ence and commitment” of ski academy life had
a profound influence on him and his peers, and
he maintains most of his friends from GMVS
“are very successful people — they’ve all thrown
themselves into whatever they’ve decided to do
with reckless abandon.”
After graduating in 1987, Zemach attended the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as both an
undergraduate and graduate student, earning a
PhD in polymer chemistry. “I’m basically a plastics chemist by training,” he says. “But I don’t use
much of that here in the Middle East. I do a lot of
electronic and mechanical engineering work — a
lot of MacGyver-ing with supplies [you might
find in any hardware store]. Mostly, we’re being
asked to solve problems being confronted for the
first time in an atmosphere that doesn’t necessarily afford you much time to deal — so my job is to
Zemach in a Stowe slalom during which he lost
a pole in the starting gate and his goggles on
the fifth gate. “Ski racing trains you for absolute
commitment in the face of adversity,” he says.
imagine the art of what’s possible and find a solution using whatever resources are on hand.”
Zemach says he took many lessons from the
sport of ski racing — some of which include tangible connections to his work in the Middle East.
“I suppose I could give you cliché thoughts about
how the sport helped me learn to work hard,” says
Zemach. “But it’s really more than that. When
you’re in a downhill race and you’re scared out of
your mind because you’ve been getting clocked
at 80 miles per hour in training runs, you know
you’ll be doing turns at insane speeds, you kind
of feel like you’re out of your league, you’re not
sure if you can make it, it’s cold, it’s emotionally
terrifying, and it’s physically terrifying ... Sure, it
takes hard work, but it also takes the ability to
perform under pressure — and when you look at
it compared to what most kids are doing at the
same age, it’s really extreme pressure. Your physical well-being — even your life — are at stake.
You find that to perform well, you have to clear
your mind and be 100 percent dedicated to the
task at hand. It’s ultimate, absolute, unwavering
dedication and commitment in the face of adversity. Obviously, there’s a direct correlation to what
I do in a war zone, but it applies whether you’re
working at a desk in an office or you’re on day six
marching through the hills of Afghanistan.”
Zemach continues that skiing hairy conditions and not being sure if your edges will hold
is similar to his job. “Well, the analogy is perfect,”
he says. “If you’re aggressive, your edges hold; if
you’re timid — maybe you lean in a little bit, or
sit back — you crash. It’s true in life, too. Those
who attack the icy slopes succeed. Those who are
afraid and let that fear get to them tend to fall on
their asses.”
Email bryce@brycehubner.com with Role Model ideas.
Expertise
in Menlo Park, Ca-
lif., and consults engineers and businesses across
wide-ranging industries. Their specialty, according
to Zemach, is “failure analysis and some pre-failure
product development work,” which means they’ve
consulted on and investigated everything from
cracked bridges to the Oklahoma City bombings
and the World Trade Center’s collapse on 9/11.
The U.S. military enlists Exponent’s services be-
cause people like Zemach help save lives — and
money. The following is a compelling anecdote
Zemach shared with Ski Racing:
“In the earlier days of Iraq, as you probably know,
there were lots of roadside bombs. The Explosive
Ordinance Disposal guys — the EOD guys — had
robots they could use to investigate, disarm, and dis-
pose of roadside bombs. Most of those bombs were
hidden under boxes, and because there’s a box every
50 feet on the road, it was impossible to have an
EOD unit investigate every box — there were simply
tons more roadside bombs than EOD units. So you
had untold numbers of people — from military police
to engineers to regular infantry soldiers — out there
patrolling the roads.
“In 80 percent of the missions, they’d drive up next
to a box and the turret gunner would stare down into
it to see if there was a bomb — if it blows up, he’s
dead. In the other 20 percent of these missions, a
soldier would walk up to a box and kick it to see if
there was a bomb underneath. It sounds insane, but
the reason they were doing it was because they absolutely had to get the roads cleared. They were basically looking for these roadside bombs by Braille.
“[The best solution to that insanity was to have a robot investigate] each and every box. But we needed
an additional 1,000 robots, and when each one costs
$120,000; it’s not like you can just make a bunch
appear — that’s a lot of money, an act of Congress
sized-appropriation.
“So we took some off-the-shelf RC cars, mounted
an arm and extendable camera on each, rigged the
electronics to run off a standard military battery and
ended up with something that could do the job for
roadside inspections. It cost us $8,000 per robot
instead of $120,000 per robot, and we were able to
throw it together really quickly.
“Within days of those RC cars hitting the field, I had
emails in my inbox saying: ‘Thank you so much for
the robot: last week I was kicking boxes, this week I
sent my robot down to look at one and it blew up.’ To
say those notes make my job rewarding would be an
understatement.”
Zemach works on a prototype wireless surveillance system in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2005. This project
won an award as one of the 10-best inventions of the year for the U.S. Army.
