
At ThermoAnalytics, Keith Johnson helped turn university research into software for cars and military vehicles. Building the company required a second kind of engineering: customers, colleagues and a future in Calumet.

Before a battery overheats, a cabin chills its passenger or a vehicle reveals itself in infrared, engineers can model the outcome. Tom Hogan's job is to make that invisible foresight legible to the people who buy it.
The employee-owned Michigan firm turned contract engineering for Ford and the U.S. Army into software that predicts hot batteries, uncomfortable humans and visible military hardware - while those problems are still cheap enough to fix.