Tom Hagerty

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Bridging the artistic & technical has always been a passion of mine, especially by applying CAE tools to uncover elegant design solutions and enable creativity. My career has focused on bringing these tools down to earth for "mere mortals" and helping people blend these with business and sales strategy to solve real world challenges.

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My career kicked off with an opportunity to contribute to the thermal and structural design of the Chandra X-Ray Satellite Observatory. While this experience provided a valuable foundation in extremely precise analysis and organizational engineering efforts, it did not fulfill my curiosity and creativity. Future roles exposed me to various manufacturing & design processes (castings, high precision machined components, sheetmetal) and machine design with a focus on extremely high precision & accuracy, thermal stability & dynamics (vibration management) using FEA, CFD and a variety of CAD tools.

The second chapter in my career shifted toward working with a variety of medical, consumer product & industrial clients, helping them access and apply the above toolsets within their product development efforts. Typical projects would require finding common ground and being the bridge between Industrial Design (human factors, aesthetics, form & feel) and Manufacturing (metrics, quality, ROI & margins, risk mitigation). This mission continues for me at Autodesk, where I help our customers identify & rank goals and develop strategies for efficiently putting Autodesk's tools into play for Additive, Subtractive (CAM/CNC), Generative Design & traditional Simulation and overall design & collaboration. For me the greatest pleasure is helping customers innovate and solve real world problems. The biggest surprise (and pleasure) has been evolving from the technical "guru" to a jack of all trades - I help customers articulate goals, build teams of truly inspiring Autodesk experts and then coach and keep the team on track by fostering teamwork, trust and collaboration.