of Defense installations. So that's, that's pretty well publicized. So it's, it's sort of this, you know, this technology that is being used to as a sort of a first layer of defense to make sure that people who might be ill aren't getting into those places where then they're exposed to large populations of people. And they can, you know, spread illness, so young Makes sense. Yeah, like I say says that first line of defense is someone similar to temperature, you at least haven't just checked out this to make sure that could be something that could be spread to a lot other people. And like I said, Everything you guys do is about keeping people safe. That's kind of interesting because for this group, you know, like I said, we early on we, we specialize in wanting to detect, you know, biological threat. So bacteria and in in viruses.

And so the thermal, you know, as you know, with people with COVID, right, they don't always present symptomatically to begin with, so they can be transmitters or spreaders and maybe not have a fever, not have great cough, right and some of the other symptoms and so, more sophisticated approaches to detecting signs of infection are needed. And so that's another effort that this site here in Pittsburgh actually is working on. We've got some really innovative, new approaches to trying to detect viruses and bacteria in the environment, and so on.

Sort of the classical technique is taking a sample and then doing what's called a polymerase chain reaction or PCR. But that's, you know, as we see right now, that's a process that you send samples back to the lab. And there are significant backups. It takes time you hear the back of you hear about right now all the time, like 10 days to find out, you heard, yeah, we're focused on we're focused on trying to detect those same kinds of targets. But can we make it happen in five or 10 minutes? Right. That's the speed at which I'm particularly for the Department of Defense, right? If you think about how, how quickly one needs to react to those things. You don't have 10 days Yeah, you don't have 10 days to make a decision. You didn't have five minutes.

That's why some of the some of the times we we've developed over close to 20 years of working on this technology about now knowing how to work with proteins and now going into sort of like more sophisticated and new techniques like engineering, protein that just don't exist. In engineering new ways to kind of detect things and amplify their, their presence in real time and develop chemistries that can, you know, either change color or develop before us in signal. So, you know, we see, you know, a significant opportunity, even beyond the immediate opportunity exists for FLIR in terms of thermal imaging and in the value that that adds, I think that there's additional whether it's a field detection assay or things that maybe become translated into that sort of clinical space or diagnostic space. I think that's that's an area of pretty huge opportunity. And that's something that my my people here in Pittsburgh are working on right now.

Apps, I mean, so obviously, you can have a lot of fun, and you've been there since 2006. So obviously, I mean, you love what you do. What's the best thing about about being fleurs offices here in Pittsburgh and working on the types of stuff you get to work on problems that you get to solve?

Yeah, obviously, having a whole technology toolbox because I work with With other groups at other sites, and they've got different different technology, right, so we really can kind of select the best tool for the problem. And I really like being in the cutting edge of innovation and a lot of times in my job, that means going and partnering. So we do a lot of partnering with universities, we do a lot of partnering with small businesses. And it's really about trying to accelerate solutions. And so we don't always have all the answers with what technology comes from FLIR. And so we do a lot of a lot of partnering. And so some couple of poignant examples. We've got active partnerships on government contracts with both the University of Pittsburgh and with Carnegie Mellon. We work with we've worked with at any point in time, on the order of maybe half a dozen different small businesses in Pittsburgh. We have a couple more things coming up that that we'll be doing with some other companies. I'm really excited about, we really we try to sort of keep it local where we can. And that's what I love hearing that the fact that you're working obviously universities make sense, but also to work with private business here as well. I mean, I mean it really it, it. It's really sort of understated how much technology there is here in Pittsburgh. And everybody knows about the computer science and software, AI and machine learning kinds of things that people are doing and some of the big players that are here and then you've got your autonomy industry with with with self driving cars and everything. So I think that's sort of what comes to mind when you think about Pittsburgh, but we, you know, we're really finding a lot of other opportunities to work with companies that do a lot of material science, a lot of a lot in the biotech space. I think so there's really sort of three parts the answer and we just covered the first in terms of what Yeah, what I like about coming to work. Okay. Secondly, is we do You know, we're really trying to use our technology to the fullest extent, particularly to support the VOD. And so while we focus on detecting chemical and biological weapons, we also will do a good bit of what I would call translational work. So learning how to work with enzymes. They've got a letter out what other applications so they're sort of, you know, clinical ad phase, and there's protein therapeutics. And so one of the other things that that we've done most recently, that's really going to be significant as we figured out how to take an enzyme that God wants to administer to people as a what you would call a prophylaxis, basically something you could put in your body, and it would stay in your blood circulation for a long time. And essentially, these are enzymes that break down nerve agents. And so if you got poisoned by nerve agent, you can basically give somebody a shot of this And then for about 10 days, at least, if they got poisoned by the nerve agent, the enzyme circulating in the bloodstream would break it down and make it my Hockett. And so essentially, our soldiers would be protected on the battlefield where if somebody attacked me it wouldn't matter, right?

Oh, that is amazing. That's exciting. And we've partnered with a local small business. And again, this is sort of a polymer technology for for doing this that came out of Carnegie Mellon. Oh, that's and, and we, we leveraged it to show that it could work with our DVD customers, and now we're transitioning that relationship to this small business that's been out of CMU, and they're going to take the market and hopefully someday when a really big, really, really big VOD contract, no. And and, you know, we'll we'll be in a position where we've, we've sort of seeded that and worked out some kind of licensing or royalty arrangement with that your, you know, everybody wins, and most Importantly, you know, we're we're protecting the warfighters. And, and that's just really an amazing innovation when you think about it to just be able to go and use the tools that we've developed over, you know, 15 or 20 years and be able to apply it to a different problem. And so, I love looking for opportunities to do that. And I would tell you the third third piece of why I like to come to work, is we just have a very small but very, very determined and talented group of people that work at our site. So we've got people that, you know, we hired 15 to 20 years ago, and it's been it's been a long road to get where we are, but you watch sort of these people grow into their careers.

Yeah. realize the potential of the technology to its fullest and then also the people to its fullest. So it's been amazing for me To manage so many of these people to kind of watch them grow and as technologies grown, right, and so we're now at a point where we've, we've got some of these bigger acquisition programs that are really exciting for us because it's kind of the, the, you know, the carrot that we've been chasing for a long time, but I'm even more looking forward to the future because where we're going to take things and and be able to apply these to, you know, future detection of chemical and biological threats. But I just think there's an awful lot of other stuff that we're going to go do. And actually, I've got a number of exciting things coming up that we're negotiating contracts for now. So I can't so unfortunate, that things didn't happen a little faster, but I was hoping to have you back on because at some point, I want to hear about these things. Yeah, no sooner in a month or twos time, we're going to have, you know, a plurality, so to speak. Or maybe more really exciting announcements to make about some new things coming online for our government work that I'm really would love to come back and tell you more.

No, I want the update. You said plurality of things. That sounds very exciting. Amy's many things are coming down the road. What a cool, fascinating company and you know that it's got Pittsburgh presence here based on adyen taste back in the day, I think is just absolutely amazing. I'm so glad I got to tell this little sliver of your story without a doubt Jeremy cool stuff. Man. I can't thank you enough for hanging out with us today.

Yeah, I appreciate the opportunity. It's really nice to be with you today and get to talk about this. It's it doesn't take a lot arm twisting to get me to write about the particularly just just the cool stuff we do and the people here that are so invested in, in you know, doing this work and it really is.

You have to be super motivated. It's a really you know, technologically stressful environment sometimes to be able to deliver these things. But but it really, we didn't have the culture we did. And I really think that that's that's another reflection on just how Pittsburgh is right it is a it is a gritty town and people work hard and people want to people want to innovate and people are proud of what they do. And so just to have, you know, a real small group of people that are that are Pittsburgh natives and doing this right, and it's a nice just reflection on where we're from, I don't know, I don't know if we'd have the same situation if we were anywhere else. But I would agree that makes a great point. At the end of the day, it's not gonna be an easy task when your vision is to be the world's sixth sense. So I'll leave it at that. Jeremy, you are the best, you and your work and your team's work. So it's making Pittsburgh proud man, simple as that. Thanks for being part of this today. You are the best.

Thanks, Jonathan.

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