AWAY WE GO!
Regan Zane,
blessed with a name that sounds straight out of a sci-fi novel, is preparing for a world in which vehicles never have to stop for fuel and will never emit a kilogram of pollution. Nathan Dana, equally blessed with a fourth-grader’s unbounded imagination, is already there. “I think we will have tiny solar panels on our electric vehicles with insanely powerful magnifying abilities that will capture the energy of the sun easily and make it so all [of ] our vehicles have zero carbon emissions,” he wrote for Utah State University’s Edith Bowen Laboratory School teacher, Shannon Rhodes. She challenged her class to write what they think life will be like 100 years hence. Dana continues, “I also think these vehicles will sense tracks under the roads so they will be able to move themselves around and we won’t need drivers.” Zane was duly impressed. “Let’s give him an award and get him involved at an early age,” he says. This from the David G. and Diann L. Sant endowed professor from the College of Engineering who has just over 200 academic papers in the field published and has filed 39 patents in electrified technology. This also from the director of ASPIRE, the newly formed research center funded by the National Science Foundation for electrified transportation. The new center, announced in August, comes with a 10-year NSF commitment of more than 18
UTAHSTATE I FALL 2020
BY JOHN DEVILBISS
$50 million, which adds up to $80 million in total research funding that Zane has helped generate so far since joining the university in 2012. This, too, from the inaugural director of the Sustainable Electrified Transportation Center (SELECT) who has spent the past five years testing vehicles that “sense (electric) tracks under the road,” enabling them to run without ever having to refuel. Good thinking, Master Dana. And good validation for you, Dr. Zane, because this imaginer and his fourthgrade classmates are the very people with the best shot of being around to actually see your innovations—and their dreams—come to pass.
EYE TO THE
FUTURE
And know, too, Edith Bowen fourth-graders, that there are others, many more, on and off the same campus you attend, with an eye to the future of transportation. Smart people such as College of Engineering transportation planning researcher Patrick Singleton, and former electrical engineering graduate students such as Mel Torrie ’97, MS ’98, who has helped to set industry standards for the past 20 years in the use of driverless vehicles in mining, construction, and agriculture. Zane talks about the future of transportation with the same familiarity that architects do their blueprints. We meet up over Zoom, just weeks into the pandemic. His
