Jeffrey Widder Email & Phone Number

I have a doctorate degree in chemistry and a passion for manufacture, design, development, and prototyping. In graduate school and during my post doctoral fellowship at the Army Research Laboratory (ARL) I design and built most of the spectro-electrochemical and photoacoustic cells used for my research. I also designed and built a prototype variable velocity rifle with the goal of producing a tunable single munition weapon for lethal and non-lethal fires; however, optimal performance at both extremes proved difficult to achieve. At Battelle I have designed and built remotely activated liquid and solid aerosol and gas generators to simulate chemical and biological weapon attacks for testing infrastructure protection strategies developed in the DARPA Immune Buildings program. I have installed and helped maintain discrete environmental monitoring systems used indoors and out doors. I have performed studies on several blunt impact weapons for private companies and the Department of Defense.To overcome technical problems with the variable velocity rifle I started at ARL I reevaluated the problem and concluded that optimal duel lethality performance required separate munitions: A small lightweight non-lethal ballistic attached to a parent lethal arm was a practical solution. Blunt impact weapons suffer from poor accuracy when compared to conventional arms. This is primarily due to large variations in muzzle velocity and poor aerodynamics. To improve consistency of muzzle velocity and stability I developed a captive piston driven projectile that can also be fired at multiple muzzle velocities from a small and lightweight launcher: either mounted to an M4 or used independently. I built and tested the first prototypes in my home shop before receiving IR&D funds from Battelle. A demonstrable weapon and munition with point accuracy demonstrated to greater than 100 meters, three issued patents, and a pending CPT have resulted from the IR&D effort.

Listed skills include Chemistry, Spectroscopy, R&D, Technical Writing, and 9 others.