November 2024 - The STLE Annual Meeting is an Unparalleled Opportunity to Connect, Learn, and Achieve

This month we look back at our Annual Meeting from May of 2024 in Minneapolis.  I took the time to interview some of our attendees on their attendance at the meeting and what about the meeting was important to them.   
Each May STLE offers their annual meeting to gather industry professionals to network, learn, and grow together for several days.  This year we will convene in Atlanta at the Hyatt Regency from May 18-22, 2025.   Over the course of these 4 days we will over 11 full-day education courses, over 150 technical sessions, a keynote speaker, and numerous networking opportunities.  For more information and registration to the Annual Meeting, visit STLE Atlanta Annual Meeting 2025.  
And as always, for more information on STLE, please visit us at https://www.stle.org/.  We have a wealth of materials to help you advance your career through our TLT Magazine, webinars, and in-person conferences.   We look forward to hearing more about how STLE can help you, and to seeing you in Atlanta.  

For more information on STLE, please visit https://www.stle.org/ If you have an idea for our podcast, or interested in being a guest, please Email STLE Director of Professional Development Robert Morowczynski at rmorowczynski@stle.org . Also, we love your feedback, please take a minute to provide us with your thoughts at Perfecting Motion Podcast Feedback.

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:00  
Music.

Unknown Speaker  0:08  
Welcome to perfecting motion, an STLE podcast series that talks with members and industry professionals about current issues and trends impacting the global tribology and lubricants community.

Unknown Speaker  0:22  
Hello. And welcome to our STLE podcast, perfecting motion. I am Bob Morowczynski, STLE's Director of Professional Development, and this month, we want to highlight the benefits of the STLE annual meeting. At our meeting this past spring, I had the privilege of interviewing some of our attendees about why they attended, what being a part of STLE means to them, and what the best part of the meeting was for them individually. This comes from our past meeting in 2024 which took place in Minneapolis, where over 1300 professionals gathered to network, learn and grow together for four days. So what brings you to the st le annual meeting? Well, it's part of my job, but it's also a ton of fun. So what brings you to the st le annual meeting? I think for me, it's as much the networking and seeing people and connections I've made over the years as the technical content. Well, technical content is important. Keeping those friendships going and making sure that you stay connected with the people that you can call or when you need help, is really important.

Unknown Speaker  1:24  
And what does STLE mean to you? It means a lot of activity at the local level as well as at the national level. Making connections through the web offerings and the podcasts really helps keep people connected and engage with each other as well as the organization. What brings you to the STLE annual meeting? I work for a company called Spectro Scientific. We make a line of instrumentation that analyzes oil and grease to monitor asset reliability. And what does STLE mean to you, it is the repository for all things Tribology. It's where I come to learn more about my profession in terms of me being the salesperson, so that I can understand their world more. And I find the technical sessions stellar at this conference. And what do you think is the best part of the STLE annual meeting? Certainly for me, because my territory is in the Midwest and includes Minneapolis, it is a phenomenal opportunity for me to meet a number of my customers that come visit. And all of my customers in this area attend STLE because it's local for them. So what brings you guys to the STLE annual meeting? Well, we had the pleasure of participating in absence with our commercial talks, and so we were one of the guest speakers, and we were able to do a presentation to kind of show the prowess of re refined base oils. But then also get a chance to be here, but there's four of us here, and one of them is actually here to do the entire seminar. He's been here since here since Sunday, and so he's gone through all the conference art of it. He's gone through the trade show trainings and updating his CLS site on the marketing guy. So I would get all the acronyms all messed up, but it's great in the sense that we get to see it from the industrial side and the technical side, which is what I'm far removed from. That's what I use Colin for. He translates everything from tech speak to something that I can say more commercially. What does st le mean to you guys? It's a great organization for learning and lubricants, for contact with customers, additive companies, networking, and a great place for them to pass on some of our technologies and some of our advancements and have that kind of feedback. So it's a great forum for that. And then what has been the best part of the meeting so far for you guys? I think one of the things that you see is the different representation from all the companies. It's done in such a way where you don't feel like there's this it's all about the competition that you see every single day. It's more about bringing people together, because everybody's trying to do all advancing on the technology side, so they're sharing. They're being more open. And as you walk through the different conference associated hotels, you see a lot of people that are in the lobby talking to each other that are normally competitors, but some of those walls are breaking down, and you're just having conversations and trying to figure out, how do you solve some of these problems without, Hey, I can't talk to him because he's a competitor situation. So I've seen a lot of people talking to each other and running into people that we even we compete with, that are having conversations and asking questions that outside of this venue they would probably feel less comfortable doing. So

Unknown Speaker  4:29  
What brings you to the STLE annual meeting,

Unknown Speaker  4:32  
Lots of meetings with suppliers and customers, all the technical papers, as many as I can absolutely sit down and listen to. What does STLE mean to you, education and technical information that you can be used in our line of work of any kind of grease manufacturing for us, yeah. 

Unknown Speaker  4:51  
And what has been the best part of the meeting for you so far?

Unknown Speaker  4:54  
A lot of the networking, obviously the papers and education and the Excel.

Unknown Speaker  5:03  
So what brings you to the STLE annual meeting? I went to sharpen myself of knowledge with machinery lubrication. What has been the best part of the annual meeting for you so far, you know, I really have enjoyed and absorbed a lot of great information in all the technical sessions. I mean, I really can't give one more credit than the other. I've attended the education course with the advanced notification for additives. I brought home more information from that once. Today, I'm attending oil conditioning sessions. Yesterday I attended electrical vehicle sessions. I've attended recessions, and I could say this about 90% very useful information, and it's really good to know how the machinery lubrication industry is advancing, so I can stay current on machinery applications and product formulations, etc. And what does STLE mean to you? St le is an organization that brings camaraderie within lubrication specialists, so we can collaborate with each other and participate in the Houston section and come to annual meetings every few years or so, and it is a great place to, as I mentioned before, stay current on technological advances within lubrication. So what brings you to the st le annual meeting? Yes, sir. So I was part of the student poster competition, and so it was my first experience presenting any sort of research. And so we came here one of my the professors who's helping me, he's come here for the past five or six years, and he brought me along with him this year. What's been the best part of the meeting so far? I think presenting was definitely a good time for me. I would say probably the other presentations from PhD students and other professors and anybody else presenting have been really cool for me to learn from all of them. And what does st le mean to you? Yes, sir, it's my first time, and it's first time in any conference, not just st le. So it's been a great experience to me, and something that I'll definitely be coming back to continue. What brings you to the st le annual meeting. Yeah, so I would say that I'm here mainly because of how the work of other people in the tribology community can inspire us to further our research efforts. What does STLE mean to you? STLE means a place where I can actually see the people that I'm citing in my papers, which is really cool and important, and what's been the best part of the meeting so far for you? I think the networking session, it's always a lot of fun. Yeah, that's a place where I can see, Hey, I saw you last time last year, yeah, and just getting to know other people better. So what is your impression of the FT le meeting? It's big. I've done a lot of running around between rooms because my interests aren't necessarily those that are aligned with the streams. It's been a fantastic opportunity to network for me, it's my first major conference in North America. So there's an awful lot of people that I've met virtually, particularly over the last four years, and now I've had the opportunity to meet them, to say hi, to introduce myself, and have some really good conversations about what's going on in the lubricants industry. 

Unknown Speaker  8:22  
It's really good professional organization as a chemist in the lubricants industry. So I don't really fit as a tribologist or a lubrication engineer. I see it very much as a professional society. So it's on akin with the other ones that are go with my degree as a chemist, and I find it an interesting organization from the perspective of somebody from Great Britain, because we don't have an organization that really combines The education and the commercial and academic and conference activities in the way that STLE does, and what's been the best part of the conference so far? For me, it's always going to be new chemistry presentations about new molecules, exciting things that might come out of them.

Unknown Speaker  9:16  
So what brings you to the STLE annual meeting? I'm here representing the Louis Vuitton Corporation, and I teach classes. I go to technical sessions. I'm on committees, and I see a lot of old friends. What does STLE mean to you? I've been involved with STLE on and off for 32 years. When I was based in England. We started a UK section that folded, and then back in the US, I got involved in Detroit in 2002 and then moved to Cleveland, and I've been going to annual meetings since 2008 I also am a CLS certified individual.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
All, I took the exam in 2008 and I complained about Greece questions, some fundamental geology questions. We had a discussion with the committee, and they invited me to join what's been the best part of the meeting so far for you, the Greece sessions. Yesterday, I saw two or three young researchers, PhD students, give presentations, and they were very good. I was very impressed with the quality. So I'm thinking the future's bright. So what brought you to the st le annual meeting, the papers, the booths and the people? And what does STLE mean to you? Knowledge? So I'm gonna go with and what was the best part of this year's meeting. Always a fun time at the new members booth or the ambassadors group, but yeah, the grease talks were probably my favorite part this year. Yeah. So what brings you to the STLE annual meeting? I always come to these annual meetings. I've been coming here for 17 years now, so I'm always here looking for new products, new technologies. This year I'm looking for rest, preventatives and other products, new methods of testing. That's what brings me here this year. And what does st le mean to you? It's been a good organization to work with. It's helped my career quite a bit. Made me understand more about tribology and lubrication and got me connected with a lot of people in industry, much more than if I was trying to do this on my own. And what was the best part of this year's meeting? The best part is renewing the connections I had. I've noticed a lot of people here. Unfortunately, half of them are saying they're retiring. So it's been a bittersweet meeting for me. I saw Irv Zaretsky was here, who I was happy to see him. I was not expecting to see him. It's good to see some of the the old old timers here. So it was a real interesting meeting to meet a lot of the people that I haven't seen for a long time and for a long, long time, and to meet some new people. What brings you to the STLE annual meeting? So it brings me to the meeting every year is seeing all of my current customers and definitely trying to make new connections and new customers, and hearing about all of the issues in the industry and seeing if we can provide a solution to those issues that are occurring right now.

Unknown Speaker  12:22  
What does STLE mean to you? STLE means to me, building new friendships that will last a lifetime, making new friends with people that you know. This is a nice community where everybody is friends with one another, and you can tell people have been here for 30-40, years, and they just love seeing each other, and I hope I'll be here for the next 20 years. So that's what STLE means to me. And what was the best part of this year's meeting? Well, I really love Minneapolis. This is a great town to have one of these conferences. So the best part was definitely seeing everybody's booth, what their focus is. It seems like this year, it's definitely on sustainability. So I'm curious to see what next year is going to be too. 

Unknown Speaker  13:16  
And what does STLE mean to you? It's the ability to be able to speak and the ability to be able to hear what's going on in industry and kind of catch up with old friends and also make new connections at the same time. And then, what was the best part of the meeting for you? I think just getting to meet all the different people that are part of the same industry that I'm a part of, and be able to get to see what's going on in the new research that's being unreal and beyond throughout the world.

Unknown Speaker  13:44  
I've been coming to the annual meeting for many years. I know a lot of the people here, a lot of business partners, and it's always been a good show for me. 

Unknown Speaker  13:56  
Well, STLE is the most technically astute organization that I go to, there's a sales function, but there's also a lot of things that you learn about, things outside your direct field that you don't really get from any other shows. And what was the best part of this meeting? For you? Well, for me, I'm retiring in two weeks, so the best part is seeing all the people that I've known over the years and having a chance to say goodbye and talk about what's exciting in their lives. What brings you to the st le annual meeting? I was a speaker in a session condition monitoring, having a paper about NMR global analysis,

Unknown Speaker  14:34  
I mean, it's the largest tribology community, so it's the largest conference to my knowledge. And it's always there good to meet people and be like right on pulse to see new developments. And what was the best part of this particular meeting? Oh, probably the luncheon. No, come on, no, I like TV sessions a lot. There's really a lot of stuff going on.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
So I work as a research assistant at a tribology lab. This is my third year coming to a CLE so like every year, the research video brings me here, just as much as the to learn what other groups are doing and what does STLE mean to you from the different conferences I've been to. STLE is like our home conference or main conference, and it's big enough that you get to learn about everything, but it's also like my circle of friends that I share my passions of science and research with. And what was the best part of this conference for you? The talks, for sure, is the talks. I have a blast going to talks, talking to people, asking questions and getting questions back.

Unknown Speaker  15:41  
What a great Recap of last spring, and we appreciate everyone who took the time to talk with me at our membership booth. As you can tell, our annual meeting is a great place to network, learn and grow as a professional in our industry. This year, our annual meeting takes place from May 18- 22nd in Atlanta, Georgia. Our registration for the meeting, education courses, hotel rooms and a new fun run are now open on the STLE website. We are sure that this program is can't miss for this year for anyone in the industry, and we hope to see you in Atlanta. And for those interested in learning more about STLE, please visit our website@www.stle.org, thank you for joining us, and remember keep your gears turning, keep your creativity flowing and keep our world in motion. 

Goodbye. Thank you for joining us on this episode of perfecting motion. Brought to you by the Society of tribologists and lubrication engineers, the premier technical society serving the tribology and lubrication industry. STL E's mission is to advance the science of tribology and the practice of lubrication engineering in order to foster innovation, improve performance of equipment and products, conserve resources and protect the environment. St le supports its members with a variety of technical educational and professional development resources and programs. To learn more about STLE, please visit our website at www.STLE.org .