Meet the Team: Josh McConkey
Explore the professional and personal sides of Sensatek’s Chief Technology Officer
With extensive experience in propulsion technology, the driven team behind Sensatek’s extremely accurate RF temperature sensors is essential to our mission of helping OEMs improve reliability, increase performance, and reduce costs.
Join us to learn more about one of our team members: Josh McConkey, Chief Technology Officer at Sensatek.
Foundation for Innovation
With a deep wealth of industry knowledge, Josh McConkey is the innovative CTO at Sensatek. Josh and the team have worked to bring our technology to fruition to solve some of the world’s most sticky problems in harsh environment sensing.
After earning his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Central Florida, Josh began his professional career with Sawtek, designing surface acoustic wave devices for cell phones. “Those were fun because they included a lot of cross-disciplinary engineering knowledge about signal processing, acoustic waves, electrical impedance matching, and other subjects like that. It was a very good first job to have that let me do a lot of design and work with fabrication,” shares Josh of his first job.
After Sawtek, Josh worked for United Space Alliance—the prime contractor for NASA’s Space Shuttle program. For seven years, he joyously dedicated his career to being the Lead Instrumentation Engineer for the Space Shuttle Discovery, working in the control room, hangar, and launch pad to help prepare for launch. His main responsibility was climbing all over and within the shuttle orbiter to assess the thousands of sensors placed inside and out to ensure they worked before launch.
Over the years, Josh realized that he had certain knowledge gaps from different fields that were important to being most effective in his career, so he returned to UCF to take Master’s level classes in optics and material science. “I supplemented my education with classes that were very germane to what I needed to know. While I didn’t go back to get a Master’s or Doctoral degree in those fields, those classes unlocked my ability to understand, ask the right questions, and find ways to better my career,” Josh explains.
Before joining Sensatek, Josh conducted instrumentation research for Siemens where he helped develop new ways to measure inside gas turbines. At Siemens, Josh was granted seven patents and generated another twenty patents pending in wireless instrumentation, material science, turbine mass flow, 3D printing, and more.
Josh standing on the wing of the Space Shuttle Orbiter Discovery.
A New Opportunity
While working at Siemens, Josh learned about Sensatek when he was interviewed by Reamonn, Sensatek’s CEO, about his thoughts and opinions on sensing technology as a high-level industry professional.
After continued conversations with Reamonn, Josh realized it was time for him to amicably part ways with Siemens and join the innovative team at Sensatek. “At the time, I had been working on wireless temperature monitoring, and we had our own solutions, but they were not ones that worked as easily and well as what Reamonn’s technology promised. I saw it as one of the biggest leaps in instrumentation in the last twenty years, and I knew I had to be a part of it,” Josh said of his decision to join Sensatek.
Leading the Way with Sensatek
As the CTO, Josh is responsible for developing the chief strategic vision for Sensatek which comes down to ensuring the team meets and anticipates all their customers’ requirements. With his experience on the other side of the table for the past decade, Josh is often able to instinctively know what information their customers will need before they ask.
Josh also works with the team to analyze the changes that need to be made to their technologies to make them as user-friendly as possible. He coordinates working with the engineers to ensure they have a clear set of requirements for a project, and spends ample time communicating with potential clients and introducing them to Sensatek’s groundbreaking technology.
“A lot of engineers are more conservative thinkers—they want to go with something that’s been proven to work—so a large part of my job is helping our customers feel comfortable with our new technology by showing them that we’ve already laid all of the groundwork with our duration and bonding tests, so they can have a higher confidence in utilizing it,” Josh explains.
Josh enjoys the perks of working in Daytona Beach, FL at the Sensatek headquarters.
Passion for the Job
Josh holds a true appreciation for the constant innovation he’s surrounded by at Sensatek. “We have a stable product to deliver to our customers, but we’re pushing forward and adding new capabilities, and we discover something new, almost weekly,” Josh excitedly shares. “It’s like the creation of this technology is a latchkey discovery, and it opens the door to a whole trove of different opportunities that were not really possible or even conceived before,” he adds.
“I know how components fail materially and over temperature, and thanks to my work on the space shuttle and all the troubleshooting that was done, I know how instrumentation systems fail as well. By knowing how things fail, it helps me know how to encourage designs that will not fail and know what needs to be measured to detect those failures early,” Josh explains. “I was trained as an electrical engineer and all of the research that I’ve done, and classes I took, allowed me to gain a deep understanding of material science which has prepared me for knowing what and how to measure as well as understanding what we can build for the sensors,” he adds.
Career Accomplishments
As for his greatest career accomplishments thus far, Josh is proud to have prepared and launched six Space Shuttles, and by doing that helped construct the International Space Station. “I can see the International Space Station going by every few nights here in Florida, so that’s fun to point out to my kids,” says Josh.
Additionally, at Siemens, Josh is proud to have accomplished his career goal of generating patents as well as helping create the world’s first fully autonomous inspection drone.
Josh’s most rewarding career accomplishment is being a part of the team that brought Sensatek’s new technology into the world to give OEMs data that helps them troubleshoot problems they really care about. “When we describe our technology to people, and we can see the Christmas morning excitement on their faces, it’s very, very rewarding,” Josh says.
Advice for Industry Professionals
When it comes to advising those interested in the industry, Josh stresses the importance of stoking your curiosity.
“The best engineers, designers, and technical people I know are the ones that are incredibly curious and learn a wide range of things, but deeply. It feeds a constant barrage of data into your brain, and it’s like never growing up—having a playful mindset is useful,” advises Josh.
Beyond Sensatek
In his free time, Josh practices his own advice and stokes his curiosity by learning about new subjects such as microbiology, astrophysics, cosmology, and the deeper aspects of the math behind the geodetics of Einstein’s equations. “Those subjects are just absolutely fascinating to me. There’s probably not a lot of application space for that knowledge but understanding the warp and the weft of the fabric of the universe is endlessly fascinating to me. I like applying all of this as a knowledge to different philosophical formulations and bouncing them around and thinking about that kind of stuff,” Josh explains of his love of learning and curious nature.
Tapping into his more playful artistic side, Josh likes to do accents. He can do about twenty different American accents and another twenty from around the world which he usually showcases by volunteering to do comedy skits for children.
Originally from Fort Pierce, Florida, Josh now resides in Orlando with his wife and four children—two boys and two girls, ranging in age from seven to sixteen.
When asked about a fact that most people are surprised to learn about Josh, he shares that he got arrested in a foreign country for singing when he was a teenager. Upon asking which country and why, Josh jokingly responded “That’s all I’m going to say. Let the mystery consume you.”
“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”
– Paul of Tarsus
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