... with nanotechnology.
Anthony Laviano credits an apple for sending his career in a new - more compact - direction.It was the late 1990s, and Laviano was serving as project manager for a team developing radar power supplies at Raytheon Co. in El Segundo.
His team was charged with making a paper-thin power supply out of aluminum foil. But Laviano's engineers were running up against the limits of shrinking such a component.
One day while taking a break to eat the lunch his wife had packed for him, Laviano took out an apple and bit into it.
That's when he had an epiphany.
"My wife had wrapped it in Saran Wrap," Laviano said in a recent interview. "I realized it's not what you see, but what you can't."
Laviano approached his boss with news of the epiphany.
"He looked at me like I was crazy," Laviano recalled.
But his boss allowed him to pursue his hunch. That led Laviano to research a then-little known field of applied science known a nanotechnology.
Today, Laviano serves as executive director of the Nanotechnology Center at Loyola Marymount University.
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