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Celina Mikolajczak: Battery business veteran and skilled
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?
When 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 give attention to fluid mechanics and combustion, so I thought I would go into aerospace or mechanical engineering like my father, who labored on gasoline turbine engines. However, the early-’90s recession led me down an sudden path. I bought a suggestion to affix Schlumberger doing wireline logging within the oil enterprise. Working out within the subject in southern Louisiana was a actual crash course in management and the way an business works.
About a 12 months later, I determined to go to grad college at Princeton to review mechanical engineering with a give attention to combustion. By 1999, I discovered myself engaged on battery security. This led to regulatory work with the Rechargeable Battery Association 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 autos 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 the complete battery enterprise, from R&D to manufacturing.
What’s the perfect piece of recommendation you’ve ever obtained?
I typically share this with interns: You’re going to have at the least 4 or 5 completely different careers. The stuff that’s occurring proper now gained’t be occurring in 20 years, so don’t stress a lot in regards to the future and making your subsequent transfer — if a function doesn’t match, you may at all times change route. My personal profession journey, from astronomy analysis at Caltech to the oil subject, graduate research, engineering consulting and battery expertise, displays numerous technical shifts and studying curves. Staying versatile and open to new alternatives prevents stagnation.
What is a barrier you confronted, and the way did you overcome it?
There are a number of limitations for ladies. The factor that you just run into most as a lady is that folks don’t count on you to be a chief — and a lot of occasions, ladies themselves don’t count on to be leaders. It’s not till you begin doing it that you just understand, hey, I’m fairly good at this. But wherever you’re 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 particular person within the group, and since that may be a fixed, I assume you will need to learn to cope with it early on. When I went to Caltech, the ratio of girls to males was 7-to-100, and nonetheless, to at the present time, I typically sit in boardrooms the place I am the one lady in a room full of individuals. So you need to foster credibility and power in your self and what you convey to a group whereas not being perceived as weak or susceptible.
What do you assume are some attention-grabbing, neglected profession alternatives in climatetech?
This is a actually nascent business. Specifically on the battery facet, the business is huge. From uncooked materials extraction to processing to end-use product manufacturing, every of those may very well be a big business all on their very own, so if you are interested in mining, chemistry or engineering, yow will discover these jobs all up and down the worth chain. But you may as well discover all of the gross sales, finance and administrative roles that you can think of. And the fact is, these corporations should not going to search out individuals who have 20 years of expertise within the battery business — I’m like the one one who has that a lot expertise — so there’s a big alternative.
