By ASHLEY CHASE, JENNIFER WALKER
Vandegrift Voice

Martin Wiedenmeier, who teaches Introduction to engineering design/aerospace engineering at Vandegrift, holds one patent, has another pending and has sought four other patents in his career.

He worked as an engineer for many years before he started teaching.

“I spent five years working for IBM in the semiconductor path, as a process development engineer, and then 10 years as a biomedical engineer,” Wiedenmeier said. “I liked the 10 years as a biomedical engineer because I was in research and it was something new and different every day; you never really knew what you were going to get into.”

Wiedenmeier spent his 10 years as a biomedical engineer working on making medical heart valves with a company in Austin before he decided to get into teaching.

“We got bought out,” Wiedenmeier said. “I basically didn’t want to move out of Austin. I got some job offers on the East Coast and in the Midwest but didn’t want to take any of those, so I decided to get into teaching.”

He was once the one sitting behind a desk instead of lecturing in the front of the classroom. Even back in high school, he had an idea of what his future would look like.

“Actually, I knew I was going to be an engineer,” Wiedenmeier said. “I was rebuilding cars and taking things apart, so that was pretty much my high school experience.”

Wiedenmeier got his undergraduate degree from Rice University and his graduate from University of California, Berkeley.

Throughout his career, Wiedenmeier has used his knowledge to develop innovative ideas in the area of engineering. He has tried to patent six ideas so far.

“Basically if you come up with something novel that has never been done before, you can go for a patent,” Wiedenmeier said. “I’ve done six of them, and on four of those we found what’s called prior art. Lawyers do big searches and the idea has either been published somewhere, or there might have been an international patent in another country.”

Currently Wiedenmeier has one patent still being reviewed and has received a patent for an idea he had during his time as a biomedical engineer.

“It’s a spherical shoot test on heart valve leaflets,” Wiedenmeier said. “They’re ceramic, so you have to make sure there’s no cracks in them otherwise they could break inside a human body. We had an old way of testing them but it was very time consuming so I got together with a couple other guys and we looked at the problem and the solution seemed pretty obvious. We came up with a new test.”

As a teacher for the past decade, Wiedenmeier has helped with robotics for the past four years, but this year changed his focus to CyberPatriots, which involves figuring out network connections, what’s wrong with network connections, finding out if people are trying to hack into a system, and finding viruses on a system.

“It’s a competition,” Wiedenmeier said. “It’s department of defense. It’s cyber security.”

All five of the teams he helps with made it to the state round at competition and one team moved on.

Wiedenmeier has been one of the main engineering teachers at VHS.

Taylor McDonnell, a recent VHS graduate, said that Wiedenmeier made a huge impact on him as a student.

“His lectures and teaching always reflected the fact that he is one of the smartest teachers in the school,” McDonnell said. “Mr. Wiedenmeier has shown me how an educated and fun teacher can turn a class into an enjoyable and significant learning experience.”

On top of his full time teaching job and his commitment to CyberPatriots, Wiedenmeier is still pursuing his own projects outside of the classroom.

“I’m always working on stuff,” Wiedenmeier said. “I build boats as a hobby and furniture. I have a full workshop at home so I’m always building something.”

Though Wiedenmeier is still happy where he is, he is already thinking about his future when he eventually moves on from teaching.

“I’m getting close to retirement, so I figure I’m going to do this for a little while longer,” Wiedenmeier said. “When I retire I think I’m going to do furniture building full time and see what I can sell.”