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New Sales Applications Engineer – Nathan Robey!
Join us in Welcoming Nathan!
Avantes Inc. is proud to announce a new addition to our team – Nathan Robey! Nathan joins our team coming from a diverse background in the geosciences and custom precision optics manufacturing. His experiences with optical mineralogy and optics manufacturing position him well to be an effective spectroscopy solutions provider with Avantes.
Background and Biography
Nathan calls Memphis, Tennessee home but has lived in 13 different cities. He moved to Colorado during the start of the Pandemic to work as a Sales Engineer with a local optics manufacturer. There, Nathan was rapidly introduced to the Photonics industry through the lens of optics, pun fully intended.
As a young child, Nathan was obsessed with collecting and learning about minerals and fossils. This affliction ails most curious kids however, Nathan was afflicted with a life-long passion. In his teenage years, he honed his skills as an outdoorsman with the Boy Scouts, achieving the rank of Eagle Scout in 2006. He earned his education through a Bachelors’s in Environmental Geology from the University of Tennessee Chattanooga. After college, Nathan went on to work a long-term internship as a Field Geologist for a non-metals industrial mineral mining company based out of Illinois. After the internship, Nathan received further education through the awarded Illinois State Geology Field Camp program. Here, Nathan honed his skills in Exploration Geology, and Field Mapping. He then spent a few years Bartending while working on various Geology contracts as they became available. He did 4 years of work with Mindat.org a non-profit mineralogy database, a Federal gold exploration grant for a California Native-American Tribe on reservation land, and 10 months as a contracted lab technician in a metallurgy/minerals processing laboratory for a major copper and gold mining company. Here, he was introduced to a multitude of lab techniques and processes. Nathan soon developed an interest in Optics and Photonics for a more rewarding and stable career. This brought him to Avantes and his new role!
Nathan Outside of Work
In his spare time, you may be able to find Nathan scouring the mountains in search of natural treasures. He has been an avid fossil collector of marine invertebrates in the field and loves to share his finds with his friends and family. He also runs an e-commerce website where he offers up parts of his collection to the public. Nathan likes to play video games, go hiking, try new recipes, and do macro-photography.