AVNET Compass: 2018 Milestone Achievers

Roy Blake celebrates 40 years at Tekdata. The year was 1978 when Roy Blake joined Tekdata, now Tekdata Interconnections, a part of Avnet's Alpha3 group. He began his career as an external field sales engineer, interfacing with a broad range of OEMs, including prime defence manufacturers. Now, forty years later, Blake is the Business Development Manager, working on space, defence and homeland security programs. He is responsible for managing the Cryoconnect Group, and works on a wide range of international programs, including NASA, ESA, and ESO and other leading astrophysics institutions worldwide. Looking back on his four-decade career, Blake says exciting and diverse projects develop every week, but his favourite memory was when he got involved with the design concepts for applications like the ATLAS instrument on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, NASA and ESA spacecraft programs — as well as the design, support and manufacture of harnesses for the decommissioning instrumentation of Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan. He also shared that his proudest moment was when he worked with his team to win the contract from Northrop Grumman to build NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spacecraft harnesses, and then becoming the JWST technical lead for Tekdata. Reflecting on his experience over the years, Blake shares, “My role has a high degree of responsibility, but at the same time a significant level of developmental freedom to work with the team in creating concepts, designs and carrying through to the manufacturing of leading edge interconnections technologies for our customers.” Let us congratulate Roy Blake, as well as the other Avnet colleagues celebrating their 40+ year anniversaries in November 2018.