I started a recent Pallet Profile editorial with the statement that after over 29 years of publishing I have made few if any announcements about which I have such mixed emotions. This lead article provides the details surrounding Dr. Marshall (Mark) White’s recent announcement that he will retire as Director of the Center for Unit Load Design at Virginia Tech.
While I still approach this lead article with both sadness and excitement, the more that I let it sink in the more I am convinced that it should represent a positive step for our industry. I will follow the facts concerning this announcement with things many readers will appreciate about Mark’s professional career, accomplishments, and background.
On January 31, 2007, after 31 years of dedication to the department of wood science at Virginia Tech, the Center for Unit Load Design, and the industry, Mark will retire as Director of the Center for Unit Load Design. Mark’s extensive work with the pallet industry included the development of the Pallet Design System, leadership of the activities of the William H. Sardo, Jr. Pallet and Container Research Laboratory, creator of the Center for Unit Load Design, and development of the undergraduate and graduate packaging science program at Virginia Tech.
As Professor Emeritus, Mark will continue his affiliation with the center and department on a part-time basis through undergraduate instruction, service on graduate and research committees, and in a continued advisory role to the center. Virginia Tech will announce the new center director in the future when the decision has been made.
Mark will start a new company as CEO of White & Co., a Blacksburg based consulting company that will specialize in packaging and pallet design solutions that optimize supply chain performance. Through White & Co., Mark will be able to take on consulting projects outside of the scope of the university, while using the extensive testing and research services of the Center for Unit Load Design. These projects will help to further the research of systems based design, a concept coined by Mark to optimize the performance of the global supply chain. The center will continue its mission of developing technologies to support systems based design.
Mark will continue his interaction with the Center and its Virginia Tech staff. His presence will still have a positive effect on the programs, research, and activities we have appreciated over the years.
Over the last few years I have had numerous opportunities to interact with the lab staff. I am happy to report that their appreciation of Mark is envious. Every reader would appreciate a staff that holds him in such regard. While I believe that in many ways I have a good relationship with my staff, I find the loyalty at Virginia Tech to be unusual. Mark’s personality and temperament have developed an atmosphere that his colleagues truly appreciate. To a great extent it is this chemistry that makes me believe that Mark’s future interaction and influence with Virginia Tech’s pallet and container programs will continue much like it has been for so many years.
Of course the university will hire another faculty member for Mark’s position. In fact it may have the positions and money to hire two new people. If Mark continues to interact as actively as I believe he will, there is a potential that Virginia Tech may have more people to support its pallet programs than it now has. Ralph Rupert and other staff members have taken an active role in the center’s management efforts in recent years, so I believe any transition from a management and decision making perspective will be fairly seamless. The bottom line is that I have many reasons to believe that the future of the Center for Unit Load Design and its value for our industry is very bright. To borrow an old phrase, we may be able to have our cake and eat it too. The pieces are in place for the new expanded Virginia Tech team to have an even greater positive impact for our industry in the future than it has in the past.
My emotions are mixed because I am happy for what Mark has accomplished and the direction he has taken the pallet laboratory and program at Virginia Tech. He indicates that he is starting a new career, not leaving the one he has loved for over 30 years. So, on the one hand we are getting Mark and his talents packaged in a new way through White & Co., and he will continue interacting with his pallet friends and the professional materials handling world in much the same way he always has.
On the other hand, after next January he will no longer be managing the Unit Load Center and its programs. But if he is doing what he loves and does so well, maybe being freed from some administrative duties will be a blessing. He can still work with the pallet industry and lend his energies and intelligence to the wide variety of projects he has shared for many years.
Personally, I look forward to working even more closely with both Mark and the Center for Unit Load Management. At Industrial Reporting, we believe that the future is very bright for Mark, the Center, Industrial Reporting’s efforts, and the pallet and container industry. We wish all parties involved the best and look forward to a bright future.
What Makes Mark the Leader We Know?
Many readers may not know that I taught mathematics and statistics at four universities for 18 years before leaving the university world to devote my career to the pallet and wood products industries. I say this to put a perspective on my next statement.
I have had the opportunity to know and work with many, many Ph.D.s and university faculty. I cannot think of any who impressed me more than Mark. Most university faculty contribute strongly in one or more of the following: teaching, research, consulting, industry or government involvement, leadership, and human resources. In my opinion Mark is strong in all of these ways, a truly unusual mixture of talents. In fact, I can safely say that he has impressed me as much as any university professor with whom I have had the privilege of working.
Why? What has made Mark such a mixture of talents and accomplishments? Was he born a prodigy? Did everybody always expect performance from him? What was his secret? As I looked into it, I was somewhat surprised that Mark led a pretty normal life when he was growing up. He was not a natural born intellect. You might say that he was a late bloomer in a way. In my experience, many people who live an accomplished life often do so by accepting challenges, taking some chances, and exerting their cooperative personalities to interact with others.
When I met Mark, he reminded me of Mark Spitz, the olympic swimmer. Ironically Mark has always had a love of swimming and continues to pursue his love of the water today. He was born on August 9, 1947 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, went to high school in Metuchen, New Jersey and started competitive swimming when he was 10.
Mark said, “I worked for seven summers at Island Beach State Park as a lifeguard on the New Jersey shore. Through high school I had never been farther west than Philadelphia.” The White family is from Norway, Maine, and many of his relatives attended the University of Maine. It may surprise you that the University of Maine wrote him and said that because he had so many relatives who had attended the university, they would admit him, even though his grades were marginal. Mark laughed as he said, “A friend of my father suggested an obscure discipline of wood science and said that a friend of his was aware of a new program at Colorado State University that was ‘desperate for students.’” He was accepted, and the rest is history. Mark was a ‘walk on’for the varsity swimming team and had a reasonably successful three years, earning a partial scholarship by swimming primarily the 200 and 400 individual medleys.
At Colorado State, Mark had five different majors, ranging from wood science and civil engineering to English; he graduated in wood science and forest products. After graduation, Mark was classified 1A and was drafted with a lottery number of 109. During his physical, an x-ray of his sore back showed a congenital spinal anomaly, which brought him a medical deferment. Fortunately it has caused him only minor inconvenience throughout his life.
In 1970, Mark married Joy Sullivan, his girl friend of five years. The couple has two children, Braden and Megan. Ironically, Braden completed his B.S. in wood science last December and has begun his Masters in packaging science at Virginia Tech.
As a young man, Mark worked on the Raritan River Railroad as a “gandy” dancer, replacing railroad ties and salting switches during the winter. Joy taught elementary school, a career she has continued through today in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Mark applied to several graduate schools; Virginia Tech accepted him in wood science. He finished a two year Master of Science degree studying diffusion coefficients through tree bark periderms. Pallets seem pretty mundane by comparison, don’t they? He was accepted in the Virginia Tech MBA program but opted to stay in wood science to get his Ph.D. His research was the relationship between resin penetration depth and the fracture toughness of wood based composites.
Upon graduating, Mark accepted a position at Virginia Tech as an extension specialist in wood science and forest products working with the Virginia hardwood lumber industry. For three years Mark used his people skills while visiting hardwood mills throughout Virginia to understand their needs. He developed and implemented a program to assist small hardwood manufacturers in the state to become more efficient, profitable, and competitive, primarily with the application of technology and personnel training.
When Dr. George Stern retired as director of the William H. Sardo, Jr. Pallet and Container Research Laboratory, the university offered the position to Mark. He expanded the programming from what was primarily state and regional to national and international in scope. During the next decade, he converted a program that was very heavily research to one that coordinates research, outreach, and continuing education.
The first research project Mark managed was the development of the Pallet Design System (PDS™), a computer program that many people believe is the most significant research development in our industry. This project began immediately when he assumed the directorship. As the project leader, he coordinated the efforts of the National Wooden Pallet and Container Association (NWPCA), the US Forest Service Northeastern Forest Experiment Station, and the US Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory.
Mark stated, “Between 1980 and 1984, many talented scientists were involved in the development of this project. The first version was demonstrated to the membership of NWPCA in Boca Raton, Florida in February of 1984. Dr. Thomas McLain and I received a standing ovation at the end of our presentation.” While Mark was only one of the scientists involved, his contribution was a significant one; over the last 20 years, he remained involved in the continued development and evolution of PDS to what it is today, an important pallet design tool and a successful commercial product.
In 1984, Mark offered the first, successful pallet design short course; over the past 20 years he has taught over 500 professionals this subject. Mark said, “I have been told that these educational programs have been the most valuable contribution Virginia Tech has made to the pallet industry.”
It became clear to Mark that the laboratory’s role is to assist those who operate consumer goods and industrial goods supply chains to fit distribution of packaged products to materials handling systems already in place. They noticed time and time again that this was a forced fit. After finding a pallet to fit a need, the result was typically a supply chain with considerable avoidable costs. Mark stated, “Essentially we were designing a system of interacting components, one component at a time, recognizing that the best way to design a system is with a true systems based design methodology. We recognized that the pallet is the interface between the distribution packaging and the handling equipment, and thus the critical component.”
Mark eventually changed Virginia Tech’s research focus at the pallet lab from the pallet itself to studying how pallets interact with the other components of the supply chain, which gave rise to Mark’s ‘Big Idea.’ He hired expertise in packaging structural design and performance and expanded the mission of the pallet and container research lab into what is now called the Center for Unit Load Design. This new, expanded mission includes unit load materials design, handling equipment, packaging, design, and pallet structural design and performance.
The Center for Unit Load Design was established with funding support from the NWPCA and support from the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture and Virginia Tech. This expanded center consists of the Sardo Pallet and Container Lab, the Unit Load Testing Lab, and a packaging laboratory. The program has evolved from one full time technician to four full time research associates as well as undergraduate students.
Mark understood that universities typically produce two products, information and “young professionals” as graduates. Throughout the 1990s, the product of the center was information. With money received from the Scott Francis Endowment, an alumnus who had a successful career in packaging, Mark convinced the department, college, and university to establish a packaging science option within wood science and forest products. The direction of the packaging science program at Virginia Tech is different from that of other packaging science programs because students focus on how packaging influences the operation of the supply chain and how packaging, pallets, and unit load handling equipment interact. The first official class in the packaging science option entered the program this fall. Currently there are six undergraduates in the option and four graduate students, three studying for master of science degrees and one for a Ph.D.
Mark said, “I look back at my professional accomplishments here at Virginia Tech and reflect on the successful development of the PDS, our historically close working relationship with NWPCA and its members, the establishment of the Center for Unit Load Design as an industrial affiliate program operating now with an industry advisor board, and the establishment of a university interdisciplinary supply chain systems development group. This interdisciplinary group includes faculty from mechanical engineering, business information technology, food science, wood science, aerospace and ocean engineering, industrial systems engineering, and the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. Then finally developing the curriculum and working with Dr. Jongko Han in establishing a new packaging science option at Virginia Tech.”
Mark chairs this new interdisciplinary group, which operates under the fundamental premise that through interdisciplinary research and instructional programming, one can develop and implement systems based design principles and technologies with a goal of improving the efficiency of material and product manufacture storage and distribution.
Mark concluded, “The most satisfying aspects of my career at Virginia Tech are the friendships made with those in the lumber, pallet, and packaging business. I expect to make many new friends and expand my established friendships as I change careers.”
I started by asking what has made Mark such a mixture of talent and accomplishments. Maybe readers will agree with me that Mark’s intangible passion and focused determination are at the center of the man who so many of us have respected over the years for his contributions to our industry and his friends. There are many reasons to believe that Mark’s decision to start a second career, related in so many ways to his first, will build on his former accomplishments and bring new and better benefits to the pallet and container community. Good luck Mark. The industry is standing behind you.
A list of Mark’s publications, presentations, and research programs would be too long to include here in its entirety. Suffice it to say that his efforts for our industry in this regard are extremely impressive. Mark was voted as one of the top 10 professionals in the discipline of materials handling in Modern Materials Handling Magazine, an award he definitely deserves. Thanks Mark!
