12/31/2024 6 min read
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Mechanical engineering alum Azeez Mohammed (MSME 1995, PhD ME 1998) has shaped his career from the nonlinear mindset he developed under Donald Biggar Willett Professor Alex Vakakis at Illinois. Named the CEO of Covanta Holding Corporation, now known as Reworld, in 2021, Mohammed’s work today is a far cry from what he might have imagined as a student.
“If you’d asked me twenty years ago whether I’d be here, I’d have said that I have no clue,” Mohammed joked of being the CEO. Still, the company, which partners with businesses and communities to create smarter waste solutions with positive environmental impacts, has seen significant transformation under his leadership, moving from public to private and becoming a profitable business leader in the waste solutions industry.
Mohammed earned his bachelor of technology degree in mechanical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, which would later recognize him with a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2023. During his junior year at the Institute, he took interest in the robotics program at Illinois.
“I really [focused] on going to the U of I,” Mohammed recalled of pursing graduate school. “It was the only university I cared about.” Six months after coming to Illinois, he met Vakakis and became involved in nonlinear dynamics research.
“[Vakakis’s research] had the right dose of physics and math as well as application, which was so important to me,” Mohammed said, noting that Vakakis would make a point to pair theoretical study with lab experiments. “I enjoyed working with him and trusted him. He was not only a great mentor and professor, but also became a great family friend.”
For his dissertation work, Mohammed focused on characterizing rotating machinery (such as gas turbines) using non-linear dynamics, which included introducing defects to a turbine design to improve overall performance.
“By introducing more friction [through strategic defects], you’re actually preserving the integrity of the whole system,” he explained.
Developing a nonlinear perspective would become invaluable to Mohammed’s future work in industry. “[My experience in nonlinear dynamics] was so important because only in theory does a linearized system exist,” he said. “When you go to the real world, nothing is linear. You have to make sure you have the mindset and analytical skills to navigate it.”
During his time in Vakakis’s lab, Mohammed published 10 journal articles and was cited in 25 conference papers—numbers that are almost unheard of for a graduate student. However, it was an entirely different skill that caught the eye of recruiters from General Electric.
“I had a colleague named Edward Emaci who taught me how to fix my car, and he made me put that on my resume,” Mohammed recalled, noting that he had also indicated the rigs he built for lab experiments. “During my interview, [I was asked] more about the work I did on my car than about my thesis.” When he was later given an offer from GE, he asked the panel why they were more interested in his repair work than the content of his publications.
“They told me that they come across a lot of people who can publish papers or who might be smarter than me, but they don’t find many who actually have hands-on skills such as building a rig or fixing a car, and that was more valuable to them,” he said.
He would encounter another surprise when, three months into his new position, his team leader quit.
“I was given a million-dollar project and asked to manage it,” Mohammed recalled. One month into his new responsibility, Mohammed wanted to quit as well. “I [didn’t] have any aspirations to become a manager and it wasn’t what I’d signed up for,” he explained.
However, his new boss had other ideas. “He said to me, ‘You love technology and bringing new things to the world. As a manager, you could do that more and at a bigger scale than as an individual contributor,’” Mohammed said. “I trusted him and quickly found that by managing a group of people, I could implement more ideas through them. That’s when I shifted from working individually to being a team player.”
Mohammed would go on to work for GE for more than 23 years, at one point being responsible for bringing in 10% of GE’s net income.
“I touched many industry verticals and learned quite a bit,” he said of his time at GE. “I started with gas turbines and touched on steam turbines, then moved into renewables like solar, wind and hydro. I lived in seven countries and seven states in the U.S. throughout my career and experienced a lot of diversity.”
Through his journey, he felt a growing need to shift into sustainable technologies. The opportunity to join Reworld was a fitting move toward this goal.
“What we do here at Reworld is ten times cleaner than anything I’ve done in my career, including previous efforts like solar,” Mohammed said, noting that Reworld is one of just a few carbon-negative companies in the U.S. The company is now three years into its five-year plan, which includes efforts to increase involvement at the local scale, grow its customer base and monetize the solutions developed for Fortune 1000 clients.
With an eye on sustainability, students now need not look beyond their own environment to find a problem to solve. “Don’t try to go search for a unicorn—sustainability opportunities abound,” Mohammed advised. “For me, going from gas turbines to solar power was not a big leap because I could reframe the problem and apply the same skillset.”
He credits his experience at Illinois with providing opportunity to build important life skills. “The first time I left my city in India was to go abroad to the U.S.,” he said. “At Illinois, I learned how to interact with multicultural people and maintain my edge while working with the smartest of the smart. I learned the power of teamwork and the importance of communication.”
Indeed, being part of the Illinois community was also a benefit for Sharmila Jamaldeen, who Mohammed married during his time in graduate school. Jamaldeen, who was allowed to audit U of I calculus and computer science courses, credits Illinois with being instrumental in setting her up for a successful career in the software industry.
Mohammed emphasizes that the most memorable aspect of his time at Illinois was the great people with whom he collaborated and from whom he learned: fellow students Shanshin Chen, Sankara Subramanian, Dinesh Balagangadhar, Tariq Nayfeh, Xianghong Ma and Sudhakar Reddy, to name a few; Aerospace Professor Emeritus Lawrence Bergman and MechSE Professor Emeritus Daniel Tortorelli; as well as the students Mohammed taught during graduate school who opened his mind to different impact approaches to life and research.