The Road to InnovatION Like many in the industry, Cameron
Wood’s career path was not necessarily a direct one. After obtaining his under- graduate degree in chemical engineering from Lehigh University in 2022, he said he realized working full time as a chemical engineer was not what he wanted. Instead, he took a job out of college with Lock- heed Martin as a systems engineer. “In that role, I worked on algorithm de- sign and performance optimization within the radar control processor team, basical- ly the brain or the decision maker of the radar,” he said. Wood added that his role focused on
space domain awareness, detecting and tracking satellites in orbit, and writing analysis scripts to organize failures and identify areas for improvement. That work eventually led him to become the product owner for the radar. He handled the hand- off of design changes from the systems engineering team to software, then to integration and test teams, and ultimately presented the final space domain aware- ness design to the government customer. He worked with Lockheed Martin for a
little over two years and began his online master’s degree in electrical engineering through the University of Colorado at the end of 2023. His studies have focused on topics ranging from machine learning to electric vehicles. Then, in late summer 2024, a friend sent him a job posting at STA. “For many rea- sons it felt like the right move, and it really has been,” Wood said. The now 26-year-old said as digital
natives, the younger generation is in a position to help drive meaningful change in the industry. “They tend to take a data-driven approach and readily adopt emerging technologies to improve daily operations and enhance safety,” he said. “We’re already seeing more young pro- fessionals step forward as entrepreneurs, launching companies that are redefining what’s possible in student transportation.”
66 School Transportation News • JULY 2026
Cameron’s method of programming the chargers is a proactive
improvement that was not found native in any of the individual systems that we use. He developed this with his own initiative and
skill set. - Rachel Lane, STA
Before developing the current program, Wood created
a calculator in December 2024 that allowed employees to input details such as which vehicles were plugged in, when charging started and when it needed to end. The calculator would then produce the recommended values. “Most charge management systems give users the ability to
manually set custom SOC limits,” he said. “As you can imag- ine, this system does not scale as more vehicles electrify and more chargers come online.” Wood’s program, which he launched a year later, incor-
porates real-time data from vehicles, chargers and the local environment, then compares it with historical data from those same sources to calculate each vehicle’s required state of charge. STA applied for the patent in May. Wood said machine learning improves the accuracy and
usefulness of the recommendations because the model can learn from past data points. As more data is collected, the system becomes better at identifying patterns and providing more precise recommendations, including patterns that may not be immediately obvious to a person. The program runs automatically throughout the day to
actively manage sequential charging sessions with minimal human intervention. “If you were to total up the amount of manual calcula- tion time for all our chargers, it could have potentially taken
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