By the time she retired from NASA in 2018, Dr. Martha K. Williams had been awarded a Silver Snoopy Award for her significant contribution to the human space flight program. And with 20 patents to her name, she was later inducted into NASA’s Inventors Hall of Fame, one of only five women to earn that accolade.
How did she accomplish all of that and more during her 29-year tenure with the space agency? By partnering with her peers and leading diverse discipline research teams.
Collaborating with colleagues while also competing for project funding is a tricky balance, especially when multiple disciplines are essential to achieving the best outcome. Williams credits that skill as key to her success. Beginning her NASA career as a materials engineer in failure investigations, she brought a multidisciplinary approach to her work, and it started with her own education. She holds three degrees in multiple disciplines – a bachelor’s in chemistry and biology, master’s in chemistry, and Ph.D. in polymer chemistry. Williams also served as the lead polymer scientist and principal investigator, founded the NASA Polymer Science and Technology laboratory at the Kennedy Space Center, and was an inventor at Kennedy until her retirement in 2018.
With patents awarded in hydrogen sensing materials, aerogel composites, cryogenic thermal insulation materials, thermal management systems, and flame-retardant additives, Williams said the colleagues who worked with her taught her a great deal along the way. She earned kudos for her efforts earning the NASA Turning Goals into Reality Award, the NASA Silver Achievement Medal award, and the NASA Commercial Invention of the Year, among others.
Now a senior technology advisor and intellectual property strategist with the hydrogen startup GenH2, Williams is putting her considerable experience to work in the private sector. Featured in Spinoff 2025 publications, GenH2 is benefitting from the intellectual property knowledge and “thought process” Williams developed as a creative and resourceful inventor. She shared some of the things she’s learned along in addition to. “how my brain works.”
What does it take to be an inventor?
A mindset of innovation.
You can be a really great scientist or an engineer, but you’re still not an inventor. Not every inventor is a is an engineer or scientist or physicist. Beyond the technological skill sets, how you think and problem solve are really important to being a successful inventor.
Being in a creative space and a culture of creativity brought that out in me. Growing up the way I did on an island in the Caymans enabled that way of thinking, because we weren't necessarily able to go to the store to buy things. We had to make things or make things out of something, put different things together to make what we needed. You have to think outside the box, but you also have to be able to think inside the box.
Sometimes at NASA you had to think about the solution within specific limitations. The natural atmosphere of problem solving in failure investigations lent itself to innovative approaches especially during the Space Shuttle Program years. A lot of things we invented were combinations of materials, technologies, and systems that met a need or solved a problem. If the components are not new, how you put those components together in a new way nobody else thought of before with unexpected performance can result in a new invention or technology solution.
I believe it’s a thought process that inventors have, but you can also be mentored in it.
Did you have any mentors and how did they help you?
My older siblings were and still are great examples of pursuing excellence and outstanding work. Early childhood teachers and college professors were inspirational and probably a big reason I was able to excel in my studies. My doctoral advisor and the Dean of Sciences at the Florida Institute of Technology was an excellent mentor and an outstanding, world renown polymer chemist. And we continued to collaborate after I finished my doctorate.
My co-inventors and colleagues in a variety of disciplines were also inspirational to me. My colleagues respected me, so we were able to have differences of opinion and debate. We still do that, and that's how we help each other come up with the best technologies or solutions. I get to continue to do that at GenH2 in providing LH2 infrastructure solution products.
It sounds like communication is important, is it?
At NASA especially you had to be able to translate your vision to other people. That's hard do if they don't get your vision. For example, we had to go before the boards and propose an invention to get that message across.
One time I was in front of board, and they said, “Martha, that's really hard to do. How you know you're going to do that?” I said, “Because I have the right people together.” That's true of all new technology – sometimes you might not know the exact path you're going to take to get there, but you know that you have the skill sets and the right people working together to solve that problem.
Communication skills are important to be an inventor. You have to be able to ask toughtful questions and have the ability to defend why you think something should be done a certain way, especially when it's a new idea. That is a big advantage.
Some people can be lone inventors, but in my field it's too cross-disciplined for that. I like that collaboration and being respectful of other disciplines and bringing those together. That’s a big deal.
How did NASA influence your professional development as an inventor?
NASA provided the culture that allowed me to lead very diverse research teams to push innovation, to enable meeting current and future needs. Polymer chemistry reaches across disciplines, and NASA provided the opportunity and framework to partner with different disciplines including cryogenic and mechanical engineers, other fields of chemistry, electrical and aerospace engineers, physicists, chemical engineers, and more.
After 10 years at NASA, a Graduate Fellowship and other opportunities allowed me to follow my dream to research and help develop and facilitate materials/systems solutions. Leading diverse research teams at Kennedy as well as collaborating with other NASA center professionals, academics, and people at other government agencies developed important technologies. I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to work for NASA.
My advice to all future inventors is to take advantage of the opportunities that you're given, even if they're very challenging to navigate. If you don't take advantage of the opportunities when they occur, you can lose chances to be an inventor. Not taking those opportunities will make some accomplishments much harder to achieve.
Talk about one of your inventions and what was important about that discovery.
A hydrogen detection technology developed by a team from NASA, University of Central Florida, and Florida Solar Energy Center was deployed at least twice on the launch pad to detect any possible hydrogen leaks. This technology was an excellent collaboration that went on to be commercialized and won multiple awards, including the R&D 100 Top Technology award in 2014, a NASA Commercial Invention of the Year award in 2016, and Excellence in Technology Transfer Award in 2017. This research and extensive investigation provided technological solutions for possible hydrogen leaks for NASA and beyond.
Any last thoughts?
At NASA you couldn't get technology patented or licensed without having a terrestrial application. That's one of the challenges of being an inventor at NASA. How does it solve a problem in space and also be valuable for Earth? That’s more outside the box thinking. Now at GenH2 we focus on new inventions and innovative technologies by focusing on mass-producing equipment to speed up the infrastructure buildout making hydrogen accessible for everyday use around the globe.
