Generation on the Rise – Nathan Barkley

Mechanical Engineering Magazine put out it’s 2024 Watch List of the 25 early-career engineers that have made their mark on industry and society. To view the entire list: https://magazine.asme.org/issues/watch-list-2024/introduction

EARNING A MASTER’S DEGREE in mechanical engineering is an accomplishment on its own, but even more so when simultaneously working a full-time job and battling a rare medical condition. Nathan Barkley miraculously pushed through his final year of engineering school and the start of his professional career while on dialysis.

“I was hit with end stage renal failure at 22 years old due to a rare medical condition called Alport Syndrome,” Barkley said.

At first, he completed his homework in clinics while connected to dialysis machines, but afterwards was able to get at-home treatments every night.

“Many of those days ran together and I battled low energy, particularly during the cold winter months,” Barkley said. His mindset for overcoming it was to treat those days as an investment period. “You just keep putting the daily work in and when you look up in a few years, you have tangible returns,” he said.

After a successful a kidney transplant, it’s been full steam ahead for Barkley. His first full-time job out of college was with a heavy equipment manufacturer—a role that was not focused on engineering in a traditional sense. “It was more of a CAD designer role,” Barkley said. “I modeled heavy wall reactor components to determine how to bevel the connections to allow welding the components together at complex angles.” The job experience proved invaluable later in his career: He learned how pressure vessels were actually made through direct interactions with personnel in the fabrication shop.

Now leading the pressure vessel team at Becht, Barkley is working on a project to evaluate and recertify pressure vessels and heat exchangers built in the 1970s for new design conditions. “The concept is to use soybean oil instead of crude oil feedstock to make the diesel,” Barkley said. Whether the future of energy production is primary fueled by hydrocarbons, nuclear, hydrogen, biofuels, wind/solar, or some other technology, Barkley believes that pressure equipment engineering is needed to redesign aging equipment.

His advice to new engineers is to “get out of your desk space and go into the field,” explaining that people doing the hands-on work can share what’s really going on in your field, and will speak both encouragement and truth to you.

“Secondly, find a mentor in your area of engineering who can speak both encouragement and truth to you,” Barkley added. He believes that you can learn so much from those that came before you, and they can usually see things in you that you cannot yet—both the good and the bad.