Alaska Innovators Hall of Fame 2022 Inductees: The brilliant minds behind a brighter future.

• Author: Erickson, Nancy
• Position: SCIENCE

Innovation comes when and where it's least expected; if it were obvious, it wouldn't be new.

Honoring innovation in Alaska is itself relatively new, with the Alaska State Committee on Research starting its Innovators Hall of Fame as recently as 2014. The stated mission is "to celebrate and honor outstanding individuals who put Alaska on the map as leaders in innovation and to contribute to Alaska's growing culture of innovation."

Past honorees include the ancient creators of the Tlingit fishhook and Alutiiq angyaq skin boat; discoveries in ecology, aurora physics, and hibernation medicine; engineers of bridges and oil field facilities; promoters of the Gold Rush, television, alternative energy sources, peony horticulture, and innovation itself; and a vast array of inventors, often of measuring devices but also consumer products such as pack rafts, fat bikes, and fish oil tablets.

The class of 2022 inducted at a ceremony in Juneau in March is relatively small, with just three individuals, yet they represent the diversity of innovation: new computer software, new ways to communicate, and new ways to heal a wounded spirit.

Professor Robert Merritt

"I never heard anybody say less than... that he was a genius," says Bruce Merritt of his father, posthumous Hall of Fame inductee Robert P. Merritt. "His hands-on mechanical ability to shape things and fix things and even invent things was beyond the scope of most of us."

Robert Merritt was born in 1924, an only child of a miner and a schoolteacher. He earned his engineering degree from Oregon State University and joined the military during World War II. While in the service, he found himself working on communications almost before he knew it, his son says.

In his nomination letter. 2015 Hall of Famer Alex Hills writes that Merritt became an expert in two fields of electrical engineering; power transmission and radio. "He knew about receivers, transmitters, and--most important in Alaska--the behavior of radio waves," says Hills. "Bob could build just about anything--and then make it work."

Merritt and his wife arrived in Alaska from Oregon in 1949 to take positions at UAF.

At that time, healthcare in Alaska villages was provided by specially trained health aides who consulted with physicians remotely via shortwave radio. However, active aurora borealis could sever communication for days at a time.

"People literally died waiting for Alaska to get its satellite technology up and running," says Bruce...