Kelly Collins: Relentless Curiosity

This final installment of our Principal Engineer Spotlight series brings us to the freshest face in the group: Kelly Collins.

Throughout this series, we’ve highlighted engineers with different specialties, career paths, and decades of experience. Together, they represent something especially valuable at Concept Systems: a multi-generational engineering knowledge base where lessons learned over decades meet new technology, new questions, and new ways of solving problems.

Kelly represents that next generation of technical leadership. His path began as an Electronics Technician in the U.S. Navy before he returned to school and earned his B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Oregon State University, with a focus on robotics and control systems. While at Oregon State, Kelly joined the MECOP program, which brought him to Concept Systems as an intern in 2016. He returned as a full-time engineer after graduation in 2017 and, less than a decade later, became Concept’s first former MECOP intern to reach Principal Engineer.

“If I could state Kelly in one word, it would be relentless. In everything from learning to completing a job, he is relentless until it is finished.” — Mike Blass, Design Manager

That relentlessness has shaped Kelly’s career. Whether he’s working in process control, motion, machine safety, or legacy modernization, he wants to understand more than the immediate problem. How does the entire system work? Why did the problem occur? And what can be learned from solving it?

Building a Bigger Technical Toolkit

Calling Kelly a controls engineer doesn’t quite cover it. His experience spans process control, motion, VFDs, machine safety, legacy modernization, and plenty of time working directly with equipment in manufacturing environments.

That range is intentional. Kelly has continually expanded his technical toolkit rather than settling into one specialty. This mindset has made him particularly valuable when old and new technologies need to work together.

Most recently, that has included helping advance Concept’s motion control expertise as aging Rockwell Automation Kinetix 6000 systems reach obsolescence, and customers look toward modern platforms such as Kinetix 5700. It’s exactly the kind of challenge Kelly gravitates toward: understanding an existing system, determining what needs to change, and engineering a modern solution without losing sight of how the machine needs to perform.

Kelly also shared his perspective on this transition with Automation World in “Navigating Servo Drive Technology Evolution: Proactive Modernization Strategies.”

Asking the Right Questions About Risk

That same desire to understand the complete system has made Kelly a natural fit for Safety Risk Assessments.

Concept’s Safety Risk Assessments provide a documented, machine-specific evaluation of hazards and recommended measures to reduce risk to a tolerable level. Our engineers work with operators, maintenance, engineering, and other stakeholders to understand how equipment is actually used, serviced, and interacted with before evaluating task-specific hazards and potential mitigation.

For Kelly, that distinction matters. A good risk assessment isn’t simply about identifying everything that could be dangerous. It requires understanding how a machine operates, how people interact with it, what safety function is actually needed, and where meaningful risk exists.

As Kelly explained in a recent meeting with junior engineers… Risk assessments are essentially asking:

“What does this do? What is the safety function? What am I solving here? Where is my risk?”

Kelly has performed extensive risk assessment work for some of Concept’s major customers, where his attention to detail and practical approach have done more than improve machine safety. They’ve helped build trusted customer relationships.

Making Engineering a Team Sport

Kelly’s curiosity doesn’t stop when his own project is complete. Increasingly, he has focused on making sure technical knowledge moves between engineers, too.

In early 2025, he started Nerd Talk, an informal, company-wide engineering meeting, after recognizing that remote work had reduced the spontaneous technical conversations that used to happen naturally around the office.

The premise was simple: What do you want to learn? What project is kicking your butt? What cool thing are you working on?

Since then, engineers across experience levels have used Nerd Talk to demonstrate technology, troubleshoot challenges, share internal initiatives, and even show off technical side projects. MECOP interns have joined the tradition, too, creating another opportunity for early-career engineers to learn alongside those with decades of experience.

For Kelly, sharing what you know—and being willing to ask what you don’t—is simply part of being an engineer.

Industry Experience

• Aerospace
• Advanced Manufacturing
• Food & Beverage
• Brewing & Process Control
• Recycling
• Material Handling
• Metals Manufacturing
• Industrial Automation

Engineering for the Complex

Kelly’s broad technical experience reflects Concept Systems’ approach to solving complex automation challenges. From motion control and machine safety to process control, system integration, and modernization, our engineers bring the technical depth—and curiosity—to understand the whole system.

Have a complex automation challenge? Contact Concept Systems to connect with our engineering team.