Integrated Circuits

Bernie Schmidt ’81 has built a career on bridging technologies

The challenge of making systems function well together is one that Bernie Schmidt has always embraced. As a working Champlain College student in the late ’70s, he realized that working the second and third shifts in the memory lab computer room at the local IBM plant would enable him to integrate that schedule with his studies in the Data Processing and Accounting program. Today -- an entire information technology revolution later -- the project manager for research and development powerhouse Battelle, working at its Stafford, Virginia, location, brings high-tech solutions to bear on a range of cutting-edge systems. Among the projects on Schmidt’s to-do list are Incident Response Information Systems, which allow first-responder emergency managers to share information efficiently via a common alerting protocol, and a non-weather-emergency message alerting system jointly involving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and National Weather Service (NWS) called HazCollect (short for All Hazards Emergency Message Collection System). “It’s been a very fascinating project,” he says of the DHS-NWS collaboration. “It’s been about two years in the making. We’re very close to deployment.”

Schmidt traces his technology career to his upbringing as a “second-generation IBMer.” Originally from Mahopac, New York, he arrived in Vermont in 1976 when his father was transferred to the Essex Junction IBM plant. In ’79, when Schmidt began his Champlain College studies, he worked his first college co-op job at IBM, a firm on the cusp of making computers a part of everyday life.

His career has tracked technology developments ever since. While pursuing a Computer Science bachelor’s degree at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, in the early ’80s, he again worked IBM shifts, this time in Manassas, Virginia, and attended daytime classes. He later left IBM to continue college coop work at the U.S. Army’s Night Vision Laboratory in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. After graduating from George Mason in ’85, he worked full-time at Night Vision, participating in image-processing research related to Automatic Target Recognizers employing infrared and laser radar systems. Four years later, he began a career trajectory that would include some 10 companies -- ranging from information systems to telecommunications to Schmidt’s current position, which draws on multiple technologies to affect business solutions and leverages his management skills. “Because I understand the technology, I can manage it better,” he says. The move from research to project management is in synch with his outlook. “I’ve always liked to see the big picture and liked to be in charge, so for me it was a natural progression,” he says. Schmidt recently added professional certification as a Project Management Professional (PMP) to his career credentials.

Married with two children, Schmidt credits the College with helping him integrate his interests toward a career with tremendous potential for problemsolvers. “Going to school at Champlain got my head straight,” he says, noting that his major -- and the standards set by his instructors -- taught him the most valuable lesson of all: how to learn. “You just can’t walk out of that Accounting program without knowing how to study,” he says. “Champlain instilled in me the confidence to go forward to achieve whatever I needed to achieve.”

—EE