Chuck Pell
Chuck Pell
CEO, Maelstrom Propellers, Inc.; CSO, 3SILK; CSO, Physcient; TV Host of the Emmy-Award-winning Earth2050
Chuck Pell is an engineer, inventor, scientist, & Emmy-award-winning TV host with extensive experience in surgical robotics, biomechanics & functional morphology, fluid dynamics, miniature robotics, and autonomous underwater vehicles. He is an Ecopreneur on his fourth startup solving the world’s problems one brilliant idea at a time. He co-founded Physcient with the current Maelstrom team, who designed innovative surgical instruments: hand-held robotic smart tools that sense — and respond — to their environment, which includes the patient and their tissues, improving patient outcomes by anticipating and preventing tissue trauma through intelligent application of modern biomechanics.
Chuck was Co-Founder and Director of Science & Technology at Nekton Research. At Nekton, the team developed MicroHunter, the world’s smallest autonomous underwater robot and other record-breaking ocean robotic systems. The company was acquired by iRobot. Nekton spawned a spin-out— Parata Systems— that remains the gold standard in pharmacy automation. Before Nekton, Chuck co-founded and served as Director of the Duke University Zoology BioDesign Studio. Prior to Duke, he was the Director of R&D at Dinamation, a firm that built full-size robotic dinosaurs. Fascinated by shape, pattern and flow, Chuck also builds boomerangs, paleolithic tools, catapults, and kayaks, and gives talks around the world, from TEDMED to TV.
He serves on Boards, is an avid volunteer at several institutions including the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science, occasionally sleeps, and travels to give talks (examples include: --The Benefits of Blending Art & Science; --Never Launch A Rocket In Your Room; -- and How To Fail Early & Often, When It’s Cheap). Pell holds an MFA in Sculpture and Painting from the University of Notre Dame and a BFA in Sculpture and Video from Western Michigan University.
What are they Thinking?
Lessons from Design in Hostile EnvironmentsExcellent interface designs can fail when users are immersed in chaotic or destructive environments. How do you deploy and exploit limited resources while still accounting for wildly changing user expectations or even actively hostile intent? We'll discuss examples from surgical robotics, autonomous underwater vehicles, archeology, transportation, and more.