Daniel Hoy earned his B.S. in Physics from Ohio University and his M.S. in Physics from the Ohio State University. He officially joined the Lake Shore team as a Manufacturing Engineer two and a half years ago, but his experience with Lake Shore dates back to his graduate career.
Q: How were you first introduced to Lake Shore, and what drew you to the company?
A: During my research at the Ohio State University, I used a Lake Shore Hall measurement system and a Lake Shore temperature controller. I enjoyed working with the equipment and recognized the quality of the data that I could collect using Lake Shore products. At the same time, I had interesting conversations with Lake Shore employees that I met through the university’s shared laboratory space. When I started looking for a job, I had a very positive impression of Lake Shore and found a place where I could add value to the scientific and industrial communities. It was a natural fit for me.
Q: What are your primary responsibilities at Lake Shore?
A: I am responsible for the manufacture of our magnetic products including magnetic sensors, probes, and Helmholtz coils. This requires me to tackle every type of challenge relating to the manufacturing process and to address a wide range of issues. Some of the work I do includes providing our assemblers with the best possible tools and approaches to sensor assembly, verifying the quality of our sensors, designing and developing a manufacturing procedure for custom sensors and probes, providing business information about magnetics to management, considering ways of improving our product offerings, and lowering production costs.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: I enjoy working with employees with a wide range of backgrounds and responsibilities. Everyone brings their own perspective and contributions towards the goal of providing value to our customers, and I love seeing the same problems through so many different lenses.
Q: What projects or initiatives are you currently working on at Lake Shore?
A: I am working on continuously improving our magnetic product lines. There are many opportunities small and large to make better sensors and to lower the costs of those sensors. Some examples include reducing the variety of parts required to make our products, making our work instructions easier to read, and improving the tools available for sensor assembly.
Q: What achievements are you most proud of so far during your time at Lake Shore?
A: We recently changed which probes we make before they are purchased, and which probes are made to customer specification after they are ordered. This allows us to deliver our most popular probes more quickly and offer more options for customizing our probes without increasing costs.
Q: What developments do you expect to see in your field in the near future, and how do you think these will affect Lake Shore?
A: I expect that the size of magnetic sensors and the size of the magnets that researchers want to measure will continue to decrease. This challenges Lake Shore to deliver measurement solutions with increasing sensitivity and ever-shrinking size. I also expect that all types of measurement equipment deliver data through the internet or the internet of things to facilitate the collection and analysis of measurement data. This provides an opportunity to make collecting and understanding data even easier.