Zack Obermeyer's father is a mechanical engineer who focused on vehicle design at General Motors Co. and Delphi Corp. most of his professional career and guided him into engineering, Obermeyer said. His father now works at the University of Dayton, where he teaches engineering design and project management courses.
Obermeyer, 29, graduated with a bachelor's degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Ohio State University.
He worked in 2008 as a polymers and composites lab associate at the University of Dayton Research Institute. He said in his Rising Stars survey that he worked with epoxies to make carbon- and glass-based composites utilizing materials such as carbon nanotubes, carbon nanofibers and Kevlar to make high-strength materials with desirable properties for military, aircraft and other research.
While his work mainly involved composites, he said, "I gained valuable experience on material blending, material property testing, using additive to achieve desired properties and many other skills essential to my current role."
In 2009, he had a chemical engineering co-op at Silfex Inc., followed by a chemical engineering co-op at Kodak in 2010. He joined Laird in 2014 as a manufacturing engineer II, where he oversaw "product quality, blend formulation, blend recipes, line efficiency and maintenance, and new product development."
"My first work with plastics was at Laird in 2014, where I was the engineer for a thermal interface material that used a thermoplastic as the base resin with powdered metals, creating a material that could melt and form to shapes like plastic but had the thermal properties of a metal," he said.
Obermeyer became material science engineer at corrugated pipe producer Advanced Drainage Systems Inc. of Hilliard, Ohio, in 2017. He is responsible for "testing, qualifying and maintaining the material blends for pipe products, formulating new material blends, creating and maintaining systems to ensure product quality."
In terms of technology that interests him, Obermeyer said "automated systems that sort post-consumer recycled material using vision technology" and "emerging technology related to identifying and removing material that can be hard to isolate in the recycling stream."
Obermeyer, who is part of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, said that in the future, he wants to maintain his role of "the plastic blend maintainer and programmer, but I would like to further expand our recycled percentage of our supply stream as much as we can."
"I believe through our vertically integrated process we can expand our recycling efforts to be the biggest user of recycled materials in the United States," he added.
Jeff Biesenberger, director of materials engineering at ADS, nominated Obermeyer for Rising Stars.
"Plastic and materials have always interested me because it feels like anything is possible, the next formula for a super useful powerful plastic is right in front of you waiting," Obermeyer said, "and you just have to go out and discover it."
Zack Obermeyer's father is a mechanical engineer who focused on vehicle design at General Motors Co. and Delphi Corp. most of his professional career and guided him into engineering, Obermeyer said. His father now works at the University of Dayton, where he teaches engineering design and project management courses.
