Unfold your career

Dear Christian, as one of our first and long-term employees, you’ve been through quite the rollercoaster on the SAL journey with us. Can you tell us a little bit about your start at SAL and how you evolved within your Division?

I started as a Scientist with a focus on hardware design for Power Electronics in 2018 – at the “Silicon Austria Errichtungs-GmbH, as we were called back then. And just like that I was the first employee in our Power Electronics team in Villach. We then started to talk to potential partners about a joint Power Electronics project pretty much immediately after I arrived. We wanted a topic that would bring research and the industry together, that would be relevant for the future and that would show great development potential in applications; with the aim of finishing the project with an actual demonstrator which we could use to present our capabilities to other companies. Thus, we chose the topic of on-board charging, and our successful Tiny Power Box was born!

In addition to being project leader of the Tiny Power Box, I also took over the Power Electronics team in Villach, which as of 2021 consisted of three people. Besides research, my new responsibilities as team leader and project manager alone could’ve filled a full-time job, and three exhausting but interesting years followed. Now, in 2023, I got promoted from team leader to Research Unit Head for Packaging and Multiphysics. This way, I am responsible for ten direct employees and approximately twenty people within the framework of the Tiny Power Box. However, not too much has changed for me apart from the new official title since I was already so involved in the tasks before.

To get back to this big first Power Electronics project once more: What is the Tiny Power Box all about? Its development seems to be closely linked to your career at SAL.  

Well, everything started with just two tables and a few laptops! (laughs) It is incredible how far we have come in the past years if you look at where we started: with two offices in Graz and Villach, without a lab or equipment, but with a vision. Now we have a gigantic project with 400 square meters of dedicated lab space and we are getting noticed not only in Austria, but also in Germany, winning important awards. And, of course, we got the finished demonstrator right here – that’s something we can really be proud of!

Without a doubt! Something else: You said you more or less “slipped into” your position as Unit Head. What would you tell interested people that want to actively apply for our other open Unit Head positions?

It’s important to know what tasks lie ahead of you. Depending on how well a team is already established, it can take years before all the organizational details are settled; and in those years your own research takes a back seat. I’d say that our Unit Head positions consist of at least 50 % management and leadership tasks and you are actively involved in lab planning and strategic orientation of the respective Research Unit. It’s a very diverse workload for sure, you just have to be aware of it. After all, SAL is no cut and dried business – or as we say in dialect “no mowed lawn” – and we still have a lot we want to do and achieve, and the effort in our industry-oriented, project-based research is not comparable to that in small research groups at universities.