Staff Spotlight: Danny Zimny-Schmitt Goes the Extra Mile

If you were to ask Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) researcher Danny Zimny-Schmitt about his most recent accomplishment, he would describe it with one line: "When my dad found out he said, "It doesn't sound possible.'"

That is because Zimny-Schmitt is now one of just dozens of Americans who can say he has been everywhere in the country. The weekend of June 29, Zimny-Schmitt went to his first Extra Miler Club meeting, adding his name to the list of people who have been to all 3,143 counties in the United States.

"I really started in earnest when I was about 25 years old," Zimny-Schmitt said. "At that point, I already had about 1,000 counties down, and then I basically did the remaining two-thirds in five years from about then to the time I was 30."

He finished the goal in November 2023.

Taking the Roads Less Traveled

Zimny-Schmitt's journey to see every corner of the country was born out of a lifelong wanderlust and a desire to gain a new understanding of the world around him.

"This was a series of trips where I tried to stay off the interstates as much possible," Zimny-Schmitt said. "It's really when you're farther from the interstates and in the smaller towns that you have the chance to have more genuine interaction with the places you're going through."

To find the right route—the smaller highways away from the interstate corridors—Zimny-Schmitt would first plan his travel around an airport and the flights he could get. He would meticulously compare county maps and Google maps, searching for the best possible routes to maximize the number of counties he could visit per trip.

"I would pick out a state park, a little museum, or another historic site as anchor points where I would stop for 20 to 30 minutes learning about the area, and then navigate to whatever the next spot was," Zimny-Schmitt said.

From there, he took what some people might consider an old-school approach to mapping out his plans.

"I would write down basically the turn-by-turn directions to everywhere I was going," he said. "I still use old state highway maps, especially when I'm when I'm on the road and I want to visualize it and not just be on my phone the whole time."

Once he hit the road, Zimny-Schmitt would typically drive from sunup to sundown, so he could take in as many sights as possible. Averaging roughly 10 hours of driving time per day, he would break up the time behind the wheel with rest stops at local coffee shops, where he could observe how people in different towns interacted.

"I saw all kinds of different political convictions and all kinds of different cultures."

An American-Made Journey

In between trips, he has worked as an analyst in JISEA's American-Made Program since 2020. His work in JISEA helps budding energy scientists become more involved in clean energy innovation, particularly in communities that have historically had limited interaction with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Zimny-Schmitt manages a diverse collection of prizes ranging from technical challenges, like the Heliostat Prize, which tasks competitors with improving the performance and reliability of heliostats by developing novel components, to workforce development prizes, like the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Clean Energy Education Prize, which is challenging HBCUs to develop clean energy-focused academic programs and partnerships.

"One of the big points of American-Made is to create access to DOE for communities that historically have not had a lot of interaction," Zimny-Schmitt said. "It really helps people, whether they're innovators tinkering in their garage or they're doing community activism in a city or tribal nation get in the door and think about DOE as a means to further some of their goals and ideas."

Each prize Zimny-Schmitt manages is a smaller piece of JISEA's larger goal of bringing diverse clean energy voices to the table to mobilize around emerging clean energy opportunities and challenges.

Bringing it Home

As he zig-zagged the country, Zimny-Schmitt found his travels more and more intertwined with the work he is doing at NREL. By traveling to places with world views other than his own with an open mind, he can now take the experiences he had and apply them to the work he does.

"It makes me cognizant of the fact that we need to strive to include people from as many places as we can as we're going about our business at the lab," Zimny-Schmitt said. "It is part of what we try to do, so it's pretty unique to have seen all the places we're trying to serve."

Learn more about the American-Made program.