Meet Alexander Laws, Ph.D., Senior Process and Tooling Design Engineer at Crown Electrokinetics
Growing up in Evergreen, Colorado, Alex Laws developed a passion for the environment – and a knack for inventing – from a very early age. Using tools and leftover materials from his dad’s general contracting business, Alex would build ziplines, forts, catapults and just about anything else he could imagine in his spare time. His passion for invention eventually took him to the University of Colorado, where he studied mechanical engineering and earned his Ph.D. Alex would later spend 10 years working as a mechanical design engineer and research and development engineer for Hewlett Packard in Vancouver, Washington. At HP, Alex specialized in robotics and printing technologies. As much as he loved this work, over time, Alex felt a growing need to align his professional career with his personal passion for climate change and sustainability issues, which brought him to Crown Electrokinetics in late 2020.
When did you decide you wanted to be an engineer?
I don’t feel like I decided – it’s just who I always was. Lots of kids build and invent stuff with blocks and Legos and I just never stopped. I think I learned what an engineer was in junior high school when I spent a day with a mining engineer as part of a school project. I remember his advice clearly – “Don’t become an engineer” – but it was too late. Before I even knew what an engineer was, I was inventing and building things. I still invent and build stuff as a hobby even though it’s also what I do for work.
During the 10 years you spent at Hewlett Packard, what kind of work did you do?
At HP I designed robotics – well, printers actually. People take printers for granted, but what other high-precision, high-reliability robot do they have in their house or office? For the first 6 years I designed paper handling systems, or what we call the paper path. Paper paths I helped design 5 to 10 years ago can still be found in many HP home printers found in the stores today. It’s fun to walk into a Costco and see stuff I designed sitting there for sale, knowing that those designs are all over the world, and knowing that those printers enable a lot of people to do their learning, work and art.
Probably the biggest thing I learned at HP was how products are made on a grand scale – how to take something invented in the R&D lab and turn it into a product, how to make millions and millions of those products, and how to put them in a Costco or some other place where they are available to everyone.
The decade I spent at HP also explains why I’m at Crown, in a way. When I was looking into Crown, I knew the team here had a bunch of people who used to work at HP. So I knew the culture would be a good fit for me.
What kind of work are you doing now at Crown?
At Crown it’s my job to build the tools and processes to bring the electrokinetic films we’ve created in the R&D lab to mass production. This job is right up my alley, inventing processes and inventing and building the tools we need to make this film on a large scale. A film that is unlike anything else in the world, with so much potential to make the windows in office buildings – and many other kinds of glass – smarter, less energy intensive, more sustainable and better for the climate.
What does sustainability mean to you?
To me, being sustainable means doing what we must to protect the things that are important to us. Quite literally, we have to sustain what matters to us – as individuals, as families and as a society – or we will lose what matters to us. I think climate change is the ultimate sustainability challenge because our civilization depends on a stable climate, and the combination of inefficient energy use and over-reliance on fossil fuels is making the climate unstable.
How do you feel about climate change, and how does it factor into your daily life?
Climate change makes me angry, to be honest. When I was 8 years old, the renowned NASA climate scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about the dangerous impact of our energy system. More than three decades later, I have kids of my own, and climate change is an even bigger threat than it was when I was growing up.
That makes me angry, yes, but it also motivates me. It’s my generation that must act on climate change, as consumers and as citizens. I’m lucky that I also get to contribute as an inventor and an engineer, too. I hope that’s my biggest impact, even as my family takes other actions like fully electrifying our home, installing solar panels, driving an electric car and replacing our old furnace with a ground source heat pump. Technology may have gotten us into this mess, but technology is also the solution.
What do you consider to be one of your biggest professional assets?
Persistence. I love taking on big, meaty problems – especially when there are people who say those problems are too hard to solve. I dive in and just keep working the problem until there’s a solution.
What made you decide to join Crown?
Climate change and other sustainability challenges have always been important to me personally. I loved working at HP, but probably about five years ago I had a realization: If I’m not working on climate change, I’m probably not working on the right thing. Initially after HP, I was working at another sustainability start-up, but then I learned about Crown and decided working here would be my best opportunity to impact climate change.
For me, the key advantage for Crown is that we will be able to retrofit existing buildings with smart window technologies that reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions. To cut emissions and accelerate the energy transition, the lowest hanging fruit is to improve our existing systems. As an engineer, that really appeals to me.