When Dan Lieberman (PhD ’05) started really getting into combustion and high-speed fluid mechanics as an undergrad, he asked his advisor about where he should go to graduate school. “He basically said, ‘Go work for Joe Shepherd at Caltech,’” he says. (Shepherd, who graduated with his own PhD from Caltech in 1981, is currently the vice president of student affairs and C. L. “Kelly” Johnson Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering.) “And that’s what I did.” Lieberman currently works as a principal investigator at the Bellevue, Washington-based Intellectual Ventures—a company he discovered while reading SuperFreakonomics, a follow-up to the bestselling Freakonomics. “The way that the book described the lab and the opportunity to learn and attack different problems really appealed to me,” he says. Now four years into his work at Intellectual Ventures, he says he’s also come to appreciate both the method and the mission of the work. “We have the flexibility to work on a wide range of problems—and we work for the greater good,” he says. Lieberman is currently leading the company’s fluid and respiratory systems group, where—as he explains below—he’s spent the last two years working on an innovative solution to an often overlooked problem.