Class Note 1974

After graduation Larry Rome traveled around Europe before entering graduate school at Harvard and earning a Ph.D. in biology. Following postdoctoral work in the United Kingdom and at Harvard Medical School, Larry started his first position at the University of Tennessee. Before leaving Boston, Larry met his wife, Victoria. Today they have two sons, Henry (Princeton, Cambridge) and Nathaniel (University of Pennsylvania), both of whom live in the Washington, D.C., area and work in international relations. After three years at Tennessee, Larry moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he has worked for more than 30 years. He currently serves as a professor of biology with his scientific work focused on muscle physiology and biomechanics, mostly in fish swimming and calling. He also has a lab at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In 2002 he was talking with the Office of Naval Research because it wanted to build a submersible vehicle that could swim like a fish. One day staffers called and said that Special Forces in Afghanistan were carrying 80-pound backpacks with an additional 20 pounds of batteries, and they wanted to know if there might be a way to get energy from their movement and convert it to electricity. Although Larry wasn’t working on humans or terrestrial locomotion, he did teach the subject. During that phone call, he came up with the idea of getting energy from the movement of a backpack. Over the next few years at the University of Pennsylvania he invented backpack technology that converts movement to electricity, and he formed Lightning Packs LLC to develop it. The principal of operation is suspended-load technology (SLT): Walking causes the backpack load to rise and fall a few inches with each step, and the movement with respect to the carrier is used to turn a generator. The backpack increases power production by more than 1,000-fold compared to normal movement. That power can be used for emergency communication during disasters or normal communication in locations where there is no electric grid. Also, an SLT backpack without a generator reduces the vertical force on the body and stress on joints, making walking, hiking, and running much more comfortable. The load floats at a constant height above the ground and doesn’t have to decelerate and reaccelerate each time the carrier’s foot hits the ground. Larry has branded the packs HoverGlide. He ran a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter in the fall, which continues now on Indiegogo. To learn more about Larry’s innovative backpack product line, go to his website at lightningpacks.com.

Please watch for monthly email updates from our reunion co-chairs Matt Putnam (Ann) and John Haulenbeek (Karen) about our 45th reunion from Thursday, June 13, through Sunday, June 16.

Be safe and send news.

—Rick Sample, Retreat Farm, 1137 Manakin Road, Manakin Sabot, VA 23103; samplejr@msn.com