ERIE, Pa. — Lynzie Nebel previewed her keynote speech at Penn State Behrend’s Innovation and Emerging Plastics Technologies Conference with a T-shirt: Princess Leia, from “Star Wars,” in David Bowie lightning-bolt makeup.
“Rebel Rebel,” it read.
Nebel, an upstream hardware engineer at Cytiva, had come to the conference to celebrate risk-taking creative thinkers.
“The plastics industry was built by people who questioned every map they were given,” she said. “But when you have been in the industry long enough, you kind of shift from being the person who is making the map to the person who asks others where they should go for directions.”
Nebel earned a degree in plastics engineering technology at Behrend in 2008. She chairs the executive committee of the Society of Plastics Engineers and co-hosts the “PlastChicks” podcast, which has featured product designers and engineers from the Ford Motor Company, Proctor & Gamble and Lyft.
In 2025, she recorded an episode of the podcast at Behrend’s annual plastics conference. This year, she returned to give the keynote.
Her talk celebrated the plastics industry’s best-known rebels — engineers like Stephanie Kwolek, who spun a polymer solution that was cloudier than she had expected. Kwolek was supposed to be designing a better car tire. Instead, she invented Kevlar.
Innovation is celebrated after-the-fact, Nebel said. The curiosity that leads to it is not always viewed as a corporate asset.
“We will stick the word ‘innovation’ on anything,” Nebel said. “You can put it in your marketing. You can put it in your keynote. But industries look for optimization. They look for efficiency. They kind of beat the rebel out of us.”
Engineers who are established in their careers tend to take fewer chances, Nebel said. They have more to lose.
“Expertise is great,” she said. “Expertise can create speed and confidence and pattern recognition. But when you have those things, the uncertainty that sits underneath it starts to feel costly.”
She said she prefers a “student mindset” — a willingness to rethink assumptions, even at the risk of being wrong.
“We have bottlenecked innovation because we have made curiosity risky,” she said. “We have made it so your idea has to be technology-ready before it can go anywhere.
“In order to stay innovative and adaptive and effective, we need to find a better balance,” she said. “Efficiency protects what you do today. Innovation is what will keep you relevant in the future.”