Anti-icing coatings developed by Seebergh's team were tested on the 2014 Boeing ecoDemonstrator, a 787-8 Dreamliner.
As a Principal Senior Technical Fellow, Jill Seebergh ’89 has reached the highest level of Boeing’s technical workforce. Over her 26-year career at the global aerospace giant, Seebergh has applied her expertise in adhesion and interface science, multifunctional coatings, and nanomaterials to make safer, more efficient aircraft and improve manufacturing processes in support of the company’s wide-ranging sustainability goals. She also provides strategic technical leadership, while placing particular emphasis on mentoring colleagues across the corporate enterprise. “We're in a moment where there are big disruptors driving a lot of exciting technology development in aerospace,” says the chemical engineering alumna, who holds 8 U.S. patents and a PhD and MS from the University of Washington. “I think from the chemical technology perspective, but interdisciplinarity is the name of the game. Approaching big problems requires lots of different skills and people from different backgrounds working together.”
Q: What are some of the applications of your research?
A: Most of my career has been focused on developing new chemical materials and coatings and implementing them on products that Boeing makes across commercial aviation, defense and space, and our global endeavors. I've worked on environmentally preferred surface treatments and coatings—so reducing the amount of solvents used, eliminating some hazardous materials, and focusing on using less water and energy.
Other applications of my research relate to the durability of materials, for example, more durable exterior coating systems for airplanes, like the paint used in the decorative designs. We’ve extended the service life of those materials by two to three times. Now airlines don't have to repaint as often or do as much maintenance.
I’ve also worked on coatings that reduce the buildup of ice on surfaces. It's a passive means of ice protection that saves energy and doesn't add much weight on the aircraft. And then with the pandemic, there has been an increased focus on “healthy travel” by designing aircraft cabins with features like antimicrobial coatings and other technology that keeps passengers safe from communicable diseases.
Q: What is the Boeing Technical Fellowship?
A: The fellowship provides a career pathway for technical experts who have demonstrated innovation and problem-solving, as well as aptitude for leadership, mentoring and teaching, and have a technical vision of the future. When I joined Boeing, I worked alongside and was mentored by fellows and saw them doing projects with universities, serving on industry committees, and going to conferences to give technical presentations. I saw them being engaged outside of Boeing’s walls, while also leading the technology projects and setting a lot of the strategic direction. That inspired me to go the same route. Now, having reached the executive level of the fellowship, I have a lot more responsibility in terms of helping set strategic direction and working with our various functional chief engineers.
Q: What role does mentorship play in your position?
A: I've come to appreciate how vital mentoring is at every stage of education and career. I definitely had mentors at Lehigh—even though we didn’t call them that—who gave me advice and the chance to conduct research and coached me on giving presentations and putting together research reports. In my career, I've mentored everyone from the interns and new employees up through experienced people who are fellows and managers. And I have mentors as well, because even after 26 years, you always need people to bounce ideas off of.
Mentoring is not just giving people advice on going back to school or career-life balance. It includes practical help like reviewing an abstract or a conference presentation, but it's more than just that. You have to actively find opportunities for people. It's not enough to schedule a weekly half-hour meeting to dispense wisdom. Having climbed the ladder, I’m now in a better position to see opportunities for others and take action. I recently nominated one of my mentees to attend an NSF conference. It wasn't even on her horizon. But she got accepted. Doing things like that is so important. A lot of people talk about training the next generation, and that is truly needed. But I'm also interested in helping people find their passion.
Q: How does the growing emphasis on sustainability influence your work?
A: Sustainability has become a big focus everywhere in the last three to five years, but I've been working on it—or what we used to call “environmental health and safety”—for as long as I’ve been at Boeing.
The aviation industry has set the ambitious goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But that’s not just flying airplanes and having zero emissions. It’s a life-cycle approach. That means thinking about sustainability in the design of the aircraft and its parts and technologies. We need sustainable manufacturing operations and maintenance approaches, and then at the end of the life of the aircraft, recycling and reuse, to drive circularity. We don’t want to fill landfills. Materials and related processes are involved in every phase of that lifecycle.
Future aircraft designs will have more lightweight materials, new alloys, and thermoplastic composites. With each new generation of designs, fuel efficiency improves by 15 to 25 percent. The raw materials we use to build airplanes will be made from non-petroleum resources, such as bio-based or green resins. We're also going to see changes in the resins and fibers that are used to make coatings, composites, and sealants.
That's going to be a big transition, not just in the aerospace industry, but in every industry and process connected to the manufacture of airplanes. For example, coatings and sealants that can cure at ambient temperature instead of elevated temperatures, or cure in seconds or minutes instead of hours, so that we're not heating up giant parts in energy-intensive ovens or paint hangers. My team is also working on sustainable aviation fuels, which is the first step toward decarbonizing the aerospace industry, because for large commercial airplanes, the technologies for electrification and hydrogen are not there yet and may take decades.
But sustainability is more than just cutting CO2 emissions. It's reducing energy and water use and the generation of waste. A lot of my work has been directly aimed at reducing hazardous waste by developing new primers and surface treatments that don’t contain, for instance, hexavalent chromium, which is a very good corrosion inhibitor but is also very toxic. We want to reformulate those materials to eliminate some of the hazardous chemicals and implement processes that are friendlier to people. For example, we sand a lot of surfaces to prepare them. People do that work. We're trying to eliminate sanding processes so that the work is more ergonomic and automate processes so that they're safer. All of these things impact the whole sustainable lifecycle.
There's a lot of R&D that goes into solving those problems. It’s an incredible challenge, but also one that the whole world is getting behind.
Q: What advice would you give to engineering students and early-career professionals?
A: Choosing a major seemed like such a big decision, but in practice, the boundaries on what you can do with a given engineering degree are very wide. For instance, some of the work I do could also be done by a materials scientist or a chemist. There’s not a wrong decision if students are struggling between, say, choosing mechanical or civil or electrical engineering, because there's a lot of overlap of what backgrounds you can bring in to do certain jobs.
At the same time, today’s engineers need to be π-shaped, rather than T-shaped. The idea is that a T-shaped engineer has broad, general knowledge, but then deep, specific knowledge; a π-shaped engineer has an additional “leg” that includes skills in data science, machine learning, and so on. It’s not enough to be just a chemical engineer—you need analytical skills and broad knowledge of other disciplines.
My work at Boeing supports chemical technologies, but we don't just have chemical engineers and chemists, there are also material scientists, physicists, applied mathematicians, and mechanical engineers on the same team, and then we work with people that have much broader skills, say in structural engineering or aerospace engineering. We work with our intellectual property team. We work with our supply chain team. You need that diversity of backgrounds and disciplines to find innovative solutions.
-Interview by Katie Kackenmeister
-Photos courtesy of Boeing