Binghamton alumnus chases passion for running as New Balance engineer

John Murphy ’21, MBA ’22 started running competitively in middle school. He tried a variety of sports in his hometown of Penfield, N.Y., but it was cross country that hooked him. He threw himself into the running culture and participated in track clubs and meets.

“I was doing pretty much anything I could to just keep running,” Murphy said. He continued running after enrolling at Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science 4+1 program, becoming the public relations officer of Binghamton’s running club. He even designed a logo for the running club that was featured on the uniforms and jackets. But what interested Murphy more than uniforms was what runners had on their feet.

“I was always fascinated by the footwear, whether it was for training or racing, or anything in between,” Murphy recalled. He was interested in how shoes were designed, deconstructing his old shoes once they were too worn out to run in anymore.

“I was cutting them up to try to figure out what’s inside,” Murphy said. “Finding ways to learn more and dig deeper has always intrigued me.”

In 2016, Nike debuted the Vaporfly. This running shoe used proprietary materials and returned energy better than any other model sold by competitors. The shoe completely revolutionized racing shoe footwear.

“There were people calling it mechanical doping,” Murphy said.

The Nike Vaporfly utilized super soft, light, yet bouncy foams that would be stabilized usually with a carbon fiber plate. The emergence of these “super shoes” was a derisive issue in marathon racing and ultimately forced the governing body for competitive running to respond.

Murphy explained that to try to not halt the innovation in its tracks, governing bodies created a rule that shoes could only be 40 millimeters (about half the length of the long edge of a credit card) tall in the heel and could only have one rigid body in the shoe.

This was the first substantive rule change for shoes in a century. As luck would have it, this rule implementation occurred during the spring semester when Murphy was deciding what topic he wanted to investigate for his junior design project at Watson College.

“I was lucky that the timeliness of the rule change gave me the opportunity on a silver platter,” Murphy said. In semesters past, he would have been hard-pressed to find an organic way to include his passion for running shoes in an engineering project. “But this gave me something that was timely and could be analyzed mechanically.”

For his junior design project, Murphy conducted a mechanical design analysis. “It was cool to be able to have a whole semester dedicated to where I could just really kind of hone in on my own research,” he said. “I created my own ideas and conducted experiments on them.”

One of the goals for his project was to be accurate enough so the results would be tangible and applicable. “I really had to understand not just the engineering side, but also the biomechanics side and then intertwine the two,” Murphy said. “That was a fun problem itself.”

“Once I completed that junior design project, it definitely lit a fire under me,” Murphy said. “I realized this is what I want to do.” He realized how much fun he was having despite spending hours a day on it and managing the workload from his other classes. Murphy decided if he could get a job where he could do anything remotely like his junior design project, it would be easy to pursue full time.

Murphy set out to connect with anyone in the footwear industry. “I was constantly using LinkedIn, constantly sending out messages, having phone calls, and then just applying everywhere across the industry,” he said. The confidence he built combining his passion for running shoes and what he was learning in the classroom gave him an edge when reaching out to people already in the industry. The persistence paid off when Murphy met a manager of the Sports Research Lab at New Balance. After graduating in May 2021, Murphy moved to Boston and began an internship.

A little over a year later, New Balance hired Murphy as an inline tooling engineer.

Murphy said he would recommend students use opportunities like the junior design project in Watson college’s 4+1 program to apply their classroom lessons to something they are interested in.

“If you have the freedom to apply what you’ve been working so hard to learn and study, why not do something that you’re truly passionate about?”