"I am doing art still," he said about his work with AFRL on turbine engines. If you had to tell someone how you got into your career field in fewer than 10 words, could you do it? Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor can. "I played basketball and math was easy for me," he says. Then he repeated the same words one more time as if to reiterate that yep, that was it. That was the whole origin story. Dr. Scott-Emuakpor is 6'7" and played forward for Wright State University in the late 1990s until an injury ended his basketball career. He declared mechanical engineering as a major, graduated, got a masters and a Ph.D. in the same subject from Ohio State University, led the experimental side of turbine engine structural integrity research at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) for nearly 13 years, and today he’s running his own aerospace and defense business, Hyphen Innovations. He's a taller-than-average guy who played college basketball, works on jet engines, and has had career success that could conservatively be described as a rocket ride. The puns practically write themselves. But as those nine words in quotes above suggest, Dr. Scott-Emuakpor's story isn't one of a young kid who grew up knowing they were going to be an engineer. "A lot of the students I mentor that are interns, they've known they wanted to be an engineer since they were in eighth grade," he says. "I didn't even know what an engineer did until I was 18." Dr. Scott-Emuakpor credits at least some of his success to this relative unfamiliarity he had with the field. "I think the fact that I didn't grow up wanting to be an engineer or know what an engineer did made it so that when I was older, I looked at technology from a kid's perspective," he says. "A lot of people who know all that stuff as kids, when they become adults they aren't as curious. I was still a kid despite the fact that I was in my late 20s. I always said 'Yes, I want to know how this works.'" Today, the "this" for Dr. Scott-Emuakpor has been the humble turbine engine, and all the different enhancements that can be made to how they're manufactured that can result in fewer failures. "There is so much opportunity with turbine engines to implement advanced manufacturing technology and it’s not being explored," he says. "I got into the AFRL Entrepreneur Opportunity Program (EOP) with the goal of using new designs and advanced manufacturing to make lighter, more durable and more affordable turbine engine components,” he adds, noting that he used his time in the EOP as a springboard to continue his work by launching Hyphen Innovations. Founding a company that focuses on using advanced manufacturing techniques to improve turbine engines might not sound like an obvious career path for someone who, when he was being courted to play basketball by dozens of different colleges, said his major would be fine art. "My dad told me fine art is a hobby, not a major," he says. "When he told me that, part of me was like 'Dad just killed any chance of me creating art again,' but once I got into research I started realizing that even though I'm not drawing or painting, and I'm not writing these creative make-believe worlds, I am doing art still." Dr. Scott-Emuakpor’s success is proof that there’s value to mixing art and science, a distinction he views as a false dichotomy. "Just because somebody gave you a perspective on what art is, that doesn't mean you can't find it somewhere else in a topic that might not align with what you've been told," he says. "Take creative writing — I get to do that all the time. Just because I'm an engineer doesn't mean I'm incapable of applying the English language. For journals, you're telling a story that's never been told before. That’s just one example, but I've created a lot of things people haven't created before, like an artist.""Look at everything with a wide eye and try to understand the intricacies, because you never know how much art you can find in different fields," he says.
Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor shares how basketball, art, and math led to a career as a propulsion scientist.