MEL #011 |From Researcher to CEO Through Mentorship, Innovation, and Leadership with Dr. Philip Stuckey

STUCKEY: There are infinite number of ways in reality to approach open-ended problems. it’s a constant back-and-forth and what-if analysis, and at some point, decisions just must be made.

ADAMS: In this episode, I speak with Dr. Philip Stuckey, CEO of FC Renew, which is focused on research, development, and commercialization of extended-life hydrogen fuel cells and recovery of precious metals and critical materials for hydrogen fuel cells and electrolyzers.

Philip shares his journey from a curious student to a leader in hydrogen fuel cell innovation. His passion for renewable energy was sparked during a study abroad trip to Iceland, leading him to pursue advanced degrees and a role at the U.S, Patent Office, where he honed his analytical skills. In the leadership segment, 

Philip discusses the challenges of transitioning from researcher to CEO, emphasizing the importance of decision-making amid uncertainty and the need to balance technical and business aspects. 

He credits mentorship as a pivotal influence on his growth and advises aspiring leaders to seek out mentors, embrace continuous learning, and make informed decisions quickly to drive progress.

Without further delay, here is my conversation with Dr. Philip Stuckey.

ADAMS: Hi, Philip. Welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

STUCKEY: Hi, thanks for having me today. 

ADAMS: Can you start out by telling us how you got into engineering as a career field?

STUCKEY: Yeah, I’ve always been mechanically inclined, always wanted to know how things work, very mathematic focused. My brain is not so much, you know, reading and writing focused the whole time, but those are very important skills. But I really engaged with engineering coming out of high school, seeing… what could be built, how things work, what you can learn. And I wound up getting into material science engineering, which was not something that was on my radar from my high school perspective at all. I actually found that at the orientation at my undergraduate school and switched from mechanical engineering to material science engineering. And it was a whole different mentality, I think, of what traditional engineering was in my mind.

The research component of that was something that I never really had an insight to. My family’s background is mostly in teaching and it was always been instilled in me to have an appreciation for learning. And I enjoy learning new things even today. It’s a great motivating factor for me to learn how things work and how things operate.

And how to get things done too. when I started off in college, I wanted to not be an engineer. I started looking at every other possible thing I could do with my life and major and skill set and things like that. And I never found anything that I actually liked more.

And then I became interested in hydrogen fuel cells early on in that. And it was something that gave me some type of way to focus some of my energy I kind of just found these. did an early study abroad in Iceland in my first semester of my sophomore year. So I was pretty young in that to be away. this was before Iceland was really a a big tourist destination. was mostly ecotourism for Germans at that point and only in the summer. I went back a couple of years ago and it is completely different. So that gave me a chance to see how energy works. At the time I was living in Iceland, I wanted to learn more about fuel cells and they were doing a demonstration project with hydrogen fuel cell buses on the city streets.

And that’s where I learned that where people do demonstration projects isn’t necessarily where the engineering work gets done. Most of those projects were directed from places in Europe and that the site was selected in Iceland because of their kind of unique energy resources. And also the time I was living there of interest and kind of an interesting thing to observe was the construction of a dam in that region. And it, it,took away what was the largest unspoiled area in Europe. So it really kind of put a twofold view of what energy was for me while I was there. And it was a time in life where I got to experience new culture and come up with new appreciations for how to enjoy life too.

ADAMS: It sounds like that trip to Iceland was really a turning point moment for you just in terms of giving you exposure to so many different things about the kind of work you’re interested in and then lifestyle and all these different things that you got really, really early on in your academic career.

STUCKEY: It was insightful and I think it certainly led to some formative experiences afterwards that I don’t think I even realized at the time were happening.

And then you decided to pursue graduate school. Was that to continue to pursue fuel cells or were there some other motivations behind going to graduate school?

So up until my senior year in my undergraduate career, I wanted to get a job and work in industry and use that skillset. And as I started to really look around as an entry level person going into a new field with the plethora of different engineering applications, it kind of became clear that there were lots and lots of choices. And one of the key places that I was actually considering taking a job would have been a plastics extrusion line in rural Eastern North Carolina. And I kind of looked at that and being 22 years old decided that that wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted to have at that point in my life. That wasn’t necessarily the work environment I wanted was to be monitoring foam coming off a line for 40 to 50 hours a week. so I started to look around.

This interest in fuel cells had kind of been developed through Iceland, through some other undergraduate research experiences. And it gave me an ability to focus something for the future. And starting to understand the complexities of things led me to wanting to go to grad school to further my career getting a master’s degree in my mind at that time would always pay for itself five years down the road. Probably get to start off a little bit higher. Your growth options once you do start working are probably a bit higher. And so I said, OK, go into graduate school now makes sense. It’s two more years of investment. The academic world can be a pretty fun place too.

And so I think I even delayed maturity by two more years by going to grad school for a master’s degree. And maybe I just wanted to stay young at heart because then I continued on for a doctorate degree and I’ve really been engaged in research ever since. Not to say that it’s just fun all the time, but it was definitely kind of what to do next. And the problems that arose out of research in graduate school were truly perplexing. And as you really started to become aware of what you don’t know of what’s around you, it became even more intriguing and inquisitive. So it kind of fuels this vicious cycle of trying to learn and discover.

ADAMS: Yeah, and I was just thinking back when you said you didn’t want to go to rural North Carolina and sit in front of an extrusion line. So you went to Hawaii to get your master’s degree. 

STUCKEY: That’s right. So in trying to find a place to go to graduate school, I wanted to stay on the East Coast closer to home and probably pursue something with fuel cells and material science engineering. And not knowing what I knew then, I applied for material science engineering schools up and down the East coast. And I wanted to do fuel cell transportation research. My grades coming out of undergraduate were good, not great, not graduate student, top of the level great coming out of undergraduate, but good. But all my essay materials didn’t match up to what the actual research priorities were for the typical professor in material science engineering.

And then part of getting to Hawaii was I started to look at who was producing research publications and things like that in the news and why kept coming up with all these relevant fuel cell projects. interesting. And being a smaller kind of college, they didn’t have a material science department. was mechanical engineering was the closest related department. And I had a professor that picked up the application, had an opening, saw the fit, wanted to engage in that area of research. And once he made the offer, I kind of said to myself, well, I guess somebody has to go to Honolulu for graduate school. 

ADAMS: Somebody does, yes. Thank you for taking on that hardship on behalf of others.

And then you went on to Case Western for your PhD. then, you know, after you graduated pretty early in your career, you went to the patent office. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

STUCKEY:  Yeah. So after spending eight plus years kind of focused on hydrogen fuel cells. I finished up my doctorate studies and it was not a good timing for hydrogen fuel cells around 2011. It wasn’t a great market for new PhDs having come out of the 2008 recession.

And having this focus and desire to work on hydrogen fuel cells, I actually found a fit working on hydrogen fuel cells with the patent office. So I became a patent examiner my portfolio was focused in hydrogen fuel cells and batteries. So it was a way for me to continue to engage in this topic, in this technology, in this industry that I’d already invested in.

And a lot of people at that time, batteries were kind of taking over the limelight for hydrogen fuel cells. So there’s actually in this technology development, been very cyclic times where one technology will out-compete the other technology or gain influence and funding and all sorts of different things that have ripple effects in the markets and the job markets and the product offers.

So this was the first job that I had gotten after actually trying to start version one of FC Renew. And I was actually living in Knoxville at the time that I got the job offer from the patent office. And it turned out to be a good fit and a good reason to move.

ADAMS: I think that’s a really, I think that’s just a really creative way to kind of continue to stay tethered to this technology area that that you’re passionate about through the patent office.

STUCKEY: So working at the patent office was not what I thought it was going to be, When I took the job, I expected that there would be this collaborative process where we get together and talk about technologies and dwell over things and have debates and make decisions. are hundreds of thousands applications filed every year. And that job is based on your ability to produce. Literally it is a production system.

So you are expected to review so many applications per an hour worked. And that means that you have to become efficient at reviewing, reading, understanding, writing, researching, and a little bit of discussion. It’s actually a very independent job. They train you to be almost a one person shop.

At the end of the day, the patent office’s core requirement for most of those jobs is a four-year ABET accredited engineering degree. And there are other ways to justify that you have those skills and background, but they want you to walk in the door having a technical basis and the mentality to be able to understand the technology. And they crash course you in the wall behind what what the process is. So it was an intensive first year and first four months with a lot of lectures in a very academic type environment and lecture halls with different speakers throughout the time, trying to get us up to speed on how the law worked and how the decisions have to be made to properly make the decisions behind the reviews for the patent applications.

ADAMS: That’s really helpful, because I don’t know how welL Our audience knows about the patent office as a potential job a job opportunity But it sounds like they hire quite a few engineers So it’s something maybe folks can consider any and lots of people I think might even enjoy that type of environment.

And then so just kind of going back to your career trajectory So you’re continuing to pull on this thread of fuel cells that you’re so passionate about so now you you mentioned FC renew now you are the CEO of a startup, you’re an entrepreneur now, a CEO of a startup. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming an entrepreneur?

STUCKEY: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think I intentionally set out to become an entrepreneur. In the way fuel cells were in my mind, I actually took some entrepreneurship courses in undergraduate. I engaged with that in the academic environment and graduate school as well.

As I spent years and years trying to do research on hydrogen fuel cells, you start to ask questions as to why things are and how they can be. And I came up with the idea that fuel cells degrade and we know they degrade. And what can we do to live with that? And the entire industry that I’ve seen and the whole focus of the engineering mindset is to produce a hydrogen fuel cell that has the longest possible lifetime. And since we know they degrade in my mind, I’m like, well, let’s work on what we can do to them to extend their lifetime. And it’s not an approach industry has taken. And I think a more common understanding to that might be towards lithium ion batteries, which everybody has in their cell phone and we’re familiar with this.

You use that battery for two years in your phone and it cycles so many times and the capacity of it starts to fade. And eventually is what you might have to do is what most people do by the new phone or you put a new battery in it. And that old battery is then effectively just trapped.

Same thing happens with hydrogen fuel cells. And that’s where I started to recognize that there’s still a lot of value in that system if there is a way to help refurbish the catalyst side of it. So that was the eye-opening, how can we do something differently and what do we actually need to change in our mentality to solve a problem to make these things last longer? So that they are ready for commercial deployment. Because lifetime is a huge hindrance to actually getting this technology in a commercial setting. And because of that short lifetime, short lifetime equals high cost.

So I started to ask myself that question and started to reconsider that and started to come up with ideas just floating on the back of my head on a way too frequent basis of what can we do to the catalyst layer to achieve a refurbishment? And I had some ideas and I wanted to pursue this and coming out of grad school.

I tried to do that for a while, for about six months. I was an entry-level person with very little real world experience. And while I tried and got out there and networked and tried to engage into the entrepreneurial community,and they were receptive of having me start to engage in that, taking an idea to something that has a profitable business model is not really the easiest thing to achieve.

So having a PhD and starting to get into a position where I was starving, I decided that that had to be something for the future in my life. And at that time, that step back felt like a failure to some extent. In hindsight, it was an experience and a lesson learned. And I had years of kind my initial years of being at the patent office, of having this in the back of my mind. But I can also say that getting a real adult paycheck after being in graduate school and trying to do a startup and living off of $12,000 a year was a really fun change and in a fun city in the Washington DC area. So I got to enjoy life from a different perspective and have new experiences and start to travel in ways that I never traveled before. So there were a lot of positives for that for my own personal development.

And it was the, the patent office is a great job and a great career. And, you know, there, there was many times where I saw myself retiring after 30 years of service as a civil servant in the federal government. And I think I could have had a happy life doing that too. But the opportunity and kind of this in the back of my head ability to engage in in meaningful change was something that I really wanted to pursue. And I suppose in a way that is maybe the definition of taking on some leadership role on my own to start to do that. And I always kind of view what we do as a technical challenge, but I think there’s also, as I’ve started to grow with FC Renew, a whole new set of challenges that come behind that that take persistence, dedication, insight, and listening to those people and indicators around you to make good informed decisions.

ADAMS: Hey everyone, Angelique here. So, Philip and I ended up talking about his time at the patent office in a separate conversation a few weeks later. He graciously granted me permission to record his thoughts. I decided to tack them on at the end of our career journey segment. So here’s Philip with a few more insights into what it is like to work at the United States Patent Office.

STUCKEY: What I found interesting about the patent office and what was a great component of the job was that it required critical thinking every day. Sometimes that’s exhausting and most of the times it’s fun and rewarding. And you really have to be searching the known body of literature to try and figure out if what is you’re considering for a patent has in fact been invented previously. And then you have to use rationale to piece together other components that could be conceivably combineable. And it’s an exercise that you wind up at the patent office learning by doing. People train you, you work with other people, people review your work products and that whole process to kind of get ingrained in the mentality because of the way the promotion schedules are set up and and everything else, it’s pretty much a five year kind of track and program there. So the patent office is in reality invested in examiners staying long-term in their career at the office. And the longer you’re there, the more promotions you take, the more work you actually produce and move. So it works in their favor, surely to invest in the longevity of their employees. 

And that’s a neat thing the people that work there have a work-life balance. You are definitely expected to work your very traditional government type of 40 hour work week. And ideally the job is set up in a way that you are able to achieve your objectives for work in those timeframes. And that is definitely, I think, a plus of the job. There are times where you may have to do more on your own, but that is sometimes just how any job goes in a lot of ways.

ADAMS: All right, Philip, what leadership situation are we going to be talking about today? 

STUCKEY: I think we’re going to approach leadership from my experience as starting what I would call day zero with FC Renew and to where we’ve gotten today about four years later. Great. tell us about some of the the key moments that have happened? Well, given the background of my career and my engagement in hydrogen fuel cells, I knew that trying to approach this technical problem of renewing and refurbishing hydrogen fuel cells was something that was going to require a lot of time, resources, analytical equipment, and research.

And those are hard things to put together for technology that has not seen a full commercial deployment yet. It takes a lot of buy-in and a lot of risk to start to engage in these types of meaningful investigations to get towards answers. And I got my first real win with FC Renew by being accepted to…Innovation Crossroads, which is a Department of Energy sponsored program that allowed me to incubate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for two years. And it wasn’t just the ability to get into a research lab that was, in my opinion, what was so positive about this program, but it was also the ability to have a network of invested mentors and advisors around us that helped us to define what could become a business model surrounding the technical problem that I wanted to solve as well. And the technology that we’re working to develop now could be developed in an academic setting, but there’s a lot of commercial value in this too. So there also makes sense that this could be an area for economic development, which I think lends itself well to being in the entrepreneurial space and trying to build the business around the technology as well.

And you always have to start somewhere. And for me, that was with zero resources. So that program allowed me to take the reins on the technology and start to understand what it would take to get the technology commercialized. So I had to lead myself in that charge and I had to help lead the others around me, even though I was not necessarily

their boss and I actually wanted them to lead me. And as what it kind of came up is what kind of worked out the best is that everybody was in a way leading each other and there was a collaborative effort but a defined goal of trying to develop technology and trying to ensure that it has a market fit.

And I had to juggle between actually being in the lab and doing the lab work, analyzing the data, trying to understand the markets, trying to understand the economics behind the problem, trying to understand the economics behind the research budget that I was generously given, trying to manage my own time, trying to manage my family life and how I, and how to put all those things together.

So I had to lead myself through these phases. And then I was able to get good feasibility data and was able to secure funding from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy and the US Army. And to date, been able to raise about $3.7 million towards solving this problem. And we haven’t solved the problem yet it’s going to take more resources. But we are well on our way. We continue to improve the knowledge. We continue to achieve feasibility milestones and fairly quickly too. And I, at every stage of growth have to take a step back and look at the skills and resources that I need to grow myself grow the technology and grow the team that’s around me. 

ADAMS: Yeah, I love the way that you have talked about these three distinct pieces. So you’ve, as you said, you’ve got to grow yourself, you’ve got to grow the team and you’ve got to grow the technology. And can you talk a little bit more about maybe what you do behind each of those? So maybe start with yourself and you went from being an individual contributor, being a researcher to now needing to, as you said, to bring advisors and team members on board. You’ve got to manage your time. You have a family. So how do you think about, one, identifying maybe the skills that you need to grow, to build, and then how do you go about actually closing those gaps that you have self-identified? 

STUCKEY: Sure. I think part of that comes back to sort of a research and engineering mentality of wanting to problem solve. And I can look at, you know, one of the things that I have to do is say, we have a vision and a dream, and then we have to break it down into components and then take the resources we have and try and make the most meaningful value added impact towards that. And those resources, time, materials, money, all play into that. And the skills that people bring to the table too also play into how much you can drive some of those outcomes too. 

So in the beginning, I had to try and fill all the holes myself and look towards my mentors to help me identify the blind spots. It’s impossible to not know what you can’t see in a way. So the value of mentors, which is different than managers or bosses, mentors are a truly different, I think, experience to have a valuable one. And I have one of my most valued mentors interviewing me right now. So this is a really fun experience too to really talk about this. And I’ll go backwards because one of the best career development things that I was able to do at the patent office was be a part of a office-wide mentoring program.

It gave me an opportunity to have a one-on-one engagement in a relationship with senior people in different business unit operations in that office. That gave me insights to the job and the purpose and the mission that I would have never been able to see from my own doing my job at my desk that same way. 

And being a mentee in a mentor relationship, you wind up talking about yourself and opportunities and things you can do to grow. And if you are, I think, are honest in both directions, you can really truly identify some areas to grow and a mentor can really identify things that you don’t even realize about yourself.

So I was able to engage in that mentee role with several mentors over many years and different business areas and got unique visions on that. kind of having this passion for fuel cells. And I think we got off our topic completely, but this is towards mentorship. Having this passion for fuel cells and the career trajectory for patent examining as a federal, you know, as having that career trajectory as a federal employee, a civil servant, was something that was pretty defined. And as I tried to grow myself and try to do new things, I was sometimes not able to get some experiences that I was kind of looking for. At the end of the day, I had a job and the job needed to be done. And that’s what was expected of me. And for constantly reviewing innovative things, there was not always a welcome place for me to be innovative. So that was something to consider. And as the kind of markets turn for hydrogen fuel cells and I started to see that coming up, I actually was starting to consider new jobs within the patent office or outside the patent office or even outside of federal government. So I did some several years actually of considering what my next move was going to be, knowing that I had a great job and I was in a great place. So I had no rush to try and make that change and the opportunity to start FC Renew kind of by my doing and looking around kind of lended itself eventually at the end of the day.

ADAMS: Yeah, so you’ve had a sense, it sounds like pretty early on in your career, that mentors can be a very powerful tool to help you both self-reflect and or help you identify areas for growth and things that you might need to improve on, both in yourself as an entrepreneur now and you have your own team, you also have mentors that probably give you advice on the team and the technology and all these different areas.

You mentioned, you started with zero and now you’ve had over $3 million in investment in your company. So a lot of things have changed. You’ve grown quite a bit. The technology has improved. The team has gotten bigger. I’m just curious if you say, okay, well, these are some of the key either skills or mindset shifts I have had.

STUCKEY: Yeah, I think the concept of money and resources have changed for me through that growth. bootstrapped and kind of working for paychecks and having a very defined predictable budget kind of went out the window at some point with trying to do what we do or what we’re trying to achieve at the end of the day. When I started with FC Renew, I was still very resource limited and and dollar limited and we still are today in reality. We can’t just go and do everything we want to do, but the ability to have that funding to actually have a team and employees that are dedicated towards this common mission, bringing in new skill sets into this fold really looks at resources in a different way. And so the mentality for me changing was it wasn’t all on my shoulders anymore and how to engage all these components together as opposed to just trying to keep myself focused. I now had to keep a project focused. I had to keep the team focused. I have to keep the funding focused and try and do the best possible job we can with all the resources we have. And there are infinite number of ways in reality to approach open-ended problems. it’s a constant back and forth and what if analysis and at some point decisions just must be made. And in making decisions now, make the best possible informed decision. And if it’s going well, you keep going in that direction, but starting to be honest of the reality of things that don’t go well, you wanna find those out as fast as you can and course correct as fast as you can. And that could be coming up in so many different places that isn’t just technology development, but it could be the way you operate the day to day of how the team integrates and collaborates with each other.

It could be on what types of software packages to utilize. It could be with someone who you’ve had doing great work for you for six or eight months on a project and that project wraps up and there’s new objectives. And as it turns out, they aren’t as engaged with the new objectives and how to determine if that person can be re-engaged into new objectives or if the fit’s not there anymore and that’s come up and those are hard decisions

ADAMS: I really like what you said about this idea of, when there is all this ambiguity and things are open ended, it’s the leaders role is to make the best decision they can with the information they have. I appreciate you saying that because I do think that’s a challenge for people. New and leadership roles, it can be paralyzing. And also,somewhat defeating to think, nobody’s helping me get the best answer. Well, actually, like, nobody really knows. And so you’ve just got to take a decision and do the best you can and live with the consequences and adjust if you need to. 

STUCKEY: That’s exactly right. And truly the experience I’ve had. And things have changed. The resources around me change when you get a funding or a resource of over a million dollars and that faucet turns on that day, my mentality did not change the same day that that contract started. It took a little bit of mentality for me to realize what I actually had gotten and had to shift that and started to approach the problem, realizing that, I can now do things differently. I can do things on a bigger scope. I can engage more people in this. Can, start to work the problem in different ways. And I had to go from a mentality of, I wouldn’t do that experiment because it cost $800 to, we have a million dollars. If we can do 10 of these and get to an answer, we need to do this today. And that was just totally something that being a very frugal person was a change in my mentality.

And, you know, with that, with that kind of shift in mentality that I’ve had, it’s really helped me make decisions faster too, which has been absolutely critical to achieve project goals.

ADAMS: Absolutely. you’re really in the thick of it. you’re an entrepreneur in a really growing field, having a lot of success, which brings its own challenges because you went from, zero or half a million dollars to, a big stepwise jump in funding, which meant a bigger team, but also meant a lot more deliverables that you had, that you had to fulfill. And so I do think, your mentality of this self-reflection and working with mentors and being coachable has really served you well and will continue to serve you well. I hope that our audience will hear that leaders also need advisors. They also still need support. They don’t know everything. There’s a lot of uncertainty. So having trusted advisors that can help you is really important and I think that you’ve discussed that and it seems to be really working well for you, Philip.

Okay, Philip, as we wrap up, what advice would you give to engineers who want to move into leadership roles?

STUCKEY: I’ve talked a lot about mentorship and I think that would be my number one advice is to find people formally or informally that can help you grow. And I had the opportunity to engage in that through a formal structured program that forced you to ask questions, answer questions, focus on listening at times as opposed to talking.

And I actually got a chance to be a mentor in that program after being a mentee several times, which was a very different role for me because I did not at the time think I was anywhere near a senior person and actually wound up with someone to work with there that had been at the job longer than I had.

It was a very interesting dynamic in that regard, but I think that being a mentor helped me see some things in myself and become a leader in that area, learn how to actively listen, understand what the other person was trying to achieve and accomplish, listen to what the pain points were.

And we put in some types of procedures for managing the docket and the workflow that just helped that person a lot.

So that was very kind of impactful way for me to see ways to help people even though I was not a recognized leader in the area.

ADAMS: Yeah, that’s great. So of course, look for mentors to support you, but consider being a mentor not only to get the fulfillment of helping someone else, but also it sounds like you learned a lot about yourself through that process,

And Philip, do you have any books, podcasts, or other resources that you have found particularly helpful in your career that you would recommend?

STUCKEY: There’s an endless amount of academic type of things you could consider But I found that listening to Planet Money in the car is one of the ways that I can have my brain working and thinking on something that I feel is fun and useful without draining my mental capacity.

As I’ve become a husband and a father, that is something that I’ve had to learn how to do talking to some other people who had been engaged in this career longer and went through that experience helped me to just put in some practices for myself that helped me to be able to compartmentalize some of these very daunting, very open-ended type of problems that we’re trying to solve and be able to appreciate other parts of life and…

be appreciative that sometimes you do deserve a break. 

ADAMS: Absolutely. You absolutely do deserve a break. Well, Philip, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us and for sharing your insights. 

STUCKEY: Yeah. Thank you.