Dartmouth Engineer

I started Dartmouth in September 1940 in the class of 1944, and made it to December 1942. I had enlisted in June 1942 in a program that protected me from the draft as long as I stayed in college, but in December 1942 I left for Washington, D.C., and the Office of Strategic Services. Between those dates I devoted my efforts to the Dartmouth Players as part of the stage crew, particularly electrical. I recall a production of Heaven Can Wait where I was stage manager. I had always been annoyed by errors in the program, and made a $5 bet that there would be no mistakes. The student who bet with me tried to win on the theory that I had not listed the dog in the cast. But the dog was given credit elsewhere, so I won. This apparently made an impression on the membership, and they elected me president. Unhappily, I left before I could serve. It’s fair to say that life in Hanover was a bit confused at that point.

Another seminal event, at least for me, occurred when Paul Robeson gave a concert in Webster Hall and I was the stage manager. Mr. Robeson knew exactly what he wanted, and I was apparently able to rise to the occasion. I remember him as courteous and charming to the weedy sophomore he was dealing with.

After the war, living in a New York suburb with a wife and three kids, I took up the French horn. For the next several decades I enjoyed playing in community orchestras, summer concert bands, Christmas programs, and chamber groups. You can play almost anywhere with a French horn, which was one of the reasons I chose it. Eventually, business pressures closed in on me and I had to give it up, with great regret.
—Tom Streeter ’44 Tu’48 Th’48

Binary Arithmetic
The decimal system is based on “10”
Its origin’s not in doubt.
Just count the number of your toes
That’s how the “10” came about.

We share our limb number with monkeys and chimps
Close DNA explains all we need.
Other species count four, six, or eight
And of course, there’s the millipede.

Learning decimal math involves
Distinguishing 10 different shapes.
A difficult task, to say the least
No thanks to the primates and apes.

Ten-toed creatures have lived here on earth
For eons and eons of years.
So our decimal system’s been around for a while
But not by itself, it appears!

We claim we originated our system of “two”
To simplify computer design,
For it’s simpler to recognize “on” versus “off”
Than the symbols “zero” through “nine.”

Had we but paid attention to the two-toed sloth
Rote learning our “10s” wouldn’t last.
We’d be used to a totally binary world
Making decimals a thing of the past.
—Ace Taylor ’54 Th’55

Between my senior year at Dartmouth and my last year at Thayer I attended the Art Center College of Design. Today, the main campus is in the Pasadena, Calif., hills, and “the main building is a dramatic postmodern steel-and-glass bridge structure spanning an arroyo in the San Rafael Hills, just above the Rose Bowl,” to quote from the school’s website. It’s a spectacular site, but in my day the campus was in downtown Los Angeles. At the time, I was considering a career in industrial design, and the Art Center had a fabulous reputation. It is best known for its automobile design program, but it also has outstanding photography, product design, packaging, graphic design, fine art, illustration, advertising design, film, and environmental design programs. I loved it there. After four years at Dartmouth focusing on math, science, and engineering, working at the Art Center was liberating and a nice break from engineering school. The experience certainly changed how I thought about engineering design—and inspired me to work for engineering designs that were beautiful as well as functional. Architect Louis Sullivan said, “Form follows function.” (Actually, he really said, “Form ever follows function,” but that’s been shortened to the more recognized phrase.) In industrial design, a particularly effective design will not only be beautiful to have and to hold, but also will call attention to how it is to be used. There are lots of good examples in kitchen gadgets, everything from corkscrews to garlic presses. Sadly, I can’t claim to have designed anything particularly beautiful myself. For most of my career I worked at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a University of California research center in northern California. We built prototypes of a wide variety of hardware. For example, at the lab I was involved in helping to manage our work on high-power lasers, which I think are quite beautiful. I did not design those lasers myself; nevertheless, throughout my career, I was inspired by my experience at the Art Center to work for engineering designs that were beautiful.
—Philip Coyle III ’56 Th’57

From 1980 to 1995 our daughter Susan and our son Bob were involved in three local community theaters. Susan was an actress and Bob was a technician with a specialty in lighting and pyrotechnics. As parents, we supported their activities, driving to auditions, rehearsals, and performances, and attending them. From mid 1985 to about 1995, I was on the board of directors of the Indianapolis Civic Theatre, our largest community theater and one in which both our children were involved. Susan was also a charter member of the Indianapolis Children’s Choir, founded in 1986 and now one of the largest such choirs in the country. We were parent volunteers: I went on the choir board of directors in 1988, served as president of the board from 1989 to 1996, and have continued as a board member and served as assistant treasurer since 1996. From 1963 to the mid 1970s, I helped as a fundraiser for the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. For the last several years, we have been active financial contributors to these organizations as well as the Interlochen (Mich.) Arts Academy.
—Bill Batt ’60 Tu’61 Th’61

My most recent artistic activity was to perform the Brahms Requiem baritone solos last May with the Sangre de Cristo Chorale in Santa Fe, N.M., where I live. I have through the years had numerous opportunities to perform this work, in both English and German (this performance happened to be in English), but my most challenging performances of this work took place in February of 1987. Due to a scheduling problem brought about by a large snowfall in Los Alamos, I performed the solos in German with the Pacific Mozart Ensemble in San Francisco on a Saturday evening, flew the next day to Albuquerque, drove to Los Alamos, and did the solos in English with the Los Alamos Choral Society.
—Loren “Jake” Jacobson ’60 Th’61

I’ve been involved in the arts since I moved to Washington State. I was a member of the board and president of the Mid-Columbia Symphony in the 1980s. My wife and I have collected visual art, and we have been loaning some of it to local organizations to show. My engineering contributed to that effort when it was time to hang it on walls.
—Jerry Greenfield ’61 Tu’65 Th’62

From 2006 to 2012, I managed the Waste Not Center (WNC), which accepted donated materials and supplies from businesses and residents in Columbus, Ohio, that were redeployed as arts and crafts supplies used by teachers and artists. The nonprofit was started by the Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio in 1989 and I took over in 2006. On an average day, the center will host 40 to 50 clients who collectively select about 2,500 pounds of materials and supplies for which they pay nothing other than the small annual membership fee. Member clients estimate the collective value of what they obtain at the center each week is about $4,500 based on what the items and supplies would cost if they were purchased commercially. The WNC accomplishes the dual objectives of enabling teachers to obtain materials for their work that would otherwise be unaffordable and reducing the burden on local solid waste disposal systems. It is in recognition of this dual objective that we adopted the tagline “Unleashing Creativity Through Recycling.”

There are many success stories, including the solution we found to a monthly donation of about 200 ladies shoes—right shoes only!—from a local photographer after he photographs them for manufacturers. Many members have found creative uses for the shoes. The most creative: A local elementary schoolteacher was taking a creative writing class last summer along with other local teachers. One of her assignments was to develop a writing lesson and deliver it to her classmates as if they were her elementary students. When she saw the shoes she had an inspiration: She took a variety of shoes, gave one to each classmate, and asked each to write about the person who would wear the shoe.

Business skills, entrepreneurial interests, and an appreciation for sustainability developed at Thayer and Dartmouth were instrumental in preparing me for this endeavor.
—Neil Drobny ’62 Th’64

If engineering sciences was my major, then the theater was my minor at Dartmouth. I was actively involved as a technician in the Players all of my years at Dartmouth. I spent two summers as master electrician at the Dartmouth Repertory Theater. I took courses in theater lighting design and theater technology (they appear on transcripts as English 84).

While figuring out what to do for my B.E. project, Professor Laaspere suggested that I talk to the new professor in the music department who wanted to upgrade and improve the primitive electronic music studio. That professor was Jon Appleton, who ended up being at Dartmouth for 40 years. The design of the electronic music studio became my project. My research included a trip to Trumansburg, N.Y., to visit Moog Music and another trip with Jon Appleton to N.Y.C., where we visited Milton Babbitt at Columbia’s electronic music studio (and saw this incredible movie, 2001).
—Bill Judd ’67 Th’68

I was coeditor of the Jack-O-Lantern humor newspaper from 1967 to 1968. The accomplishment of which I am proudest was a Shakespearean tragedy about Winter Carnival that was based on a mixer fiasco that Robert Reich ’68 organized freshman year. I also wrote a Field & Stream-style article about Dean Thaddeus Seymour hunting down the last Dartmouth animal. After graduation I did not write any more fiction, unless you count numerous government documents.

I was a dual major. My other major was medieval history, which led to an interest in Gothic cathedral architecture. I am now an adjunct professor of materials science at the University of Maryland. Through the years I have worked on the conservation of a number of architectural monuments, including Cologne Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Buildings from other periods that I have worked on include the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Alexander Hamilton Custom House in New York City.

My work involved mostly determining the cause of damage to the monuments, particularly from air pollution and soluble salts. I also have developed some nondestructive test methods. This helps the conservators determine the best treatment method. I have also worked on the materials science of historic brick and mortar to understand how they were made in order to predict durability. I have worked on some structural problems (including writing a paper that concerned cracking of some stone pinnacles at the National Cathedral). I also wrote for the Federal Highway Administration’s Public Roads magazine to try to explain how research in the materials science of conservation can be applied to highways.

The interdisciplinary approach of my Thayer School education was critical to all of this. The field of materials science combines aspects of civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, materials science, and nuclear engineering. In most conventional engineering schools, one becomes stovepiped in a single discipline. Also, Thayer School’s emphasis on a liberal arts education made it easier for me to take a lot of history courses.
—Richard Livingston ’68 Th’69

I became a black-and-white darkroom landscape photographer for several years after I quit being a lawyer. I did that for about three years until my husband was diagnosed with cancer, at which point I devoted myself to his care. Because he assisted during my photo travels, helping to carry tripods and extra lenses and such, I chose not to return to landscape photography when he died in 2006.
—Drea (Papp) Thorn ’82

Is writing considered an art? That’s what I do for a living. It really could not have worked out better. My beat at the Philadelphia Inquirer is science, and also to some extent medicine, so it is helpful that I am familiar with basic concepts of physics, chemistry, and mathematics—realms that are somewhat foreign to more than a few journalists!

I like to think of myself as a bridge between scientists and our audience. My Thayer education (along with my experience working at The Daily D) helped prepare me for writing about technical subjects in a way that is accessible without sacrificing any accuracy. While I was struggling through thermodynamics with Professor Horst Richter, I went to him for some career advice. I did not see myself as someone who would practice engineering for a living, so he clairvoyantly suggested that I might enjoy technical writing. I never did go into technical writing per se, but certainly I write about technical things for a lay audience, so he was right on target. A piece I wrote in November about new research on Parkinson’s disease is an example of the kind of writing I hope accomplishes that goal.

Because of my engineering background, I also try to write about engineers whenever possible. They are a valuable pillar of society that does not always get its due.
—Tom Avril ’89

My involvement in music started as a youngster, when I used to sit under the grand piano while my father played Scott Joplin rags. I went on to learn piano and trumpet, and I was thrilled to continue trumpeting at Dartmouth in the Barbary Coast Jazz Ensemble, the orchestra, and various other groups. Now, almost 20 years after Dartmouth, I still play trumpet at least a few times a week with various ensembles, including a Swiss/German “village music” band. Although my music and engineering experience have not directly influenced each other, they have been integral and intertwined parts of my life. While racing with Dartmouth’s solar car in the Swiss Tour de Sol, I took my trumpet along and sat in with a jazz combo in a Zürich restaurant and played reveille to rouse the solar race participants camping by the Bodensee. In Hanover I was late to an orchestra rehearsal because my B.E. group had just gotten our electric pickup truck (dubbed “Electruck”) running for the first time and I felt compelled to take a victory lap around the Green. While on a business trip to Germany to commission hydrogen-powered fuel cell transit buses, I trumpeted the Canadian national anthem atop a bus roof to commemorate Canada Day (my company’s fuel cells were installed on the bus roof, so we regularly worked up there).
—Laura Iwan ’93 Th’94

When I was a student at Dartmouth, I took advantage of individual guitar instruction through the music department, but it wasn’t until I took a break in my technology career to have children that I started to devote more time to music. Since graduation, I have been involved in several musical projects as a guitarist. My current project is called Stumble Fox. We are a female duo and have been performing around the Tampa Bay, Fla., area for the past year. We are currently working on writing and recording original music. Our sites are facebook.com/stumblefox and reverbnation.com/stumblefox. Prior to that I was in an all-female alternative rock/pop band called Kore.

I feel that music taps into the same part of my brain that math and logic do—in a way that’s hard to articulate. There is something scientific about rhythm and harmony and the way that different instruments work together. On a practical level, my engineering background comes in handy when diving into the details of figuring out how to use technology (sound equipment, effects pedals, editing software, etc.) and discovering how to put things together to get a sound that you want.
—Susan Ettinger Burkhart ’96 Th’97

Most of my artistic endeavors were prior to college, when I attended School of the Arts in Rochester, N.Y., as a musical theater major for grades seven to 12. While I loved it, I knew I wanted a more stable career and went into engineering. I did perform in A Chorus Line my freshman year in college, but then it was many years before I had the opportunity to express my artistic side again. After Thayer for grad school, I was married and had my son Elliott, who showed his ear for rhythm and music at only 1 year old. At 4, he started drum lessons and now, at 8 1/2, he is a fantastic player. He and I formed a band called Lightning, and have given two fundraising concerts, one in 2011 and one in 2012. He played the drums and I played the piano, and we raised money for the American Heart Association and Children’s Hospital Boston. (Elliott had a heart defect when he was born and had open-heart surgery at 6 weeks old.) It has been great to see my musical interest come through in my son. He has even tried his hand at musical theater camp these past two summers. Now, as a human relations director at Allegro MicroSystems in Manchester, N.H., hiring many engineers, I love to see an interest in the arts come through in engineers’ resumes.
—Mandy Kraus Frank Th’99

After graduating from Thayer I started doing some acting. I have done a few commercials—for Sundrop soda, Miami Children’s Hospital, and INDY RaceCar—and I was also on the USA TV series Burn Notice for one episode as well as in many independent films and theater productions.

It was engineering that inspired me to try acting. During my undergraduate studies at Wentworth Institute of Technology, our professors required that we present our projects to our class every month. This “rehearsal” helped me hone my skills as a presenter, which in turn helped me to win the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Old Guard Presentation Competition (Northeast Region) and go on to win fourth place at the National Competition held in California. I feel that acting was a natural progression that stemmed from these experiences. I believe that my engineering background greatly influences my acting because I was trained as an engineer to focus on the details. This becomes very important when creating a character. As in research and engineering, every detail about my character is first proposed, then researched and tested during the rehearsal process, and finally accepted or rejected, sometimes by myself and sometimes by the director.
—Lincoln Potwin Th’06

I’m on the U.S. biathlon team and training full time for biathlon in Craftsbury, Vt. But I need something to do in my off time when I am traveling and stuck in hotel rooms, so I’ve been doing a lot of painting. I am trying to sell my paintings to help support my racing. I have an art blog, hannahsartventure.blogspot.com, which includes a recent painting I did called Windmills. I’ve been watching all summer as more and more windmills slowly appear on the horizon. Everything else aside, I think that they’re beautiful—like big, functional kinetic sculptures. Our landscape in Vermont has been shaped so much by humans already—the fields, barns, stone walls, rows of corn. Many parts of this human-created landscape are what make Vermont beautiful. And they also serve(d) a function. Plus, the world needs more windmills and fewer oil wells.

I did a modified major with studio art, mainly because I love art and I found that it was a great way to balance my brain between engineering problem sets. I also think that there is a lot of room for engineering and art to combine and basically be the same thing—instead of just complementing one another. So I think I’ll try to do something like that when I am done with my biathlon career.
—Hannah Dreissigacker ’09 Th’10

I started pursuing digital photography while at Dartmouth/Thayer School and greatly benefited from photographer Doug Fraser’s experience. I started by documenting skiing and biking adventures with friends. Since graduating I have moved to Utah and enjoy photographing the hugely varied landscape here (as well as continuing to document my skiing and biking adventures). Just recently I’ve started to have some success selling prints! See some of my images at thomasjcollier.com.
—Tom Collier ’11

I used to paint a lot before starting my Ph.D., and I did paint once while I was at Thayer. I painted the Connecticut River and the train bridge viewed from the bridge between Hanover and Norwich. This particular painting was a result of a two-day break from a period of intensive and exhausting work on my research project in summer 2010. Sitting on the Ledyard Bridge and watching the Connecticut River with the train bridge on the back, I was inspired to start it! I believe engineering has influenced my artistic approach. In fact, I find my creative endeavor more consistent since starting to study engineering at Thayer.
—Amir Golnabi Th’11

For more photos, visit our Alumni Networks collection on Flickr.

If you’re a civil engineer in the construction industry, it’s easy to capture the interest of kids. Several years ago I met with the class of one of my granddaughters. I believe they were fourth-graders, but the approach can be tailored to any level. I first introduced a carpenter’s tool belt supplied with all the usual tools. This was greeted with great enthusiasm. I then passed around tapes and other instruments for measuring distances and angles. Next we discussed job safety and handled hardhats, goggles, safety harnesses, and an unexpected favorite: masks to protect the mouth and face from dust. Once I had a captive audience I introduced plans of a fairly simple six-story apartment house: first the architectural drawings, which make it clear what the building looks like in plan and elevation; next the structural plans with beams and reinforcing rods; and finally the mechanical plans, plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and elevators. This led into a discussion of design—the strength of beams, the efficiency of air conditioning, etc.—the role of engineers, and the need for math, chemistry, physics, and computer science. At this point you take the group as far into the technical as you can without losing them. My “teaching career” ended before the introduction of BIM, the 3D computer modeling of a proposed building, but that remarkable development would surely have an important role in any discussion today.

Naturally, when you leave you have to be prepared to leave that tool belt and other props behind!
—Sam Florman ’46 Th’46

Since I started Dartmouth some 69 years ago and graduated from Thayer School 64 years ago, I am no longer involved with youngsters now other than family. I do have one grandson (now 30) who went to Swarthmore and became a civil engineer and another grandson (15) who I will encourage to study science and engineering when he considers colleges in a couple of years. However, having retired some 20-plus years ago, I am out of touch with current engineering and its modern practice in this electronic world. Therefore I would not be able to do much encouragement with young people—that should be done by younger persons who can better relate to present-day young people and can stress the enjoyable and challenging aspects of science and engineering.
—Bob Keane ’47 Tu’48

The only thing I do in this regard is to make regular contributions to the SME (Society of Mechanical Engineers) Education Foundation, which does a lot!
—Foxhall Parker ’48 Th’49

I am on the board of directors of a middle school in New Haven, Conn., called St. Martin de Porres Academy. The school is private, tuition-free, and supported by donations from private citizens. I have mentored some kids and teachers. I think some possibilities exist for the kids through their science studies in areas that I believe are far beyond what they are currently taught. For example, the activity at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva (quantum physics) could be fascinating to students if presented in a kid-friendly way. I could just see a cartoon figure named Mr. Higgs Boson as the star of the show; I believe kids would be as fascinated as I am in these topics if presented in a cartoonish manner.
—Bart Lombardi ’52 Th’54

I have been involved with a program that could lead middle school kids to a science career. A number of years ago the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) established a program for students in the middle schools of New England called Junior Solar Sprint wherein teams of sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders would build and race solar car models on a 50-foot line-guided run.

Each student would be given a 6-inch-by-12-inch solar panel and an electric motor, and with help from science teachers and engineers like me they would proceed to build their models and then race them in a statewide competition. My engineering background is ideal for this kind of mentoring. I used to work at Yardney Technical Products, where I was program manager for electric vehicle battery development and owned and operated my own electric-powered van for a number of years. Since 1990 I have been a consultant in the field of alternative fuel vehicles (AFV), and have been responsible for a number of major Clean Cities projects, including AFV educational programs in the Norwich, Conn., public schools and at the UN International Children’s Conference on the Environment. My associate, also a mechanical engineer, and I have assisted the kids for the past 15 years on this program. We typically go to their classrooms at the beginning and talk about the engineering principles involved with model design (weight, friction, gear and shaft alignment, energy conversion). When their models are nearly complete, we help them put on the finishing touches and fine-tune them for the race. The kids from our local schools have done remarkably well through the years, almost always placing in the top three in the speed event, plus winning other awards for design innovation, among others. My associate and I have received some nice accolades for our work assisting the kids. Unfortunately, NESEA has discontinued its K-12 education program. The program is still supported to a limited extent by the U.S. Army, and in Connecticut continues under regional support.
—John Kennedy ’53 Th’54

Somewhere around 1973 Dean Carl Long asked the Dartmouth Society of Engineers (DSE) for help in encouraging high school students to apply to Dartmouth with the intention of going to Thayer School. Dean Long felt that he was losing too many students to math and physics. As president of DSE, I helped organize an orientation meeting at a home in Hartsdale, N.Y. We queried the various high schools in Westchester County, N.Y., to send juniors with engineering aptitude. Dean Long made the trip to Hartsdale to make his pitch.
—Harlan Fair Th’54

For the most part I teach computer science and software engineering courses within the computer science department (part of the College of Engineering and Mining) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Usually the software engineering courses are graduate level, but I sometimes teach CS101 (computer literacy) to fairly large classes of students. The age range of CS101 students is from 17 to 65, and their majors include the full spectrum—including English, history, psychology, music, political science, computer science, and criminal justice, etc. It is a challenge to keep these students interested and to ensure that they also learn something worthwhile. I cover computer basics, computer productivity tools, the Internet and the web, and elementary web programming (mainly HTML and JavaScript). In addition, I cover current relevant emerging technology issues, such as the cloud, intellectual property, artificial intelligence, and software law. I doubt whether many of the above-mentioned students will end up in engineering fields because many of them have deep concerns about even basic mathematics. I try to cover some mathematics whenever I can without causing serious danger of student cardiac arrest. I’m thinking of upgrading CS101 to a so-called “digital literacy” course, which could be more helpful for fledgling engineers.
—Pete Knoke ’55 Th’56

I have funded three scholarships awarded annually in perpetuity to a family member of a service person by the Military Officers Association of America (MOAA), under the umbrella of the MOAA scholarship fund. I request that the awardee intends to pursue a four-year academic program at an accredited college or university leading to the award of an engineering or engineering sciences degree primarily or a degree in the physical sciences secondarily. Each awardee receives $500 in cash and a $3,000 loan annually. There is no interest charged on the loan until the student graduates. I have also left a legacy (two variable annuities), one half of which is to fund as many $25,000 scholarships as possible from the proceeds at the time of my death. The primary reason I selected this organization and this scholarship is that every dollar is given to the awardee(s); MOAA doesn’t take any money for overhead or other purpose.

Two of my grandsons are engineers. One attended Vanderbilt and works as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; the other graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and is a co-pilot with Delta and an active aviator in the U.S. Navy Reserve. A grandson-in-law is an aeronautical engineer and a civilian employee of the Army at Redstone Arsenal.
—Arv Hickerson ’56 Th’57

My grandchildren are doing very well in math and science. I encourage them and provide all necessary tools—computers and websites. I also assist them in science projects, which have earned them blue ribbons. However, the cost of school is skyrocketing. If we want more scientist and engineers, perhaps tuition and cost breaks would help.
—Don Jansky ’62 Th’63

The best program for students is the one founded by Dean Kamen, the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC), which last year attracted close to 300,000 students. My older son was born an engineer. He spent more time at 3 years old looking behind the merry-go-round than riding it. He went to Bellarmine Prep and joined its FRC team. He won the world championship in 2011 as operator and then went to Missouri University of Science and Technology. My younger son joined a robotics team as well. He just finished freshman year at Bellarmine and became operator as a freshman. That team made it to the finals of their division at the world championship in St. Louis, Mo. They have a great website at team254.com. Bellarmine is very fortunate in that it is sponsored by NASA Ames and has the resources of a private Catholic school and some big donors. It also attracts some of the best students from Silicon Valley, but still critical is parental involvement. Invaluable are the mentors in industry and college, most of whom were not paid in the past.
—Andrew “Kip” Sides ’77 Th’78

My team at Azarias International—I’m the president—is developing a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) program for schools and colleges. We’re researching an advanced STEM development concept that will pair high school students with graduate students for collaboration on real-world projects. This approach leverages the best of individual and institutional strengths to help students discover their natural gifts and passions within a STEM education setting. Our STEM concept aligns sponsors, colleges, and schools on an institutional level and connects students, teachers, and professors on an individual level. Each student accomplishment will be stored electronically in a secure STEM portfolio. Sample projects are environmental and global resource analysis, mathematics modeling and analysis of Internet traffic, biochemistry/healthcare clinical research assistance, and information security analysis and design.

Schools benefit by gaining access to low-cost STEM mentors, faster adoption of online resources by teachers, enrichment of course materials through filtered online resources, course-consistent material for extracurricular activities, and new funding sources through corporate sponsorship. Colleges benefit by developing graduate student interest in STEM teaching, creating additional funding sources for professors, building stronger school relationships, and increasing application submissions through long-term student relationships. Sponsors benefit by directing funds toward targeted regions and specialized fields of study, tracking specific student achievements, obtaining granular STEM life cycle metrics, hiring greater numbers of better trained U.S. STEM graduates in targeted fields, and accessing low-cost research resources.

We are in the process of developing a Phase 1 National Science Foundation grant proposal to research the viability of the portal and portfolio. We will be inviting up to five schools and five colleges to participate in this research and development over the next two to three years. If anyone is interested in participating or if you have any comments or suggestions for improvement, please contact me at mtuttle@azariasintl.com.
—Mark Tuttle ’80 Th’82

I am a structural engineering professor at Vermont Technical College and a licensed consulting structural engineer. My work involves teaching, performing, or researching the design and analysis of bridges, buildings, and other structures. Last year I became the Southeast Vermont Chapter coordinator for MATHCOUNTS, a national mathematics competition for middle school (sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade) students. Students, who are called “Mathletes,” compete both individually and on teams to perform mathematics problems ranging from easy to extremely challenging. The experience, which is fun for all involved, rewards them for their mastery of mathematics. It also allows me and my fellow volunteers—including engineering students from Vermont Tech and Norwich University—to show them how mathematics relates to engineering so that they can consider engineering as an educational and career path. There is also a chance for me to let the students know what the letters “P.E.” after a person’s name mean, because many have no idea what a professional engineer is. There are regional, statewide, and national levels of competition, and MATHCOUNTS is sponsored, in part, by the National Society of Professional Engineers, of which I am a member.

The greatest challenge with kids this age is working within a schedule broken into short bursts of activity with snack breaks in-between. They are not yet at the age where sitting down for multiple hours of activity is their nature. The most unexpected element of the competition is how incredibly quick and bright many of the students are, solving complicated problems without calculators faster than many of the practicing engineers in the room can!
—Scott Sabol ’88 Th’88

My 10-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter like LEGO robotics using the LEGO NXT kit; 3D animation and CAD using Maya; and programming with Scratch, Python, and pygame. Scratch has a YouTube-like site that allows you to share your creations, and my son has posted several games he has written. They also like to program using Alice and HTML and model fluids with OE-cake. When they were younger they enjoyed building simple electronic circuits using snap circuits, and they went to Camp Invention and various science camps at their school.
—Suchitra Ram ’91 Th’92

I help students at Duke University in the electrical and computer engineering laboratories. A video is at ondemand.duke.edu.
—Kip Coonley Th’99

Our community is fortunate to have a company named Med Associates and its affiliate, Catamount Research and Development, based in St. Albans, Vt., that performs contract research and development for the biomedical research community. The president of Catamount, Dr. Gerald Herrera, runs a program called Catamount Kids to “give children an opportunity to explore science and the natural world.” I was invited this spring to present the chemistry of dental caries and the role that fluoride plays in helping to prevent dental decay.

We conducted an experiment evaluating the effects of fluoride treatment in preventing the dissolution of eggshells exposed to acid solution (soda).  Another fun demonstration we did is testing the pH of various beverages to show the kids how their diet choices also affect their risk for dental decay. We do a similar presentation at some of the public elementary schools in our corner of northwestern Vermont.
—Richard Dickinson ’00 Th’01

Since 2006 I have given presentations on space exploration to elementary school children in northern New Jersey almost annually. I started doing these talks when I was a grad student at Purdue, pursuing my M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering. (I am currently a propulsion development engineer at SpaceX.) I always wrap up the presentation explaining to the students that they are the future leaders of space exploration. During the most recent talk, at least half of the female students stated that they want to be the first woman to walk on the moon. Every time I give this talk I see a lot of excitement in the students’ faces.
—Erik Dambach ’04 Th’05

I’ve been involved with a high school outreach program that presents to math and science classes about structural engineering. It’s a one-time presentation followed by a hands-on building activity to show students what we do and let them know the best path to pursue if they are interested by what we do. (I am a designer at Degenkolb Engineers, where I design new buildings and retrofit existing buildings to meet and exceed current seismic building design standards.)

We do a contest with a certain number of toothpicks and mini marshmallows and see which group can build the tallest structure in 15 minutes. It’s great for team building, communication, brainstorming, and thinking about basic geometric shapes. We also ask them before they start to think about the project limits, so they do some quick math with 250 toothpicks and 100 marshmallows end-to-end to determine the limiting factor. If you could make the structure end to end, how long could it be, approximating the length of a toothpick as 2 inches? They usually have a lot of fun with it! I also recently talked to a Boy Scout troop about one of my buildings and gave them a tour of the construction site for an engineering badge. They were some of the most curious kids I’ve worked with! They had some good questions: What is the best type of building to be in during an earthquake? Why is glass a bad material to use in earthquakes? How do you get that tractor out from inside the building? We were on the job site when they asked that last question, and it was a great way to get them thinking about the building process as well as design.
—Laura Weyl Th’08

My nuclear experience began in 1951 in the desert near Idaho Falls, Idaho. The facility consisted of a pressurized, water-cooled and moderated power reactor as a heat source contained in a huge “sea tank” simulating conditions at sea, coupled to a “half mock-up” steam-turbine powered engine room for the Nautilus, our first nuclear-powered submarine.

The facility and programs were operated by the Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory (BAPL) under Hyman G. Rickover, the “Father of the Nuclear Navy.” The facility was designed to confirm the ability to safely operate a nuclear power reactor as a heat source for steam generation, and subsequent use of the steam, in a steam-turbine powered propulsion plant. Another purpose of the facility was to provide skills and training of the submarine personnel. This experience lead to similar roles in providing nuclear power to the first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, Enterprise, the first nuclear-powered cruiser, Long Beach, and several subsequent nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile submarines. I spent 17 years with BAPL and the naval reactors programs.

I subsequently joined the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which allowed me to apply my expertise to many other types of reactor designs and moderators, including fluidized bed cooled and moderated gas reactors, liquid-sodium-cooled reactors, and various organic-moderated types. In all these endeavors, public and nuclear safety was of paramount consideration. My last task involved nuclear and public safety issues, since a radioactive isotope was part of a power supply designed specifically for the Galileo satellite launch to Jupiter. The launch required a stable, long-life power source because the interplanetary transit time was slightly greater than two years. Jupiter’s distance from the sun precluded the use of solar power. The power supply, a radioactive isotope thermoelectric generator, contained fuel pellets of plutonium 238 oxide encapsulated with iridium to contain the fuel. The thermoelectric generator converted the isotope decay heat into usable electric energy. Extensive research and measures were undertaken to assure integrity of the capsules under all plausible conditions. Since the space shuttle was used in the launch, these included any failure during ascent that could lead to dispersion of the capsules, either over any thickly populated area or possible immersion and corrosion in salt water should the shuttle fall into the ocean.

I spent many fulfilling years with the AEC, retiring after 20 years of service. All of my experiences were both exciting and challenging.
—Lloyd Smith ’47 Th’48

I worked for six companies during my 40 years of employment. There was something significant at each company in completing the various projects; however, the one at the last company was the first time I used software to control machine functions. The company was Rockwell International and the division I was in was Goss, which manufactured newspaper printing machines and all the related handling equipment. A press produces newspapers at 48,000 per hour, almost a blur as they stream off onto conveying equipment to take them to an area where they are bundled for distribution. The spacing between newspaper “noses” is two to three inches. To create a bundle to convey to a truck, a stacker intercepts the flow on the conveyor to collect one second’s amount of papers. For many years, sensors were mechanical devices that bumped along the stream and sent a signal to relays that controlled the stacker operations. I developed a stacker design that had software-compatible sensors sending information to a computer to control motorized devices, thereby operating the stacker more smoothly and on a one-second cycle. After the bundle is tied, it is conveyed to a truck that distributes it and other bundles to areas of the city or outskirts. This may require that a given truck have bundles with different news or advertising content that would be produced on a different press, a different stacker, a different conveyor that probably doesn’t go directly to the truck. I designed a bundle distribution system that used a computer to identify a given bundle and send it to the appropriate truck. Goss had installations in many countries, and I was fortunate to be able to travel to those locations to insure proper installation and operation of the handling equipment.
—Robert D. Eckerson ’48 Th’49

Our company melts and refines and produces alloys of copper, tin, lead, zinc, nickel, aluminum, manganese silicon, antimony, silver, and iron. We sell the copper-based alloys to foundries to make valves, plumbing goods, pumps, bushings and bearings, glass molds, bells, bronze sculptures, pole line hardware, plaques, and ship propellers. Our tin- and lead-base alloys and products are used in plating, soldering, extrusions, sound attenuation, X-ray shielding, and counterweights, among other end products.

What is fulfilling about 55 years of doing this: About 90 percent of our raw material feed is recycled from scrap. Reuse of scrap bypasses mining and smelting to produce metals, thus saving energy, the landscape, and the atmosphere. It supports the scrap-metal industry and provides high-quality finished products more efficiently and at lower cost and with less waste to landfills. Through the years I estimate about 7,000 truck/rail carloads of scrap have been converted to useful alloys and products at our plants. We were in the “green” sector long before green entered the vernacular.
—Jack Avril ’53 Tu’54 Th’54

Computer modeling of a close-in weapon system for the Swiss firm Contraves in 1986–87, when I worked in Switzerland with Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC). Because of my expertise in modeling weapon systems (such as the Mark 50 torpedo) for the U.S. Navy, I was able to fill the position for CSC there. A close-in weapon system is a gun that is used to shoot down sea-skimming missiles. The Mark 50 torpedo became the latest lightweight torpedo for the Navy. The greatest challenge was being able to conduct an accurate evaluation of the torpedo vs. very capable foreign submarines.
—William Pierce ’54 Th’56

I have had quite a few exciting and fulfilling jobs in my 35-year career in telecommunications/datacom, but the most interesting assignment took place in the early 1980s: the creation of a worldwide market analysis/forecast common language guide for ITT, similar to the guide used by every comptroller worldwide to speak the exact same financial language. (A comptroller in Germany could phone a comptroller in the United States and, when referencing an item on page 8, line 22, they would be working with the same definition.) At the time, product managers and market forecasters from each country had their own set of definitions and methods of analysis and forecasting. My friends and associates said, “It will never happen!” Not discouraged, I created a first draft of the common language guide. I visited our international units to improve it, and it was implemented worldwide on a confidential basis. Two or three years later, the Korean Telecommunications Research Institute wished to determine the future of telecommunications and data for the country in 2000. Billions of dollars in sales would be awarded to the supplier whose forecast was accepted, and I was selected to be the team leader for the ITT proposal. My strategy for winning was simple: Share the common language guide methodology with the Koreans and let them do the forecast (with our guidance). It worked. We got the business. In ITT, that was the true measure of success.
—Joel Ash ’56 Th’58

The most significant work I did in my career was at Los Alamos in 1964, a time when the mechanism of the monoclinic-tetragonal phase transformation in zirconium dioxide was a matter of wide controversy. We made a movie showing the rumpled surface of the formerly smooth surface of a sample of zirconium dioxide. The movie, along with other data, confirmed that the mechanism of the transformation was so-called “martensitic” or shear-type. I was a lieutenant on active duty at the time, serving at the Air Force Materials Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
—Loren Jacobson ’60 Th’61

In 1966 implementing the interactive brand information system at Procter & Gamble was one of the first interactive uses of computers in a practical business application. The technology was called “time sharing,” and utilized a teletype machine as a terminal. The terminal communicated with a mainframe using dial-up telephone lines. This was a precursor of the personal computer, Excel, and the Internet revolution. I implemented it for the advertising department at Procter & Gamble 45 years ago. It was used by brand managers to manipulate sales and market-share data by regions and time periods using a matrix-oriented programming language called Matran (a matrix-oriented version of Fortran, proprietary to P&G).
—Dennis Crumbine ’62

My current role as a professor of sustainable business practices at the Ohio State Fisher College of Business. Eight years ago I was given the opportunity to design a course for M.B.A.s. I now have a package of five courses that I offer to both M.B.A.s and undergraduate business students. This experience has allowed me to combine everything I have learned in my career into a timely curriculum to which students are not exposed in other courses. Next year Ohio State is launching a campus-wide major in sustainability that will incorporate two of my courses. Another plus to this experience is the sense of legacy that it creates.
—Neil Drobny ’62 Th’64

My coolest project: building from scratch—every nut and bolt—a replica of the 1966 Shelby Ford AC Cobra. I have more than 2,000 hours in this car. I completed the project during a single calendar year while running my company, Plastic Technologies Inc., during the day! I purchased a rebuilt 1969 Ford 351 ci Cleveland engine. Because the 351 is a 302 cc with larger cylinder diameters, it generates a lot of heat, so I installed a double-sized radiator and wired the cooling fan to run all the time. The 351 is a perfect engine for the Cobra because it is a small block V-8 that is several hundred pounds lighter than the 427, which Shelby used when he finally beat the Porsche on a race track back in the mid-1960s; and a small block engine is much easier to work on under the hood. I used a brand new T-5 Ford Mustang five-speed manual transmission with a short Hurst gearshift, and I cut a normal Mustang driveshaft down to a length of about 12 inches to connect the Ford 8.8-inch differential to the transmission. I did the project in an old two-car garage on jack stands. Today I have a cool nine-car garage with two parking lifts and a working scissors lift. I’ve restored a 1971 VW Beetle convertible, 1966 Ford Mustang, 1972 Jaguar V-12 XKE 2+2 coupe, and 1997 Jaguar XK-8.
—Tom Brady ’66 Th’68

The best was as venture manager of a new thermoplastic composite for the auto industry. In the late 1980s I headed a team of engineers and sales folks to introduce a plastic composite to auto companies in the Detroit area. We built a team of sales and technical folks, moved sales from nothing to commercial volumes, established a technical center with testing of these materials for automobile specifications, and eventually built a commercial manufacturing plant in Virginia. Along the way our technical team won several awards sponsored by the Society of Plastics Engineers for part design. It was a great experience, one that I’ll always remember fondly.
—Rick Burkhart Th’66

One of the most challenging and fulfilling projects I have undertaken is that of the first marina on our island of Cyprus. As the owner and managing partner of my firm, A.F. Modinos and S.A Vrahimis, I am the project engineer in charge of the design and supervision team of the Limassol Marina. The Limassol Marina is an exclusive waterfront development that involves the creation of islands extending for almost half a mile into the sea and is designed by our architects and engineers in collaboration with the French marine master planner Xavier Bohl. It combines elegant residences and a state-of-the-art marina with an enticing mix of restaurants and shops to create a lifestyle uniquely shaped by “living on the sea.” Our Greek heritage is reflected in the sunlit terraces, the flowering pergolas, and the elegant stone work. Combined with the breathtaking views of the sparkling Mediterranean this is the most challenging, demanding, and inspiring work I have recently undertaken.

Trying to create islands and buildings in the middle of the sea is a daunting engineering project, in which many challenges have to be met and overcome. As the consultant company you must deal with a great many people from different trades on a daily basis; as an engineer you must never underestimate the problems that can be created by forces of nature; as a project manager you have the responsibility to make the quick, right decisions based on your experience and training in order to keep the project moving. Designing the buildings to withstand earthquakes and differential settlement of the newly created islands was one of the most challenging issues faced. Reclaiming the land from the Mediterranean Sea was a first for me as an engineer and a first for our country. We anticipate that the end result will be a beautiful and inviting marina that will reflect the warmth of our Greek hospitality and cultural heritage combined with innovative engineering and state-of-the-art technology.

The broad engineering spectrum and also the valuable general education received from Thayer has been instrumental in shaping my actions and career from the very beginning of my professional life. The education received has been pivotal in the way I manage people from different fields and in the way tasks are completed—from the smallest project to the largest complicated design.
—Saverios Vrahimis ’71 Th’73

The construction of a veterans monument on Mt. Soledad in La Jolla, Calif., is one of those projects that had a lasting impact on my life. A lawsuit was filed by atheists seeking to have the original monument to Korean War veterans torn down. (It is in the shape of a cross and was located in a city park—it was a question of separation of church and state.) The organization that I head submitted a bid to purchase the property from the city and develop it as a multi-faceted, world-class veterans memorial. We won the bid and came up with a great design that fits into the landscape and includes about 3,200 black granite plaques, each a tribute to an individual veteran. Each plaque includes a photograph of the veteran etched into the granite along with details of his service record. Annually we hold services for veterans during Veterans Day week and on Memorial Day. We also hold private flag-raising services for the families of veterans honored on the walls. This project has been incredibly meaningful to thousands of families who want to have their veteran remembered for posterity.
—Bill Kellogg ’73

Leading and successfully turning around a small (less than 150 employees) heat exchanger company based in Toronto, Canada. The job was a rare amalgam of challenges: financial, engineering, procurement, customer relations. The memories of a diverse workforce and a great city are priceless as well.
—Mike Onderick ’73 Th’74

I spent 20 years in marketing and sales for the telecom industry. Recently I have been teaching high school physics for eight years, and it’s the most enjoyable job I’ve had. I work with high school juniors and seniors, helping to launch them into college and beyond. The material is wonderful and the people I work with are great. I recommend teaching high school science as a career after an engineering career.
—Richard Cavanaugh ’81 Th’83

Working on the construction of the Channel Tunnel between England and France. I worked on the construction of the Channel Tunnel in the early 1990s. It was my first construction project where I had commercial responsibility, and I spent quite a bit of time in complex negotiations to settle massive contractor claims on behalf of the owner, Eurotunnel. The cultural challenges were interesting, and I drew upon my French language skills acquired during my foreign study program in Toulouse while at Dartmouth. I attended Eurotunnel board meetings that were conducted in a mixture of French and English, which led to frequent misunderstandings! There was a great deal of complex litigation—a whole new world to a young engineer. When we finally reached a commercial resolution that enabled the project to be completed, it seemed like a miracle. I learned that commercial considerations can be much more complicated than “simple” engineering and construction.
—Mike A. Adams ’83

Right now I am working to bring to production a two-wheeled tilting front end I designed for motorcycles. The front end was designed to be a bolt-on conversion for a standard motorcycle. The additional wheel up front significantly improves the motorcycle’s braking and traction.

The two wheels up front steer, lean, and handle just like a standard motorcycle. I have been working on this project for the last seven years and currently have two issued patents (7,487,985 and 7,967,306) and a third patent pending. I was originally told by the head of the vehicle design program at a local university that my idea had been tried before, would be unstable, and would not work. A couple of years ago I worked with a student engineering team at Thayer to help me with some design work on my project. I completed a 3,200-mile trip to the Harley-Davidson Sturgis gathering last August. More information and video of my bike in action can be found on my Tilting Motor Works website.
—Bob Mighell ’85 Th’86

Probably the coolest job I’ve done recently was one my company, Focus Embedded, picked up a couple of years ago to design the guts of a handheld video projector for 3M. What made it fun was the fact that it came with the interesting technical design challenges that go with making electronics run at video speeds, the economic constraints that go with knowing it would be produced for the consumer market, manufacturing issues related to building the things offshore, and the overall “wow” factor of designing a cool product that would stop people in their tracks when they saw it.

Technically what made the job such fun was that the entire projector runs on something of an optical illusion. The imager module is a small reflector made of a polished silicon substrate covered with an array of ferroelectric material that can rotate the polarization state of incident light from zero to 90 degrees. If you held the imager in normal room light and looked at it, even with an image displayed on it, all you’d see is a roughly 1-by-1.25-centimeter mirror. But inside the projector, the lamphouse shines incident light onto this imager only after it’s been through a polarizing filter. And as the focused image exits the projector through the imaging optics, it passes through a second polarizer. Pixels that haven’t been rotated pass right through. Ones that have are stopped cold if they’ve been rotated 90 degrees. And anything in between goes through at some intermediate luminance.

The imager module is also monochrome. The image you see is full color because the lamphouse contains three LEDs (one red, one green, and one blue, or R, G, B) that are turned on sequentially as the red, green, and blue portions of the image are put on the display. “Persistence of vision” causes the viewer’s brain to reassemble the three in a full color. Turning on the LEDs for only part of the time (when their corresponding monochrome color image is on the display module) means that they can be dramatically overdriven in order to get high brightness. While the LEDs are “off” (and other colors are “on”), the silicon die has time to cool enough to make driving them with about four-times overcurrent possible. Additionally, most of the time none of them is on, and the viewer’s brain, which is only recording peak brightness, thinks they’re still on and fills in the “gaps.” As a result, the power-hungry lamphouse is only sucking down electrons (at the 500mA rate required to drive the LEDs) for a small fraction of the time the device is perceived to be running. Since the rest of the unit only consumes about 25mA total, battery life is extended to the point where a single charge on a cell phone battery will allow the unit to play a feature-length movie.

3M came to us originally asking for the logic design for a chip to get the video content out of a small fast memory, deliver it to the imager, and synchronize the R, G, and B portions of the picture with the lighting of the R, G, and B LEDs. But when we got that working in simulation and it needed to be tested on a real circuit board, we were asked to design the printed circuit board as well. We were further given the job of developing the switch mode power supplies to run the device at extreme high efficiency.

We were pleased that when 3M decided to do the next generation of projectors with higher resolution and faster refresh rates, they could reuse all of our code and recompile our work with nothing more than a few changes. Our lasting gift to them was that their next projector was designed in about one-third the time the first one was, since we’d set things up with a development path ahead. Their lasting gift to us has been a lot of repeat business.
—Eric Overton ’87 Th’89

My first job in a micro-sized startup. It was the combination of inventing a technology, winning formal recognition for the technology (R&D 100 Award), and then exploring commercialization options, all under the security of a steady paycheck. The commercialization attempt required me to learn about marketing and venture capital funding while maintaining a small operations side of the business to generate revenue numbers for investors. All in all, it gave me a broader end-to-end view of what it means to be an entrepreneur. The job made me feel I can make a difference. As I moved into more defined roles in larger companies, I never had the same experience again.
—Sumit Guha Th’88

The coolest, most exciting, and most fulfilling job I had was 10 years ago. I became an architect after finishing my B.E. I had my own firm, and I spent two years with two close friends designing a brand new university, Ashesi University in Ghana. The project included the campus master plan and all the buildings. It just finished construction this year. We made very little money (we did receive earned income credit) and worked an insane amount of hours, but we had so much fun and it was a fantastic opportunity.
—Sofia Veniard ’93 Th’94

The most fulfilling job I have ever had is where I am working currently, as a high school math and science teacher at Doulos Discovery School in the Dominican Republic. The country has the lowest investment and performance in academics of all of Latin America and the Caribbean, with the possible exception of its island neighbor, Haiti. The need for education here is desperate. That is why Doulos Discovery School, a Christian school, seeks not only to equip the kids here with a first-rate education, but also train them to become leaders who have a servant’s heart. In this way, when their hard work and preparation enable them to rise into positions of leadership, they will use this influence to bring about lasting, needed, and meaningful changes that will benefit Dominicans at all socioeconomic levels.

Being a teacher is the most challenging job I have had. Sure, some other jobs demanded more intellectual rigor and training, but no other job has required constantly putting my own needs second, being patient with students who are at times disrespectful or lazy, or simply seeking to serve others in the way that teaching has. Doulos utilizes the expeditionary form of learning pioneered by Kurt Hahn, founder of Outward Bound. It is hands-on learning with a service focus. Recently my ninth-grade science class built and installed a windmill using materials that cost less than $150. It gave our students a good taste for renewable energy.
—Harley McAllister ’94 Th’95

Designing the graphical user interface and sound scheme for the Tesla Roadster—and seeing it out there, “in the wild.” (I worked alongside Matt Senesky ’98 Th’99 and Diarmuid O’Connell ’86.)

The narrative surrounding electric cars has changed so much during the past five years. It was exciting to be at the center of the action and rewarding to feel like I was making a (small) impact on oil dependence, climate change, and national security—while honoring the legacy of an undersung inventor (Tesla) who died penniless, talking to pigeons.
—Krispin Leydon ’99 Th’01

The job I have now: working at Google as a software engineer on a to-be-named project that aims to handle hundreds of thousands of queries from online ad exchanges for dynamically generated bids on ads from thousands of advertisers. Right now my job involves understanding issues as big as how data flow from company to company all the way down to how the HTML needs to be modified. And figuring out how we can work together as efficiently as possible to make this happen! It’s been crazy at times, but definitely exciting.

In contrast, the job that got me the most “cool” points from people I’ve talked to was working on Microsoft’s Flight Simulator game for five years. It seems like everyone you meet over the age of 25 who has ever played a computer game has played that one at some point during its 25-year history. Getting to see some of those planes in real life was pretty fun, too!
—Susan Ashlock ’00

Each day medicine provides interesting and unique challenges. The most recent challenge for me was delivering a baby in an elevator. (Read about the unexpected delivery.) I’m currently a chief resident in orthopedic surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. I’ve been here for the past five years training since I graduated from Dartmouth Medical School in 2007. Next year I’m headed to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a yearlong arthroplasty (joint replacement) fellowship. When I was an undergraduate engineering major, Dr. Mayor and Professor Collier were very influential in my pursuit of a career in medicine and orthopedic surgery. After the fellowship I hope to find an attending surgeon position where I can combine my interests in engineering and medicine. As an aside, I rented a room from Dr. Myric Wood in Lebanon during medical school and became close friends with him. He was a general practitioner for 45 years. He was one of the most amazing physicians I have ever worked with, and I learned a lot about general practice from him. His wife, Lois Wood, was one of the past Thayer School magazine editors. The Dartmouth community is a very special place to learn, for which I am grateful.
—Derek Jenkins ’02 DMS’06

Banging my helmeted head against a concrete pillar to calibrate an early head impact telemetry prototype with a mouthguard accelerometer. It occurred at Brown University in the summer of 2002, for a summer internship with Simbex LLC (and Adjunct Professor Rick Greenwald Th’88). It helped shaped my graduate studies in orthopedic biomechanics. I’m currently an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Montana State University. My lab studies cartilage, osteoarthritis, and how mechanical loading is transduced into biological signals.
—Ron June ’02

I would have to say my current job, developing the new BMW X5 in Munich, has got to be the coolest project I’ve worked on. Between the design in context and vehicle validation processes, there is always something interesting going on.
—Matt Wallach Th’09

My most fulfilling project so far is the process improvement project for my Lean Six Sigma Black Belt training with Professor Lasky and Dr. Cheung at the radiology department at DHMC. Goal: process at least one more patient through the radiology department. Challenges: lots of details in the process to capture in mapping. Highlight: finding data captured by the software that the department had been using to track patient check-in and processing info. Result: found the solution to processing two patients through the department.
—Wei Peng Th’11

In 1971 I was in the investment business. I had a friend who wanted to diversify his business and we set out to acquire the company for him. I became chairman, he became treasurer. The company engineered coal preparation facilities and was a small factor in a fairly large industry. It did turnkey construction based on its engineering designs, but had no construction facility. During the next three years the coal industry had a strike, the price of coal went sky high, and the company, which was capable of building two plants at a time, was building seven. We paid off all the debt and had cash left over. It was decided that we would begin a holding company and acquire other companies. We have made various investments, including two construction companies designed to assist the coal processing engineering company. I do not consider that we have been particularly successful. We should have been investing in tomorrow’s business instead of yesterday’s. We set out to develop a fast-growing company; we ended up with cyclical, smokestack companies. The most significant lesson we have learned is that it is critical to set goals, develop a plan to achieve them, and constantly review the plan and the results—and that you will make some mistakes.
—Nate Parker ’52 Tu’53 Th’53

In 1987-88 I founded a company that we named IMCOR (the interim management recruiting company). The company grew rapidly, and in 1997 I sold it for $10 million to a large temporary-help firm. We drew on the large pool of downsized executive talent that then (as now) existed in the United States. We challenged a large number of executive recruiting tenets as a part of our strategy and used networking concepts and laptop computers to locate and source specific skill sets and provide rapid service. We had a small but significant retainer and provided nearly perfect executive candidates in less than two weeks. All of our placements were interim assignments of six months. Our pricing and conversion fees were engineered to be both profitable (to us and to the executive) as well as considerably less expensive than the executive recruiting business model. And then we found that 80 percent of our placements were offered a permanent position after completing the interim assignment. Models of recruiting behaviors, economic tradeoffs, and negotiating tactics were used continuously in our training and mentoring. And all of this was before monster.com.
—Bruce Clark ’60 Th’61 Tu’61

In 1972 I left as the development officer of what is now Westin Hotels and started my own firm, Jack N. Hodgson Co., specializing in hotel development. I’d attach myself to a developer doing a major project and oversee the hotel part of it. My firm never had more than three employees. I loved that flexibility. Science courses and case studies in business school were important aids in my work. During my two-year stint in the Army, I studied interrogation techniques at intelligence school. That helps in negotiations, which you do every day. Most importantly, if you treat people nicely and do good work, more work comes in the door.
—Jack Hodgson ’60

After six to seven years with a very large firm, CRSS, my partner and I bought the Chicago office of CRSS Civil Engineers, of which I was president, in 1993. We formed Meridian Engineers & Planners Inc., saying, “Now if we’re doing anything stupid, it has to be our fault!” We functioned with a staff of 25 to 30 until 1996, when we concluded that we didn’t function well selling from a “small wagon.” We merged Meridian into Edwards & Kelcey in a great cultural and services fit that saw me to retirement in 2006. We more than doubled the size of the office to 70 and ultimately realized an excellent return on our original investment.
—Tom Jester ’63 Th’64

In 1994, after 20 years as a manager in a Silicon Valley electronics company, I left and co-founded an RF semi-conductor company called Endwave. I had been introduced by a venture capital firm to an enthusiastic group of engineers who had a new idea for building cost-effective broadband, radio-frequency semiconductors. We built a business plan and raised our first round of financing. Six years later, after more venture capital funding, we did an initial public offering and raised funds to advance the business. Last year we sold the majority of the company to a larger semiconductor company, and I retired as CEO.

I would advise a few things for budding entrepreneurs:

• Hire the best people that you can find, then empower them to do their job. Only intervene if it would be a major problem, otherwise let them learn from their own mistakes, not yours.
• When raising money from institutions, back your truck up and load in all you can get, as you will probably need it.
• Whatever your initial business plan is, it is wrong and will need to be modified. Be open to changing it as the environment dictates.
• Be careful of being too far ahead of society. Many great ideas have failed not because they were wrong, but because they were too early and ran out of funds. My company spent millions on wireless broadband in the 1990s, 10 years before anyone really cared—a real waste.
• Traits essential for success include honesty, judgment, and perseverance.
• The most important skill set in a company is sales and marketing experience in the target market. Without customers, there is no reason for the business.
• If you have a great idea for a business but no management experience, you might do best by hiring a professional manager for CEO and become the chief technology officer. A popular venture capital comment to technologists in Silicon Valley is: “With that great idea, you can either get rich or be CEO, not both.”

—Ed Keible ’65 Th’66

I was a VP and director of technology for Owens-Illinois (O-I) Inc. when I founded Plastic Technologies Inc. (PTI) in 1985. The premise for creating PTI was that Coca-Cola bottlers wanted to develop new and innovative PET plastic soft drink packaging products, including a plastic can. Four Coca-Cola self-manufacturing cooperatives agreed to jointly sponsor and fund several major product development and engineering projects. I proposed establishing a separate independent company to manage these projects—and PTI was created. The contracts assured PTI of initial funding and required PTI to manage the plastic can development project and carry out other engineering and development projects for the combined Coca-Cola cooperatives. PTI developed client relationships with other high-profile self-manufacturing concerns, resin suppliers, machinery builders, brand owners, and converters. We learned how to work with competitive customers and are recognized for protecting customer intellectual property and confidentiality. PTI customers are involved in every step of the PET value chain, from raw material supply through end-of-life recyclability process studies. PTI is recognized today as the premier PET technical development and support resource in that industry, with nearly 120 employees worldwide, and offices and labs in Ohio and Geneva. Recent technological developments include biopolymers, nanotechnology for material additives, flexible packaging and pouches, sustainable packaging initiatives, and instrument development with new sensors.
—Tom Brady ’66 Th’68

In 1983 I co-founded and was president of Aqua Design, a desalination company based in California that established seawater desalination operations on 14 islands. We sold the company in 1996 to Ionics, and it is now part of General Electric. The company was an extension of a 1963 Thayer ES 21 project with Professor Paul Shannon and a reverse osmosis graduate research project that Dean Spatz ’66 Th’67 and I conducted under the guidance of Dean Myron Tribus.

Aqua Design engineered, manufactured, constructed, owned, and operated seawater reverse osmosis desalination plants supplying water to governments and resorts mainly in the Caribbean. Essentially we were selling water by the cubic meter. Since we owned the plants, we were able to test new ideas and developments on a commercial scale under real-world conditions. By 1987 we had the reduced energy consumption for the main desalination process to less than 9 kilowatt-hours per thousand gallons by reusing the hydraulic energy in the waste brine by means of our dynamic pressure exchange systems.
—Chris Miller ’66 Th’67

I played a significant role in the rebirth of the family-owned business, Schweizer Aircraft Corp. During its first 44 years the company developed and produced a line of sailplanes and manufactured airplanes, as well as airplane parts and assemblies for major aerospace companies and the U.S. government. A second generation of Schweizers (all engineers) joined the company in the 1970s, including my brother Paul ’68 Th’69, after eight years in engineering at Boeing, and me, after picking up a master’s in aeronautical engineering from Princeton and three years at Boeing. In 1983 we acquired the company, which was in bad shape in terms of its technology, product base, and finances. Our first major move was to acquire an existing light helicopter line, which included the Army’s primary flight trainer, from Hughes Helicopter Inc. During the next 21 years the company developed two new light helicopter models and an unmanned helicopter for the U.S. government while producing in excess of 2,000 helicopter units. Another important business area became the development and production of highly specialized and sophisticated reconnaissance airplanes for the U.S. and foreign governments. In 2004 we sold the company to the Sikorsky Aircraft division of United Technologies Corp. I retired in 2007.

My advice includes: Have people around you who are ready to criticize the boss. Treat your employees fairly and your customers like gold. Recognize your mistakes as soon as possible and react. Constantly improve your products and technology. Really know your competitors. Work your butt off.

The engineering and liberal arts background that I acquired at Dartmouth helped me every day. I could solve tough engineering problems one minute and write an effective proposal the next. The most important thing I took from Thayer School was understanding that no problem was too tough for me if I put my mind and energy fully against it.
—Stu Schweizer ’66 Th’67

The photovoltaic power systems and instrumentation company I founded almost 25 years ago, Irradiance, grew out of projects I worked on and led at MIT. My advice: Follow a passion and teach others along the way—and be patient for the world to catch up. Staying in touch with Thayer is also a good thing to do.
—Edward Kern Jr. ’67 Th’68

I’ve worked at several early-stage companies and groups over the years, but the British Flag Holder Co. is the first one I’ve founded. This is a very small group that we formed to make bronze memorial flag holders for British veterans. (My dad, Ken Chapman, was at university in London when World War II broke out. He enlisted and served in the British Army until 1946.) Even though this project is small, it has all the earmarks of a successful startup: an unmet need, passionate team, and long-term commitment.
—Mike Chapman ’76 Th’77

I founded Advizor Solutions as a spinoff from Bell Labs. We are currently about 20 people. The biggest challenge has been changing markets. As a technology spinoff (I was hired to spin the technology out of Bell Labs), we had technology but needed to find the market—sort of the reverse of the ideal startup. We first went after website analytics, but that market crashed around 2003. We then went after financial services, but that got pulled out from under us when a key partner with domain knowledge went into a downspin. We then targeted higher education, but that slowed up in the 2008–09 market slump. Now we have some good forward momentum. I think the biggest lessons learned were to stick in there and adjust as market conditions change, and to make sure you address key needs and pain points in unique and valuable ways.
—Doug Cogswell ’77

I’ve been involved in two startups in the computer software industry. I co-founded Syntra Ltd. with a Columbia Business School friend while we were both at Columbia in 1983. The systems-oriented approach to engineering that was taught at Thayer and the project focus of classes such as ES 21 were excellent background for starting and growing a technology company because they made you realize that you could achieve much more than people thought if you just jumped in and tried to solve problems as they came up. I remember a number of occasions when we won competitive bidding situations because we were able to innovate around a roadblock while our competition did not. We grew the company from the two of us and $50,000 of investor capital to revenue of $6 million and a staff of 50. We sold to venture capital investors in the late 1990s, and they invested $75 million into the company in a bet on the globalization of the Internet. The bet did not work out as desired, so the company no longer exists. My second startup was an industry-funded portal called INTTRA, a global portal for the ocean container industry. Our 2010 revenues were $50 million, and we have about 300 people. Because containerized freight is a global industry, the Dartmouth global worldview was very helpful in the early days as we struggled with building a global team, culture issues, language issues, etc.
—Harry Sangree ’79 Th’80

In 1995 I co-founded Intermind Corp., a startup focused on automating information exchange on the Internet, allowing info consumers to establish persistent links with info providers, such as vendors, in a way that enabled them to control the flow. It also allowed info providers to obtain anonymous, aggregate data on what consumers are seeking, how they interact with the info, etc. The product shipped in 1996. We achieved adoption by more than 200 info providers, but the speed of the database engine proved a painful limitation. We ran low on money before we could solve the tech problems. After shedding more than 80 employees, we took the company back to just two people (myself and the co-founder), received more capital, and tried again. In 1999 I was invited to leave in favor of new CEO talent. The company is still trying to create value from the original IP. I am a co-author of one patent, and the company received several others, but patents mean little without large-scale application deployment. The startup was a wild ride. I’d do it again in a heartbeat, but differently.
—Peter Heymann ’81 Th’83 Tu’83

My company is the Energy Emporium, a renewable energy showroom and information center located in Enfield, N.H., in an 1860s renovation to zero-energy building. Zero-net energy means all of the energy needed to heat the house and provide electricity is provided from renewable sources; for us that means solar energy. We have four goals with this building: zero-net energy, LEED certification, no combustion (heating is done with all low-temperature distribution), and historical preservation. We provide information, a showroom, sales, installation, and maintenance for solar hot water, solar electric, grid-tied or off-grid systems, wind and water turbines, and composting and energy-efficient products. I hope to provide a place for people to research their own ideas in renewable energy and sustainable living.
—Kim Quirk ’82 Th’83

None of the companies I have founded has bloomed, though products I initiated have made, well, maybe billions. Under the direction of Barry Richmond, I simulated the life of a person for my Thayer M.S. thesis. In 1984 my technical recruiter presented my proposal to turn that simulation into a game. Electronic Arts (EA) turned it down, saying simulation models do not sell. Human Edge Software moved me across the country to develop it, but the company went under, so I founded AI Consultants and tried to sell the idea to IBM, Apple, Hanna-Barbera, and venture capitalists. Meanwhile, I designed and wrote computer programs and expert systems for Apple, IBM, Prudential, and other big companies. Now SIMS and SIM City are the core products of EA. Today I have two software products that will be great: one that heals the heart through individualized dialog and one that connects kids to the woods through smart phones. I still have no idea how to get a company going. Any advice?
—Sue Spencer Th’82

I am the CFO of Energy XXI Ltd., which I co-founded in Bermuda in 2005. We have a $3.9 billion enterprise value ($2.8 billion market cap) and produce about 43,000 barrels of oil equivalent in the Gulf of Mexico, of which two-thirds is oil.
—West Griffin ’83 Th’85 Tu’85

In 2007 I co-founded North Bridge Growth Equity, a private equity investment firm. We help businesses manage rapid growth with the goal of taking the company public or selling to a larger firm down the road. Our first fund of $547 million was raised from university endowments, foundations, and family offices.

After Thayer I started my career in the semiconductor capital equipment industry, working for Teradyne as a sales engineer. Since earning my M.B.A., I have spent the last 20 years in private equity focused on technology investing. My A.B./B.E. in engineering have been crucial to my career in so many ways. The beauty of the Dartmouth degrees is the breadth of exposure to technology combined with the opportunity to build great communications skills. I am at ease discussing technology with entrepreneurs, whether it is semiconductors, software, communications, medical devices, data storage—you name it. I couldn’t possibly have succeeded in my career and started my company without it.
—Doug Kingsley ’84 Th’85

My first six years out of Dartmouth were spent as a nuclear engineering submarine officer. The motivation for this service, back in the 1980s, was derived from my time in Leningrad (foreign study program in Russian language) that tapped a patriotic vein within, while at the same time looking for a challenging engineering experience. I was later able to lean on my double major in engineering and Russian studies in the early 1990s, when I co-founded a company with two Russian scientists to lease a Russian nuclear-powered submarine for civilian science research under the Arctic. In 2000 I founded a company in Brazil offering energy services to electric utilities and large wholesale customers for their energy management and efficiency needs—services just now coming to the United States, as power finally becomes of interest to consumers. A year ago I co-founded SI Energy for the development, acquisition, and management of hydropower assets in the Republic of Georgia, once again utilizing elements of my double major. We have a partnership with a Norwegian utility, but I feel it hard at my age to pick up another language.
—Dale Perry ’84

My partners and I have co-founded at least half a dozen companies focused on everything from oil and gas exploration and production to trucking. Some have been winners and some have been dogs. I think I am most proud of the fact that we have never gone bankrupt!

The most recent venture is Absolute Completion Technologies Ltd., started in 2002 and focused on developing and commercializing technologies for the down-hole control of solids and fluid in-flow in oil and gas wells. We have some exciting IP in this area that we largely developed ourselves. ACT’s products are currently sold in 35 countries around the world, and we work in some very interesting and challenging environments—from deep water to high-temperature, in-situ combustion. ACT will double in size this year to about $30 million in annual revenue and more than 80 employees. Schlumberger, the world’s largest oilfield service company, took a minority stake in ACT in 2007.

Important things I have learned are:

• Knowledge and understanding really are two very different things, and there is no substitute for experience! Trumping all: the courage to take risks.
• Judge yourself on the progress you are making toward your goals, not on whether you have achieved them. Goals have a habit of getting bigger. It’s better for your confidence to focus on progress.
• The 80-percent rule is a universal law—don’t over-engineer. It is better to be moving in more or less the right general direction than in exactly the right direction.
• Simple is super.
• You need more capital than you think.
• If you enjoy the creative aspect of engineering, once you hear the words “market share,” move on.
• Save the weekends for your family.

—Thane Russell ’84 Th’85

I started a small company called Focus Embedded to design electronics for deeply embedded systems. We do digital and analog electronic circuit design, programmable logic design (including field-programmable gate array design and synthesis), deeply embedded firmware and device driver design, some user interface software design, printed circuit card layout, and short-run prototyping for “design for manufacturability” feasibility studies. The company got its first big lease on life in late 2007, when I was handed a severance package at my position as a field applications engineer with a major semiconductor manufacturer. I was unemployed about a week when my phone rang. It was one of my former employer’s customers. He’d hunted me down and became my first design customer. By the spring of 2008, it dawned on me that this was my next job. Having collected lab equipment for years (to do all my little “garage shop” projects) and having made innumerable contacts in the electronics industry, I pretty much had all the pieces to pull the plug on working for a large corporation. Now Focus Embedded is up to six and a half employees.
—Eric Overton ’87 Th’89

After seven years of running an early stage/incubation venture fund (Momentum Venture Management) I returned to my operating roots and launched my newest venture, Graphight. I realized that great ideas must be surrounded with great people in order to build great companies. Graphight is a relationship management system that helps business professionals develop new contacts into valuable relationships while ensuring they don’t neglect important existing relationships. I am also juggling five other board roles and two young kids (Spencer, 9, and Dylan, 6). I am super lucky to have a fantastic wife, Liz, who helps me keep all the pieces together.
—Andy Wilson ’88

I had a fabulous experience founding a company. In 1994 I was working at SRI International on a team doing speech-recognition research, and we decided to spin out a company. I was one of four co-founders of Nuance Communications. I stuck with it for 10 years, during which we grew to $50 million a year in revenue and went through an IPO in March of 2000. After I left in 2004, Nuance was acquired. The acquirer took the Nuance name and NUAN ticker symbol and continued to roll up other companies in the speech space. Nuance is approaching $1 billion in revenue. Today’s Nuance bears little resemblance to the company I helped to create, but it’s exciting to see it live on.
—Peter Monaco ’89

In 2008 I founded B2B Venture Partners USA. We were a small team with considerable experience in business engineering, website design, and marketing. We set up an online social network at usaB2Bvp.com to attract experienced people for the creation and management of new public companies. Our biggest challenge was getting entrepreneurs and professionals to understand our business model. In 2010 we applied the business model in two areas: charter school funding and vegetarian fast food. I credit my Dartmouth experience for giving me the entrepreneurial guts to work on something that has never been done before.
—Ananda Glover ’91 Th’92

A couple of years after I returned to Colombia, I decided to get into the digital post-production and computer animation business for two main reasons: 1) After two years in the innovation business of research in Thayer, I was bored in the manufacturing sector where I was required to comply with norms and guidelines without much room for challenges; and 2) my husband is a TV commercials director and I could see lots of room for growth in the computer animation and nonlinear editing areas. At first, taking advantage of the enormous experience I had acquired at Thayer in computer-assisted design, I became a digital effects designer for a production company my husband worked for. In 1993 we started our own production company, Metro Studio S.A., and I took on the  job of designing software for managing the business. I also did computer animation, nonlineal editing, and digital effects. In 1997 we started our own animation and digital effects department inside the company. Since 2002 these areas developed enough throughout Latin America so that we could outsource them. Last year we had sales of $2.5 million. We plan to double this sales figure by the end of 2012.

Thayer taught me how to become an entrepreneur, and I have enjoyed every second of it. I took a very special class with Dean Charles Hutchinson. He taught us the link between engineering and business that has helped me wade through stormy waters. My mottos are: Persistence is king. Never, never, never give up. The only constant is change. Failure is not an option.
—Doris Martínez ’91

I have co-founded startups within large companies like Cisco and have started a new solutions unit in Cisco called Healthcare Solutions. We are looking to do $25 million next year and scale to $100 million in three years. The key challenge is to build a team that has both the urgency and focus of a startup but also can leverage the big company engine as we scale.
—Vishal Gupta Th’94

I formed a medical device manufacturing company, Surgical Planning Associates. It is nearly a “virtual company” insofar as it has no employees, only subcontractors for manufacturing, regulatory, marketing, sales, CAD, software development, web interactivity, billing, and quality control. Our primary product is the HipSextant.
—Steve Murphy ’94

I founded Audio3 Ltd. in 2007. At the moment it is one person and not really making money, as most revenue, when it exists, is invested back into R&D. I also do consulting.
—Bradford Backus ’95

I co-founded  ZSX Medical, LLC in 2009. ZSX Medical is reinventing surgical closure in women’s health, developing alternatives to sutures for major surgeries women encounter, such as caesareans and hysterectomies. We have two full-time employees and an army of consultants and advisors. Our biggest challenge has been raising financing in these difficult economic times. I’m not sure we’ve had “success” yet, but two things that stand out to me are: 1) you should know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it; and 2) when the facts change, you need to revisit your assumptions to make them match the facts, and then draw new conclusions and change course as necessary.
—Dan Mazzucco ’98

I co-founded a company called Liquid Light. We are developing catalysts, initially discovered at Princeton, that allow carbon dioxide to be converted to a variety of chemicals and fuels with high efficiency. To date, we’ve synthesized 19 different chemicals. The process can take place using only sunlight (artificial photosynthesis) or it can be powered by any source of electricity—preferably a low-carbon source! We have built a team that includes some of the best chemists in the world and believe we have the first credible platform technology for using CO2 as a chemical feedstock. I always wanted to work in clean tech, but was sidetracked by a 6.5-year stint in the Army.
—Kyle Teamey ’98

In 2010, I co-founded Frontier Capital, an alternative investment firm to acquire and manage illiquid credit and equity assets from hedge funds. Our first transaction was purchasing a $258.7-million portfolio from a Greenwich, Conn.-based hedge fund. We expect to acquire an additional $100 million of assets during 2011. An engineer at heart, I always look for high-quality, tech-related assets.
—Rahul Vaid Th’98

I founded Mundy Technical Communications in 2009 to provide marketing and communications support to companies in technology. Where engineers have a tough time whittling down their message, I help them identify and promote that message. I’m still in startup mode, so the biggest challenge is remembering to focus on sales almost constantly. My goal is to develop a strong enough base so that I can set aside time to help technology startups, a group that usually can’t afford marketing support but needs it greatly.
—Marty Mundy Th’99

I started Bynum Design Build, LLC, in Boulder, Colo. We do design, landscaping, and excavation work. Our five employees are expected to perform a multitude of tasks, from CAD to backhoe work. I believe that in order to truly understand what you’re designing, you must have perspective of the implementation of that design. Therefore, time spent in the field is paid at the same rate as time spent in front of a computer—and real-life experience is reflected in design.

My thesis project at Dartmouth set the foundation to my career. I worked on a project for Costa Rica involving the design of low-cost housing. With the help of alumni donors and the Tucker Foundation, funding was available to head to Central America and put the plans into action. The project was completed on time and on budget in 2001, and I am very happy to report (upon returning to Costa Rica this past February) that the houses are looking great and the previously struggling families are thriving!
—Casey Bynum ’00

I co-founded Flurry with two other Dartmouth grads in 2005. Today Flurry is the leading provider of services to developers of mobile applications for iPhones, Androids, etc., with more than 40,000 developers using our services to manage more than 70,000 applications on more than 250 million mobile devices. We have offices in San Francisco and New York and soon will expand into Europe. I credit all of my Thayer classes with teaching me one simple lesson: There is always a way to make it work.
—Sean Byrnes ’00

I opened Mighty Yoga in Ithaca, N.Y. I have a successful career working in energy efficiency as an engineer, and started the studio as a small, low-risk business because I love teaching yoga and there weren’t any other heated yoga studios in Ithaca. I discovered that the niche market I was looking to serve is much larger than I had anticipated. I run the studio like a business, using my engineering and M.E.M. experiences from Thayer. My engineering background has helped me to appreciate the value of and create clear procedures, a website that is easy to navigate, and a professional presentation of the business. My engineering career and yoga studio are a great match.
—Heather Healey ’00 Th’02

I’m the CEO of PlotWatt, which I co-founded with John Cunningham ’02 in 2008. PlotWatt helps people reduce their energy bills. Our cloud-based algorithms analyze smart meter data to figure out appliance-level energy cost without monitoring the individual appliances. The PlotWatt Energy Dashboard then boils that insight down into easy-to-understand feedback and recommendations. Users (in 22 states and counting) have cut their electricity bills by as much as 50 percent. Today we are a small team of (mostly) engineers. We are hiring.

In a scrappy startup, slow decisions are not an option. We look for non-utility, fast-moving customers that help us become profitable quickly while providing a platform and proof points that entice the big guys and open doors for massive future opportunities.
—Luke Fishback ’02 Th’03

I recently co-launched eProfit Partners to provide Internet marketing services to e-commerce businesses. The New York City-based company works with clients to multiply online sales and profits through increasing website traffic and enhancing conversion rates. We manage search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, conversion rate optimization, and email marketing campaigns, and also advise clients on Internet marketing strategy. We work with web-based businesses that have the capacity to dramatically increase their profits through Internet marketing. Our typical client is an e-commerce website that is already generating sales online and is seeking to scale its growth through Internet marketing. We also advise pre-revenue Internet startups that have significant growth potential. Our report, “The 5 Fastest Ways to Double Your Online Profits,” is available on our website.
—Philip Frost ’04 Th’06

I have started a few companies. I started a business improvement and coaching company called 1 Group Inc. in 2010. I started and was president of a solar technology company, AxiSol, until early 2011. We were awarded a N.H. Innovation Research Center grant working with Thayer Professor Jifeng Liu. I’m forming a new Maine-based company, Beltane Solar Inc., which is commercializing technology that will concentrate the sun’s energy to create power and hot water. The design has a total efficiency of more than 60 percent, yet is simple, scalable, reliable, and low-cost. Future accessories will allow energy autonomous water desalination and sanitation. We believe that you can and should get more from the sun.
—Steve Musica Th’05

The drug-authenticating company I founded, Sproxil, has seven full-time employees and five contractors. It has implemented technology from my Ph.D. research. We have two of the world’s five largest pharma companies as clients.
—Ashifi Gogo Th’09

For more photos, visit our Alumni Events and People and Summer 2011 sets of images on Flickr.

In our post-senior year Thayer students did a few weeks in the field in a house in Etna, N.H. Our classes were in surveying, and our fieldwork was to make a plan of the road that went past the house we were staying in. I was a saver of all my college papers. Some 50-plus years later my daughter Jean ’74, a graduate of Thayer (in one of the first classes for women) who was married and had a young daughter, bought a lot on the same street that I had surveyed many, many years earlier. Her husband has built a house on the lot during a nine-year period. They vacation there now in winter and summer. It is really a small world.
— Charlie Weinberg ’42 Th’43

“Structural Engineering” in 1951: On the first day we met our professor, John Minnich. He explained that on the first day of deer season he might be in late, with the dean’s permission. “But never been in later than noon!” he bragged. What we thought originally was that we had a New Hampshire farmer as professor, but John turned out to be the most brilliant, logical instructor we ever had. He made structural engineering come alive! But the most memorable event was the trip to Corbin Park Hunting Preserve in mid-New Hampshire. John owned 1/20th of the fenced park stocked with game animals of all sorts: deer, German boar, and who knows what else. We went in a surplus GI open truck with a winch we used several times to extricate us from the piled-up snow. Then for lunch, prepared by John’s wife, we partook of deer burgers, elk burgers, and boar burgers! Being from Hawaii, it was an unbelievable opportunity for me. Two years later, I had the pleasure of taking John fishing, where he caught his first marlin, and only then, got horribly seasick.
— Peter Nottage ’50 Th’51

From 1960 to 1962, my friend and lab partner Peter Stone ’61 Th’62 and I worked on a unique air cushion vehicle. Our advisor was Bob Dean. We built a 3-foot model with a model aircraft engine and tested it in the Dartmouth gymnasium guided by a wire.

It went like a bat out of hell, and we were encouraged to continue. We obtained funding from the U.S. Army research and engineering division in Ft. Eustis, Va., and spent the summer of 1961, just after I got married, building a full-scale working version. Pete lived on the base, and my wife and I lived in a trailer park. We built the device on the Ft. Eustis base, but were unable to complete it during the summer, so the Army trucked it up to Hanover, where Pete and I finished it during our fifth year in mechanical engineering. It was powered by a 45-horsepower Nelson aircraft drone engine and weighed somewhat more than 1,000 pounds. We made a number of modifications, including stripping off excess weighty parts, and ran it on the lawn behind Thayer School.

We discovered that air cushion vehicles are very slippery devices, and the least little grade will send it sliding downhill. We then added some light stabilizing wheels that could be removed and replaced with fins for water travel, and thus we could steer it on the ground and in the water. The Army guys then came up to Hanover with a camera crew and we plunked the device into Lake Mascoma and they chased it with a rented outboard.

We had great fun doing this project, and it got a bit of attention in the press. After completing this project and graduating, I went on to Polaroid and designed cameras for a living. Peter went on to Harvard Architectural School, became an architect, and eventually ended up teaching architectural design at the college level in Florida.
— Bruce Johnson ’61 Th’62

As my fifth-year project I “designed” a two-phase flow heat exchanger for a nuclear power plant. The cooling medium was powdered coal that was to be lofted into a fluidized bed by air. The coal was to collide with vertical pipes that were exchanging the heat from the nuclear reactor coolant (which I believe was liquid sodium). The coal was thus heated and gave off “coal gas,” which would have been distributed in a manner similar to natural gas today. Looking back on the experience I can see why my project grade was not as stellar as I’d hoped. Seems to me my design failed to provide for many things, especially maintenance. On the other hand, my learning was immense, as both the thermodynamics and various mechanical aspects required quite a bit of knowledge (much of which I did not have at the start of the project). Graham Wallis was my advisor and provided help when asked, but I just should have asked more questions and dug deeper. I received a real-world lesson from that project.
— Steve Brenner ’63 Th’64

One of my most memorable projects was a combined Thayer-Tuck project where we were asked to redesign (the Thayer part) the Gillette razor with market considerations (the Tuck part) in mind. We thought that having a blade that would set Gillette apart as opposed to a heavy-handled razor was the right trajectory. However, we did not think of multiple blades (now five). I have followed the industry ever since and have seen that our ideas were partly prescient.
— Lee Chilcote ’64 Th’65

Three projects come to mind: ENGS 21, where we designed and partially built an energy-storing bicycle; ENGS 22, where I designed and built an air-bearing seismograph; and the Thayer B.E. plus M.S. program, where I designed a hand-written character recognizer (someone else implemented it).
— Mark Tuttle ’65 Th’66

Although there were a number of interesting projects during my time at Thayer School, there are three that really stand out, and they share a common thread: All three taught me a valuable life lesson and all three could have easily killed me. Number three on my list is a project that never happened. During my freshman year, the professor asked us to investigate parawing gliders. NASA was studying the parawing as a way to return manned capsules from space. While tossing gliders off the top of the football stadium, I actually calculated the size of glider I’d need to launch myself and worked out how to guide it. But I never jumped. Several years later, seeing pictures of hang gliders out in California, I realized that to innovate takes more than good engineering; it takes courage, and success is only for those willing to take the risks. Number two on my list is my fifth-year project to design and evaluate the world’s worst lawn mower. (It wasn’t intended to be — it just turned out that way!) I actually built a prototype, and when it self destructed and the blade went flying inches from my head, it occurred to me that the first step in any engineering project ought to be to analyze the potential risks. At that time, risk evaluation was not being taught at Thayer — another good idea ahead of its time. The number one project was not the result of any course and was not approved by any professor. One of my fraternity brothers and fellow engineering majors found an old drone engine and propeller in the basement of Thayer. Another frat brother and fellow engineering major was a professional water ski jumper. So, naturally, it was obvious to them that we needed to build an air sled on skis and run it up and down the frozen Connecticut River! They let me join the group, and after weeks of sleepless nights and countless challenges that stretched our inventiveness and engineering capabilities, we were racing up and down the river — no helmets, no seatbelts, no fear. Though running it was fun, it turns out the real excitement was in accomplishing that crazy goal, so after a few runs the sled was dismantled and the engine put back where it was found. The lesson we learned is that a small group of dedicated people free from restrictions and “good common sense” could accomplish amazing things. For me, Thayer was always about amazing things. Every day was a magic show with the professors teaching us how to do the tricks.
— Pat Bremkamp ’68 Th’69

“How do you play if you can’t move?” With that question, Professor Paul Shannon began the first class of ENGS 21 in the fall of 1965, but only after making us wait for five minutes before he said anything. We wondered: What was going on? Professor Shannon explained: How can a physically handicapped child play with toys made for the commercial market? Can toys be successfully adapted for use by children with special needs? That was our ENGS 21 project assignment. We visited the Crotched Mountain School for children with disabilities in southern New Hampshire to understand the nature of the problem and try out our ideas. For many, it was our first encounter with children with severe physical disabilities. My project team decided to take an existing toy — an electronic slot car game — and redesign the control unit so that handicapped children could steer the slot cars, adjust their speeds, and even flip them out of the slots. We named our team TREPHCo: Therapeutic Recreational Engineering for the Physically Handicapped. We learned as a group. Made mistakes. Tried again. And eventually built a slot car unit that could be controlled by some of the handicapped children. In the process, we were introduced to a systematic approach to problem solving. This was not only my most memorable project at Thayer; ENGS 21 was among the best courses I took as an undergraduate and was a lifetime experience.
— Dennis Drapkin ’68 Th’69

As part of a structural analysis class, I wrote a program in 1972 that simulated the performance of a cross-country ski. At that time, it occurred to neither the professor nor myself that the work was probably marketable. My hope is that this no longer happens at Thayer School, and that work with commercial value is always encouraged even though it might conflict with the goals of academia.
— Mark Totman ’71 Th’72
Editor’s Note: Thayer now encourages entrepreneurship for students at all levels of study.

In our first semester in the master’s program at Tuck, Stephen Matzuk Th’77 and I collaborated on a project for ENGG 196, “Introduction to Design Methodology,” to develop an isokinetic stack sampler.

As an undergraduate engineering student, I spent two semesters as an engineering intern working on environmental air pollution remediation at a major chemical company. I had used equipment to sample effluents in emission gases from chemical reactors. To get an accurate measurement, the velocity in the sample probe had to be adjusted to match the velocity in the emission stack. This was done by using a pitot tube in the emission stack to find stack velocity, measuring the sample rate through the probe, calculating the velocity in the sample probe, and manually adjusting flow rate through the sample equipment to match these two velocities. We proposed to create an automated system to match the gas velocity in the sampling probe to the gas velocity in the effluent stack. The design that resulted consisted of two major devices: first, we created a novel differential sampling probe; second, we created an inventive pneumatic-electronic-mechanical feedback system to control the flow. We successfully created a proof-of-concept prototype, though we knew it was well short of optimizing the design for a potential product. The most critical lessons we learned had nothing to do with engineering. We learned the value of collaboration to solve problems. Our advisors — Professors Hooven, Converse, Grethlein, and Dean Long — each made essential suggestions. And we were well matched to solve this problem: Steve covered the electronics and I covered mechanical design. We learned about the real-world engineering process: No matter how obvious the need appears or how clever our first guess at a solution may be, our proposal was only accepted when we were halfway to solving the problem. Since that class, both of us have gone on to pursue independent careers in new product development — Steve as a patent lawyer and me as president of Technology Consulting Group, providing market research, strategic planning, and new product development.
— Bill Downey ’74 Th’77

I’d have to say that my two most memorable projects from the time I spent at Thayer School — the Women in Science Project and the Dartmouth Project for Teaching Engineering Problem Solving — were both very much influenced by the ENGS 21 engineering problem-solving approach and the whole entrepreneurial environment fostered at Thayer School.
— Carol Muller ’77, Assistant Dean 1987-92, Associate Dean 1992-96

The most memorable project for me was from ENGS 21. We were charged with developing products for energy efficiency. Our team conceived of and built exterior auto closing shutters to insulate windows in homes located in cold climates. We built a small model of a house and demonstrated the shutters closing and the improved insulation and draft reduction. We did our testing at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. While ENGS 21 was most memorable, I have several runners-up. I remember putting small-scale integration (SSI) chips together to simulate a clarinet, only to have a short in the breadboard and the whole project fail. I worked for 36 hours straight to rewire the whole thing. It is ironic because all that circuitry and more can now fit on a tiny chip smaller than the 30 or so chips I had on the prototype. Other comical memories are doing a superconductivity experiment one afternoon when Friday beers were being served. We thought we might super-cool our beer by dangling it over the liquid nitrogen only to have it explode on our experiment. The silicon did superconduct, and the beer slushie wasn’t too bad after we cleaned it all up. Additionally, the bridge-building project haunts me from time to time, especially when I go over rickety, small suspension bridges.
— Anne (Davidson) Barr ’83

The best project I ever worked on was for a class that was both a Thayer and Tuck class. The class operated as a consulting firm and was assigned to review and solve a problem in the community. For our particular class, the town of Brownsville, Vt., asked us to look into the Mt. Ascutney expansion that was planned in the 1984-to-1985 timeframe. For my portion of the assignment, I reviewed the engineering plan for the sewage treatment system and also the traffic analysis that had been done. Other class members looked into tax implications, environmental impact, social impact, pollution, and a number of other elements that were of concern to the residents of Brownsville. The culmination of the class was a presentation at the Brownsville town meeting. It was televised locally. This class cemented my interest in becoming a consultant, which I have been now for my 26 years following Dartmouth graduation in 1984.
— Howard Jones ’84

Without a doubt the bridge contest was my most memorable project. Our team won for least deflection and was dead last for projected deflection — never did quite get the math behind it! I still have the bridge on my shelf at home. Another memorable project was my B.E. project to build a fluids-flow apparatus for the fluids lab. I toured Thayer with my four sons last year and saw it was still in use! I do remember lots of interesting projects, such as the plan by Bob Donaldson ’84 Th’85 to attach an out-of-whack car engine to the base of tall communications towers so the vibration would inhibit ice build-up. No idea if it worked, but I loved Bob’s creativity!
— Doug Kingsley ’84 Th’85

My most memorable project at Thayer was my B.E. design project, completed with Samantha (Scollard) Truex ’92 Th’93 Tu’95, Kristen (Morrow) Johnson ’92 Th’94, and Bruce Northrup Th’94. Our project involved redesigning a boat hatch that could be opened in multiple directions, depending on the direction of the wind. What was most memorable to me about the project was less the outcome than the process and the teamwork involved. It was truly a collaborative effort with a group of people I really enjoyed spending time with and learning from.
— Sue Roberts Th’93

It is fun to sit back and remember all those great Thayer School projects, but if I had to choose the most memorable, it would have to be our B.E. design project. Linda Blumberg ’95 Th’96, Tony Mamone ’96 Th’96, Brian Spence ’95 Th’96, and I worked on this gem: designing environmentally and behaviorally appropriate “toys” for captive polar bears at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. I am aware that there was much debate outside our group regarding the true engineering value of our project, but as far as we were concerned it was perfect. We applied our well-honed Thayer School problem-solving skills to building a device that encouraged the bears to work for their food, as they would in a more natural environment. Unfortunately, our best solution — just release some live seals into the polar bear pool — didn’t meet the parameter that the solution had to be palatable to zoo visitors.
— Pam Brockmeier ’95 Th’96

I had a great experience with ENGS 21. We did a project — Bike Buddy — that involved careening down an icy hill on a bike connected (through our contraption) to someone in the project. It was crazy.
— Jay Bruce ’96

My ENGS 21 project somehow ended up with me on top of Balch Hill, along with project-mates Erin Morse ’02 Th’03, Derek Hansen ’02, and Abby Faulkner ’02 Th’03, skinning a moose.

Rewind a bit: Our theme was safety innovations, and our group chose to tackle the largely unrecognized but serious problem of moose-vehicle collisions. Moose unfortunately possess the potentially lethal combination of enormous mass, windshield-level height, and a general lack of concern for traffic whizzing by at highway speeds. After reading in some obscure journal that moose fur is known to fluoresce when exposed to UV light, we sought to investigate this as a possible key to our solution. We were “lucky” enough to find a nearby butcher shop that had recently received a road-kill moose and was more than willing to part with the hide for the low, low price of $20, with the caveat that it wasn’t entirely cleaned. So that’s how we found ourselves up on Balch Hill stretched out on tarps over a reasonably disgusting former moose, trying our best to clean the hide to a sufficiently sanitary level. The best (or worst?) part was the look on other hikers’ faces when they unwittingly wandered over to our secluded area to see what interesting thing was going on over there. So cut to a few days later and — surprise! — we did not observe any noteworthy glowing of the moose fur under UV light, journal claims notwithstanding. So our ultimate solution involved a series of heat-sensing infrared sensors and warning lights deployed alongside particularly dangerous highway areas frequently trafficked by our favorite half-ton mascot of the Granite State. I think one of our friends might still have a pair of moose-hide mittens somewhere, too.
— Tom Nichols ’02 Th’04

My most memorable projects at Thayer were both team-based design classes. In “Machine Design” we had to build a machine that could create a Lincoln Log cabin. Since we were constrained in degrees of freedom, we built a clutch into our car that allowed us to have another motion.

The clutch was driven by the crane arm. When the crane arm was up, the motor would drive the wheels and move the car around. However, when the crane arm was down, the drive motor was disengaged from the wheels and drove the crane arm out and in to give us precise control when placing the logs. It miraculously ended up working as we had designed it. My team members, James Lamb ’04, Jon Kling ’04, and Chad Steinglass ’02 Th’04, were a blast to work with.

A close second to this project was the CAD/CAM class, where our final project was to build a tricycle. We pushed the limits a little bit and ended up designing a Potty-Training Trike, where the seat doubles as a toilet.

When the kids were invited in to test drive the trikes, one of the girls saw it and immediately ran away to her mommy crying. I guess it was too much for her to understand how those two worlds could be combined. However, one of the little guys loved it and pedaled all over the Great Hall.
— Brian Mason ’03 Th’05

ENGS 21 started about two weeks after 9/11. My group of James Lamb ’04, Jon Kling ’04, and Andra Pool ’03 wanted to do something that would benefit firefighters. We learned that although their outer clothing provided protection against flames, the material did not breathe well, and many firefighters suffered from hyperthermia while combating fires. At our first presentation, our solution involved having firefighters wear mini-refrigerators. We quickly learned about the value of the design and redesign process to ultimately come up with a device to monitor the firefighter’s body temperature and serve as an early warning system for hyperthermia.
— Erik Dambach ’04 Th’05

As a junior in the dual-degree program we ended up having five of us from Colby College on the same team — I worked with Spencer Boice Th’05, Eric Fitz Th’05, Dave Fouche Th’05, and Monica Thomas Th’05 — and we ended up being referred to as the “Colby Mafia.” We won the Jackson Prize for our internal boat trailer, which Leonard from the machine shop described as a $500 boat with F-16 landing gear. With our design you no longer needed a separate trailer for your boat. You would drive the boat right up to the edge of the water and then, with a press of a button, the wheels would deploy out of the bottom of the boat and out of the front would come the tow hitch, which you would then just connect to your car. It would eliminate the hassle of having to store the trailer when the boat was in the water, and could also help in point-to-point trips: All you needed in the new location was a car with a hitch; no need to move the trailer around.
— Peter Rice Th’06
Editor’s Note: See “A Few of Our Favorite Things.”

My most memorable and glorious project from Thayer has to be the mechanical design project Margaret Martei Th’08, Laura Weyl Th’08, Andrew Herchek Th’09, and I completed in “Machine Engineering” (ENGS 76) in fall 2007. The goal of the project was to design a robot that would pick up as many walnuts as possible in the allotted time on a course built in the Atrium. Our robot then competed against the robots of other teams. As the one with the most points at the end of the round, our team won! The project may be my most memorable project because our team won, but it was also great because our robot began as just raw materials: sheets of metal, wheels, and gears. Then, using CAD and mockups, we designed a beautiful, fine-tuned machine and built the whole thing in the machine shop.
— Anders Wood Th’08

I feel like all of my projects were so memorable — I loved every one! My two most favorite are ENGS 76 (“Machine Engineering”) and ENGS 190/290 [now ENGS 89/90]. ENGS 76 was probably the most fast-paced class I’ve ever taken; however, by the end, I felt as though I had learned and accomplished so much. I also feel it was the first true “engineering” project because you design and build the robot from the ground up, which allows you to really learn about the process and take ownership of the results. ENGS 190/290 is phenomenal preparation for the real world, as you have the opportunity to work on an actual project that has real potential.

I did a project with Jetboil, in which we redesigned one of its camping cookstoves. I still can’t believe that we got to speak with the CEO regularly, access proprietary information, learn about the manufacturing process, and come up with different innovations so that we could design a system that will actually be marketed! Now that I am studying at another university (I have a Fulbright to study sustainable energy at the Technical University of Denmark), I realize just how unique an experience that was. I think this type of learning really prepares Thayer students for the workplace and gives them the tools to innovate new procedures or products and present their ideas in a persuasive and effective manner to all types of audiences.
— Emily Koepsell ’09 Th’10

For more photos, visit our Alumni Projects set of images on Flickr.

I came to Dartmouth with the dream of entering the Tuck-Thayer major, the best of engineering with a solid underpinning of business savvy. The only problem was when I entered Dartmouth with the class of ’46 in the summer of 1942, the nation was at war. After several months of relatively carefree freshman life, I had to decide about serving in the armed forces. The Navy had a strong presence in Hanover, and the V-12 program offered Thayer students a continued study in civil engineering leading to a degree, then officer training school, a commission in the Civil Engineer Corps, and service in the Seabees. When I told the recruiting people about my Tuck-Thayer dreams, they said, in effect: “If you want to study business you may end up with a commission in the supply corps, but more likely as an able-bodied seaman in the fleet. Is that what you want? We’re looking for civil engineers who will earn a degree and be both a top-level technologist and a leader of men. Make your choice.” That’s when I had an “aha” moment and opted for civil engineering. As the timing worked out, I received my degree and commission and military training, and arrived in the Philippines on the very day that the peace treaty with Japan was signed. I am a member of the luckiest generation. Once I got hooked on civil engineering, and on construction in particular, that is the path I followed.
— Sam Florman ’46 Th’46

My professional engineering experience has been involved with building construction, usually as a construction manager and in recent years as a forensic engineer. Some projects were major constructions, such as the New York State Exhibit at the World’s Fair and Harkness Medical Research Building at New York Hospital/Cornell Medical Center, but many were of moderate size. Even after 56 years in engineering, I experienced my “aha” moment this past March in Puerto de Valle, Mexico.

Engineers Without Borders (EWB) had received a request from the village of Puerto de Valle for an assessment and design to improve the water supply for the 2,000 inhabitants. I was on vacation in nearby San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and volunteered to do the preliminary reconnaissance. The drilled well has been unreliable and contaminated by poor sanitation practices. Inhabitants draw water only three hours each day. The adjacent river, used as backup, is polluted. I spent maybe four hours in Puerto de Valle, but I consider it a most rewarding engineering experience because I was able to contribute to the solution of the problem in support of this Mexican rural population. As a civil engineer I felt at home in evaluating the well and distribution system to the 300 separate houses. I never would have obtained permit approval in New York for a well only 50 feet from an open sewer ditch. I took three water samples, one from the Lerma Santiago River and two from the well distribution.

My ability to speak Spanish at an intermediate level was important to my communications in Puerto de Valle. I gathered together drawings and documents from the village elders and made my report to the EWB chapter in Tucson, Ariz., which has the design responsibility for improving the water supply system. A new well located above the community and away from the sources of contamination may be the solution.
— Harlan Fair ’53 Th’54

Memorial Day 2010: My “aha” Thayer day, perhaps my penultimate such day. My wife of 53 years and I are in what is euphemistically called “downsizing.” We dispose of physical objects, all of which evoke memories of which we cannot dispose. Today I discarded several dozen books from Thayer days: Strength of Materials, Concrete Design, Timber Structures, Soil Mechanics, Mathematical Analysis, and more. These are obsolete, irrelevant except to one matter: what they and Thayer enabled me to accomplish through a career and a life, full of satisfaction and dedication to the essence of the Dartmouth liberal education and the Thayer School discipline. So now, as I approach my 80th birthday, after a life with countless “ahas” attributed to Thayer and Dartmouth, downsizing comes easily. All readers will eventually be where I am, and will revere their Thayer faculty as I revere Carl Long and others.
— Albert G. Melcher ’53 Th’54

I don’t recall any “aha” moment, but I did have a “?” moment. At Thayer I began to wonder what computers could not do. After about 55 years in the computer field, I still don’t know the answer to that question. However, I’m beginning to get a feel for what computers can — but maybe should not — do.
— Pete Knoke Th’56

So much of school is not about learning exactly how to do a particular task, but rather how to go about solving the diverse problems one may face later in life. Two years after I graduated from the Thayer School of Engineering I started working at the University of California’s Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in northern California. One of my very first assignments was to design a special screw made from a rare-earth metal. Of course, I knew about metal screws from the hardware store, but I didn’t know how to design one from scratch, least of all in an unfamiliar metal. How would I decide how many threads per inch and how deep should the threads be? Should they be square or round or some other shape? How much clearance would each thread need? How would I show the machinist exactly what I wanted? To make matters worse, the ramp angle of a screw thread — how fast it climbs — depends on the frictional properties of the metal, and rare earth metals have very different properties than brass or steel. So I couldn’t just copy the dimensions of a brass or steel screw and expect it to work. I’d never even thought about how to design hardware involving exotic metals, and Thayer School had not taught me about nuts and bolts in such detail. Fortunately, I remembered that Thayer School had taught me how to solve problems, and soon I finished designing that screw and gave all the dimensions to the machinist to cut on a lathe. He thought it was pretty unusual too; he’d never seen a bolt or screw like that before. It was probably the most trivial engineering task I ever did, but I got a lot of satisfaction from the experience, and over the years have met many other engineers who didn’t know how to design a screw from scratch either. Thanks to Thayer School, my “aha” moment was realizing that Dartmouth had prepared me to solve all kinds of problems — trivial and difficult — with the scientific and engineering insights and skills necessary to tackle them.
— Philip E. Coyle III ’57

After receiving my A.B. as an engineering sciences major at Dartmouth and Thayer, I followed Thayer Professor Sidney Lees to Boston, where we founded the bioengineering department at the Forsyth Dental Institute. Our principal project, “Looking into Teeth with Ultrasound,” became a five-year graduate program that, with Sid, remained an extension of my Dartmouth-Thayer experience, leading to a master of science in electrical engineering from Northeastern University. In 1973 I became responsible for continuing development of a real-time ultrasound imaging system at the University of Washington. The objective was to detect atherosclerotic plaque in the carotid artery, one of the primary causes of stroke. The first patient I looked at was scheduled for surgery the next day to remove a major arterial blockage that had been diagnosed, correctly, by standard x-ray angiography. To our collective dismay, the artery looked just fine (blood-filled) with our new ultrasound machine! An ultrasound system produces images by transmitting pulses into the body and detecting echoes from minute structural variations in soft tissues. Therefore, if the patient’s plaque was not differentiable from blood it must not contain these structural characteristics. Then came the “aha” moment: Though plaque and blood might look the same, as seen by pulse-echo ultrasound, they would not sound the same if they were examined with Doppler ultrasound, which would recognize flowing blood by the Doppler shift in the frequency of minute echoes scattered by the blood cells. I realized that by integrating imaging and Doppler into the same machine one could see both stationary tissues, such as artery walls that are normally reflective, and simultaneously differentiate very weakly reflective tissues, such as the patient’s plaque, from blood, by the Doppler shift. This discovery led to the development of duplex ultrasound, the early and current standard for every medical ultrasound imager. In 1974 I performed the first examination of a carotid artery by duplex echo-Doppler ultrasound on my technician, and the first duplex echocardiogram on my 4-year-old daughter, Jennifer.
— Frank E. Barber ’62

After consulting with companies on environmental issues for about 30 years it occurred to me that my clients’ problems were not environmental problems but rather business problems. Viewed through this lens, a portfolio of solutions emerged that led not only to solving problems but also to delivering bottom-line results. Such solution sets have come to be known by phrases such as pollution prevention, life-cycle product development, sustainable supply chain management, product stewardship, and triple bottom line management. The “aha” moment set the stage for my professional morphing into academia (about half time), where I teach sustainable business practices in the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. My courses are delivered at both the M.B.A. and undergraduate level and teach future business leaders how to grow a business and prosper by managing the triple bottom line: people, planet, and profit. My courses are a mix of lectures and projects carried out for local companies, including large corporations such as American Electric Power and Limited Brands. The other half of my time I spend as executive director of two nonprofits focused on recycling: the Waste Not Center, which takes items that would otherwise be discarded by businesses and individuals (about 60 tons per year) and turns them into educational and creative supplies for teachers and artists; and the Association of Ohio Recyclers, which works to instill recycling best practices in businesses and promote a regulatory environment conducive to recycling in Ohio.
— Neil Drobny ’62 Th’64

I’m the president of Bio-Detek Inc., and I’ve developed a handheld device that reminds a rescuer how to perform CPR. Using accelerometer technology, the device actually measures the depth of each chest compression and gives feedback to the rescuer to “push harder” if compressions are too shallow. We wanted to enable 911 calling in the device when the “aha” arrived — put our software in a cell phone. We launched PocketCPR for iPhone last fall and have had more than 65,000 downloads. My hope is that within five years, all smart phones will arrive with my software preloaded.
— Mark Totman ’71 Th’72

 

I’m an architect (fisherarch.com) with an undergraduate engineering degree. I was working to win the trust of husband-and-wife clients who wanted to build a home above their glass factory that would be like an old-time foreman’s shack perched on a warehouse roof. However, my early analysis had demonstrated that code and structural restrictions prevented their dream from becoming a reality. The “aha” moment occurred when I proposed cantilevering the home out 50 feet over the warehouse from a concrete block base garage that would be located behind. This was an outlandish idea for a number of obvious reasons, and I risked losing the client if they thought my idea was unsound. Yet, despite my misgivings, they were intrigued. The result — the Emerald Art Glass Home, or “the mother ship” as it has come to be known — became what we believe to be the world’s longest cantilevered home. Why was this an “aha” moment? When they gave me the go ahead, I realized that although jumping off the Ledyard Bridge at midnight with my engineering major pal Ken Marra ’82 as a college junior may not have been a strong idea, sometimes risking everything is necessary in order to move forward.
— Eric Fisher ’82

My “aha” moment came when I learned that my engineering drafting professor, Edwin Sherrard, was also a violinist in the community orchestra. This meant a lot to me because here, right in front of me, was an engineer and a musician, a violinist no less. His example gave me the impetus to keep right on with my musical activities, which became a lifelong devotion to choral singing and solo activities (I was in Paul Zeller’s Glee Club for three years). I learned that an engineer can be a person of many talents, and that a well-rounded life is good for the soul (and good for those around you as well).
— Jerome B. Allyn ’59 Th’60

Several years after graduation, working at Metcalf & Eddy in Boston, I was assigned to work with Doc Sawyer on industrial waste designs of his “concepts” reports to clients. Clair Sawyer had taught at MIT for 25 years and wrote the book on sanitary chemistry (Sawyer and McCarthy). I was in awe of him and learned something every minute spent in his office (shared with a lab assistant). After tannery waste, poultry waste, wool dyeing waste, and optical grinding waste, we moved into a major metal finishing waste project (Scovill Manufacturing Co., long gone). I spent hours researching technologies and concepts applicable to our particular needs. At one juncture I was struck by the assertions of two very well-known experts who were completely contrary one to the other. Perplexed, I trotted into Doc’s office and presented him with this conundrum. He absorbed the material, observed that my assessment was quite right, lit up like a Christmas tree, and gave me an “aha” moment I have always treasured: “Young man, we are going to learn something here!” That moment has been with me for a lifetime of seeing, reading, and puzzling over conflicting expert opinion — it’s a learning experience.
— Tom Jester ’63 Th’64

Friday, November 22, 1963. President Kennedy assassinated. Students wondering if classes will be called off. Professor Taylor says that life goes on, and there will be an exam in our next methods engineering class on Tuesday. We walked in and sat down. Professor Taylor passed out newspaper clippings of the weekend’s events. The exam was to redesign the funeral for more efficiency. Using techniques learned in class, there were many things that could have been done in different order and timing that would have saved idle time and provided something to watch for the thousands of people who waited for long periods for things to happen. Those lessons of analyzing and effectively improving activities served me well throughout my careers, first 20 years with GATX in Chicago and then 15 years at Coopers & Lybrand/PricewaterhouseCoopers as a consulting partner and, even now, 10 years into retirement, in my volunteer activities.
— Rick Van Mell ’63 Th’64

Carl Long taught a course that was essentially an introduction to structural engineering, where we had to figure out the stresses on bridges and things like that. For the final paper the class was divided into groups of two and told to design a structure made out of balsa wood and Elmer’s glue that fit within a certain set of shape parameters. We were supposed to design as strong a structure as possible relative to the weight and also predict the breaking point of the structure. Randy Wallick ’69, who was the football captain of our class, and I got our only A’s in engineering when we figured out that balsa wood was such a lousy material (both inconsistent and unpredictable) that the design was irrelevant. The key was to use as much Elmer’s glue as possible. It turns out that glue has a much stronger weight-to-strength ratio than balsa wood. Because the structure was so simple to build, rather than come up with an elegant theory for how strong it would be, we simply made six of them and broke five of them ourselves. The paper we submitted was less than two pages, our structure was orders of magnitude stronger than the next best submission, and we were the only team that was able to estimate the breaking point within 50 percent. We also got the prize for the ugliest-looking structure — but that’s engineering.
— Clint Harris ’69 Th’70

When I was a Tuck/Thayer student, Tuck ran a business simulation in the fall for all of the second-year students. This simulation lasted for a week. We went to no classes. The simulation consumed us 20 hours per day for the week. Three of my classmates and I did not participate. We ran the simulation — one manager for each “world” of six companies. I managed the three world managers. Each manager took the inputs from each company in the world and entered it into the simulation. We then ran the simulation. All went well until the third evening. I pushed my managers to get one more set of data entered for each world. In one world, one critical process step was skipped and I did not catch it (and we found out from the subsequent experience that when skipping this step, recovery is not possible). A world crashed and burned prematurely. One-third of my classmates were deprived of a major learning experience. In the big picture, it was a cheap lesson for me, but a major “aha.” When doing mission-critical work, you cannot afford to overstress the system. There is a downside to fatigue, and if what is being done is critical, the downside can be disastrous.
— Mike Sulaver ’74 Tu’77 Th’77

I don’t have an engineering “aha” moment. It’s been a steady application of technology, trying to make it fit for purpose, along with steady improvements in the measurements and the answers that are derived from them.
— Steve Askey ’76 Th’77

I have had a number of “aha” moments all along my career, and it is probably why I studied engineering and why I enjoy figuring out how things work, finding solutions when things don’t work, and coming up with ways to explain and demonstrate these concepts to others. I think I became an electronics engineer due to the application of calculus to electronic circuits. I was really blown away when we converted equations from the time domain to the frequency domain to solve problems that otherwise seemed impossible. Professor Stratton’s teaching methods were key to many “aha” moments, and a solid understanding of electronics that excited and motivated me to learn more and get into circuit design when I left school.
— Kim Quirk ’82 Th’83

I discovered the power of “nice” in managing/motivating people — not only do you get world-class results, but people actually like working with you. Now I’m trying to influence other managers to adopt this and drive a culture change. I have discovered some great authors in the process: Syd Finkelstein (Tuck), Robert Sutton (Stanford).
— Sumit Guha Th’88

I find that I had little “aha” moments almost every day of my Thayer School experience and that they continue through my career. I think that is what lets me know how much and yet how little I know about engineering even today. Every engineering challenge results in a time when I finally figure out my design solution, and that is when I say, “A-ha!”
— Scott A. Sabol ’88 Th’88

Professor Stratton knew me better than I knew myself, and immediately exhorted me to get a Ph.D. I did so — not in engineering, but in accounting! Professor Stratton’s early confidence in me and Professor Hansen’s subsequent guidance played a big role in where I am today. I went on for my Ph.D. at Wharton and now teach at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
— Venky Nagar Th’90

After graduating from Dartmouth, I entered graduate school at the University of Michigan. I ended up taking a design management graduate course taught commensurately with an undergraduate engineering design course. We were given a design challenge to move a brick the greatest distance using only a prescribed set of materials. I severely underestimated the mass of the brick, so when it came time to demonstrate our designs, my device collapsed under the weight of the brick. When the results were tallied for the class, mine was the only device with a negative distance traveled! An embarrassing moment to be sure, but I learned a valuable lesson: Know your design specs!
— Durward Sobek ’91

The first thing that comes to mind when I was thinking back over engineering “aha” moments was when I was introduced to the idea of stress and strain. It made so much sense! The basic relationship between the two is so well captured on the graph where visually the modulus, yield, etc., just come to life.
— Brian Mason ’03 Th’05

I remember sitting in Thayer’s ProE lab in the basement doing work. It was a typical all-nighter spent at Thayer, and I was trying to focus on my work but this alarm kept going off for the door next to all the bike racks on the north side of Cummings. When you entered that door, you could go upstairs into the Great Hall or downstairs to the machine shop, ProE room, and project lab. Dartmouth had recently installed a campus-wide door entry system where you had to swipe your ID past a sensor to get into buildings after-hours. If doors were left open for more than 30 seconds or so, an alarm would sound until the door was closed. If you needed to brace the door open so you could go grab something heavy from your car and carry it in, everyone would have to endure the alarm until you closed it. So this alarm just kept going off because there was something wrong with the self-closer or the door, and every time somebody left, the door would remain ajar and the alarm would go off until I went up to close it. At last I decided to go figure out how to fix this. It didn’t seem there was much I could do about the door, so I started looking at the security system to figure out where all the wires were flowing to. All of a sudden I had this “aha” moment and realized there’s an electrical box on the wall that seemed new and sort of out of place. So I run down to the project lab, grab a screwdriver, and come back to see what’s inside. I loosen the screw, slide open the cover, and inside there’s just a single Piezo electric buzzer between two wires. I remember thinking to myself, “It really can’t be this easy. I can’t believe somebody installed this in an engineering school in plain sight, where sooner or later one of us would figure out how to disable it.” So I removed the buzzer, closed up the panel, and tossed the buzzer into a drawer in the project lab like it was a spare part. I went back to my work and never heard the alarm again. Months later, nobody had replaced the buzzer. I’m curious if now, several years later, anyone has yet replaced it.
— John Turner ’04 Th’07

The reason why drawings must be perfectly neat and legible is that you lose basic arithmetic skills when standing at the mill. I have cut straight through holes I just tapped because 5-2.3 does not equal 3.7.
— Nolan Reis Th’09

A project that I have been involved with in a peripheral way is a hydrogen fuel cell/electric hybrid transit bus now undergoing initial trails. It has innovative engineering features not only in the power system, including its battery technology, but also in its composite body structure. Made of a combination of fiberglass and carbon fiber, the bus has a low profile, easing passenger entry and exit. One of the most revolutionary parts of our vehicle is its propulsion system. It is powered by a combination of advanced technology batteries and hydrogen fuel cells. There is a website by Protera, primary developer of the bus, that tells more.
— John Kennedy ’53 Th’54

Six years after graduating from Thayer, I was working for the Bendix Corp. research labs in Southfield, Mich. Bendix had received a contract from NASA Huntsville for the development of a prototype lunar vehicle. I was project engineer responsible for the traction and steering drives. The mission profile called for a mobile laboratory in which the astronauts could live and also drive across the lunar terrain. One of the most significant technical challenges we faced was how to create a high torque-low speed traction drive system that would “float” the vehicle on loose lunar dust. We didn’t have any insight on the lunar soil characteristics, so we assumed we needed a vehicle with a large footprint for low soil-bearing pressure. Our wheel design consisted of a series of titanium rings or loops that, under vehicle load, would deflect. Essentially, we’d be running on a flat tire.

A scale model of our design was on the cover of the December 1964 issue of Aviation Week, along with a story. Wernher von Braun drove a full-scale vehicle chassis and the “flat tire” wheel design at the Bendix Aerospace Systems test track in Ann Arbor, Mich. NASA got a lot smarter about the lunar soil characteristics and the final 1971 Apollo 15 Boeing-designed “dune buggy” did the job. Maybe someday we’ll get back to the moon or Mars, and the mobile lab concept could come alive again.
— Ron Read ’57 Th’58

The elegant iPhone sets the standard for new products in its simplicity, ease of use, and intuitive design.
— Bill Allyn ’58 Th’59

I have three choices for visually beautiful structural solutions:

• Hopkins Center, with its wonderful boomerang reinforced concrete work that is so optimistic and encouraging in its form. The entrance, fireplace, and windows suggest that the latter half of the 20th century would be fun.
• The Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge at the northern approach to Boston is simple, elegant, inspiring.
• The Buckminster Fuller Dome, built for the Montreal World’s Fair (1967). Fuller once said he did every bit of research possible, tried every alternate iteration, tested every possible concept many times based on engineering logic and accuracy and if, in the end, the structure was not beautiful, he had failed.

— Roc Caivano ’66

Naming the problem is the most critical act in design. I was recently hired as a planning and design consultant by the directors of a large youth camp. They were embarking on a capital improvement project and were worried that the necessary approvals and permits might be jeopardized by neighbors who had complained of noise created by the camp. The directors had resigned themselves to conventional responses to noise — altered schedules, relocated or eliminated programs, and expensive sound walls. At my first meeting with the directors I asked them three questions: Why they had named the problem noise, if that was the best name for the problem, and what is “noise.” My point was that the words we use to describe what we perceive can constrain what we are able to perceive. By consciously reflecting on the meaning of the word “noise,” I felt we could probably find a different and much more elegant way to name the problem. After discussions, the problem statement became: How can we shift our neighbors’ perception of our children’s activities and energy from unknown and undesirable to understood and desirable? This was no longer a problem for architects and engineers, it was a problem for community organizers and diplomats. Through this process of re-naming the problem we avoided solutions that would have limited the camp’s activities and diverted scarce financial resources into unproductive assets such as sound barriers. Instead, we moved into strategies that would bring the community together and increase the resources available to the camp.
— Bruce Corson ’70 Th’73

I think the most incredible creative design for innovation, efficiency, and elegance in this decade is the Apple iPhone.
— Randy Lunn ’73 Th’75 Tu’75

A few years ago I directed a project to develop a clean air bulk material handling system, which ended up being patented (No. 5,639,188). In the manufacturing process for the insulated cables used in an electrical grid system, it is crucial to keep the dielectric material clean to eliminate premature failure of the cable. The weak link in the manufacturing process was the transfer of the dielectric from the railcars used to deliver it to the cable production equipment. State-of-the-art procedures in the mid-1990s called for vacuums to convey the dielectric material out of the rail cars using a single paper filter to remove all the contaminants from the ambient air. This added significant contamination to the dielectric materials. To eliminate contamination in this process, a large enclosure was built to house the railcars that contained the dielectric material. Using a series of HEPA filters, the air in the enclosure was controlled as a Class 10,000 environment. But the very elegant portion of the design was to pipe the output of the HEPA filters directly to the discharge valves on the rail cars and pressurize the air supply for conveying. This change reduced the contamination in the conveying air from approximately 10,000 to less than 1,000. The change made a measurable difference in the dielectric strength of the polyethylene material used to insulate the cables.
— Jack Howanski Th’75

I was the inventor and business sponsor of the website and results page for oceanschedules.com. The design seems commonplace today, but when we did it in mid-2006, it was considered quite impressive for its simplicity and ease of use. Go to oceanschedules.com and enter an origin port of New York and a destination port of Antwerp. The design was a finalist for the 2007 CSCMP Innovation Awards. The results page had many firsts: use of context-based ads, use of filters and sliders, and use of AJAX programming in the ocean transportation space. The multidiscipline style of the Thayer education was ideal preparation for this type of role. The site has attracted almost 13,000 registered users, with only 15 percent being in the United States.
— Harry Sangree ’79 Th’80

At my last company, we reproduced how people make credit decisions and created the fifth generation of automated decision making. Making car loans is a very complex process. In addition to applying the five C’s of credit — capital, collateral, capacity, character, and conditions — the credit granter must consider deal structure, portfolio health, and capital sources. For each credit application, a credit “buyer” must keep in mind thousands of potential combinations of related data, and then trillions of potential slices or tranches of data level combination. Using a decision tree as an example, if you have 13 data elements each with 10 slices or gradations, you might have 10,000,000,000,000 potential data level combinations. My solution was to relate together 10 data elements (by borrower-assigned values) that might actually affect repayment of the loan and combine these building blocks together to deliver answers. After we bring the data element together, the user assigns various combinations of data slices together to make scenarios the user feels are predictive. The market proof of the power of the decision engine is that the owner, World Omni (which handles Toyota financing in five southeastern states), has been able to sell its portfolio of collateralized securities for 90 cents on the dollar when other have been struggling to get 70 cents. If only I still owned the company! Venture capitalists forced the sale of the company in the years following 9/11, netting me a few thousand dollars after eight years of work. Five years later, the decision engine I built is like the recipe for Coke: They make hundreds of millions of dollars on two to three sales per year. It turns out that taking venture capital was the most expensive business decision I ever made.
— Toby Reiley ’81

I didn’t work on it, but I want the new Ducati Multistrada bike.
— Nash Ogden ’82

I worked on an integrated circuit design for a novel self-calibrating analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with Michael Coln of Analog Devices Semiconductor Inc. (ADI). The novel aspect of the design was essentially to split the ADC into two similar but not quite identical halves, with each checking the other ADC’s output. With some digital processing the ADC continuously calibrates itself in the background. I got the idea to split the ADC in this way from a few lines in Robert Frost’s poem “New Hampshire,” where he says:

She’s one of the two best states in the Union.
Vermont’s the other … And they lie like wedges,
Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,
And are a figure of the way the strong
Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,
One thick where one is thin and vice versa.

The design team received the best paper award for “A split-ADC architecture for deterministic digital background calibration of a 16b 1 MS/s ADC” at the 2005 International Solid-State Circuits Conference. There’s a full description in the December 2005 issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits — perhaps the only IEEE article ever to cite Frost’s “New Hampshire” as a reference!
— John McNeill ’83

In my previous job I was in charge of procurement for three countries (Turkey, Israel, and Palestine) at Ericsson. The items we spent the most money on were GSM Towers (which are what we hang the base stations antennas off). I initiated a redesign project that made our towers 40-percent lighter with the same deflection standard (.5-degree deflection at 140 km/hr wind speed) as the previous design. We accomplished this redesign by making the base of the tower wider. Increasing the base size initially raised the cost of the foundation and site rental cost because the tower now took up more space on the ground. We then redesigned the foundation, and that ended up being cheaper because we did not have to dig as deep for a wider foundation. Ultimately, the weight of the foundation is what matters, and since the foundation was now broader, we could make it thinner. We managed to keep the rental cost the same as before and the ultimate tower construction cost came down by half. One unexpected advantage was that we were able to make the towers simpler to erect, hence construction time came down as well.
— Kaya Kazmirci ’84

For several years I’ve been working as an engineer in the aeroelasticity group at MTU Aero Engines in Germany. We have several projects together with Pratt & Whitney in the United States and at the moment we are working on the next generation of aero engines based on the geared turbofan concept. This new engine generation — PurePower PW1000G — has been recognized by Popular Science magazine with a 2009 Best of What’s New Award in the aviation and space category. I’m proud to have contributed to this project.
— Harald Schoenenborn Th’91

I designed the Plast-toilet as a great low-cost toilet, water tank, and solar warmer for Third World countries. I’m the CEO of dvb Design + Engineering in Hyderabad, India. The Plast-toilet is an innovative solution to India’s sanitation problems. (Only one of three Indians has access to improved sanitation facilities, which presents a major health risk. It was estimated in 2002 by the World Health Organization that around 700,000 Indians die each year from diarrhea.) The Plast-toilet had to be easy to manufacture in a viable, low-cost, sustainable manner. I have used innovative ideas to build several features into the product. They are: integral wash basin; one-piece water closet, foot rest, shower tray, and toilet floor; replaceable bowl; integral towel holder, soap dish, shower shelves, mirror frame, ventilators, and window; and a door cut out of a vacuum-formed side panel.
— Darshan V. Bhatia ’92

There is one design effort that I’m still proud to have been a part of, even though it was eight years ago. It was an effort to address an extremely high warranty cost problem on the Ford F250/350/450 truck lines during the early 2000s. The problem was that the pinion seal of the rear axle was designed in a way that it actually enabled the ingestion of dirt and contamination. I was lead design engineer from Ford working with suppliers from Dana Axle and Chicago Rawhide seals. The effort we completed was a redesign of the seal lip to a triple lip design that essentially created a triple redundant protection system for the seal. We also added a metal deflector onto the axle that was a stamping. Eventually in 2003 we changed the stamping so that it wrapped around the seal itself, which deflected dirt and contamination. The total costs of all upgrades in 2001 were just over $1 per unit (while the cost of repair before the fix was more than $100). I am proud of this effort, as I see the results of it on American streets every single day even now!
— Ike Anyanwu-Ebo ’94 Th’95

On a recent trip to Dublin, Ireland, I was struck by the elegance, simplicity, and functionality of the Sean O’Casey pedestrian bridge. It adds an element of grace and a sense of texture to the waterfront area.
— Jeanne Townsend Th’97

For flat-out brilliant design, I think it’s hard to beat the AC induction motor. The induction motor has one moving part, uses two common materials (copper and steel), and requires only high-school-level physics to understand. An accurate analysis of its operation takes only one side of a sheet of paper. And yet, more than 100 years after its invention, it is still utterly ubiquitous and almost unchanged from its original form. Nikola Tesla clearly understood good design practice: Combine deep physical insight with extreme simplicity to create something fundamentally useful.
— Matt Senesky ’98 Th’99

My choice for efficient and elegant design is the direct fuel cell. It is elegant because it converts the chemical energy of natural gas directly into electricity with no moving parts other than an air intake fan. The electro-chemical process in a direct fuel cell is 47-percent efficient versus 35-percent efficient for a gas turbine generator with complex moving parts. In spring 2009, my employer, FuelCell Energy Inc., sold to South Korea a 5-megawatt power plant, currently the world’s largest fuel cell power plant.
— Joe McInerney Th’99

I hope that any mechanical engineer who has used an apple corer to simultaneously peel, core, and slice an apple was as amazed as I am every time I use it. I hope that at some point in my life I am able to design something as elegantly functional as this thing.
— Chuck Horrell ’00 Th’01

I’ve always been amazed by the Rabbit wine bottle opener. With one quick motion it pulls out the cork. And then by repeating the same motion, it somehow pushes the cork back off the corkscrew. I know this sounds a bit like an ad for the product, but as an engineer I am really fascinated and impressed by it!
— Gabe Farkas Th’02

I have been amazed by the Chicken Crib, an urban chicken coop designed and built by Andreas Stavropoulos ’02. This product reflects a growing interest in and need for producing food easily in small, urban spaces. The design is simple but elegant, blending efficient use of basic materials with precision crafting to create a durable, smart-looking coop that keeps chickens safe and healthy. Andreas will be selling Chicken Crib kits to assemble on site.
— Kate Tooke ’02

As a design engineer for utility-scale solar photovoltaic projects with Q-Cells International, I have to reconcile aesthetics with optimized power production based on site conditions and power purchase contracts. Further, large-scale renewable energy projects undergo strict permitting and environmental review processes, which forces me to think beyond the “fenceline” to include permeable boundaries to promote wildlife corridors, incorporate dual-use strategies for power production and agriculture, design for earth- and water-balanced sites, and to specify native grass species as ground cover.
— Adam Han ’03 Th’04

As a former ice hockey player for the Big Green and current product developer for Bauer Hockey, I’m probably a little biased in my selection of the recently launched Vapor X: 60 hockey stick. Our development team was responsible for taking high-performance materials developed for jets and racecars, incorporating the biomechanics and customization needs of elite players, and creating a high-performance carbon fiber ice hockey stick weighing less than a pound. While innovation in sporting goods continues to raise questions about the role of technology in sport, there are tremendous opportunities for creative problem solving and technology transfer that make product design and development both a constant challenge and a lot of fun.
— Carolyn Steele ’03

I was recently introduced to the Clock of the Long Now — an effort to build a mechanical clock that will keep accurate time for 10,000 years. They have prototyped most of the key mechanisms and even built a precursor to the final design that was started before midnight of January 1, 2000. It is a wonderful design challenge. Stainless steel may not actually be stainless over such a long time, but precious metals and high-performance alloys may be plundered. Gears can wear down and lose teeth, so they instead keep track of time using a serial adder that counts days. An electronic clock may be impenetrable to a post-apocalyptic civilization, so the works are open and entirely mechanical — within the grasp of the human mind with enough time to ponder it. The best pendulums are imprecise even over the course of a few days; this clock can resynchronize itself to local solar noon to correct itself. The engineers’ solutions are at each turn elegant and wondrous pieces of design and craftsmanship. The key thing about the project, however, is to encourage humans to think in time scales far beyond our everyday lives: not just next year or next generation but next millennium and beyond.
— Alex Streeter ’03 Th’05

As a Ph.D. student in chemical propulsion, I am always in awe of Wernher von Braun’s team and the creation of the Saturn V rocket. The development of launch vehicles is ongoing, but the current generation pales in comparison to this 1960s innovation that sent men to the moon.
— Erik Dambach ’04 Th’05

As a participant in Eaton Corp.’s engineering and technology leadership program, I worked on an emerging hybrid technology for trucks called Series Hydraulic Hybrid. It is designed to replace the conventional transmission on vehicles with a “stop-and-go” duty cycle. The system consists of an engine-mounted hydraulic pump, a hydraulic drive motor, and accumulators (tanks filled with gas that are pressurized by pumping in hydraulic fluid) for energy storage. The efficiency gains arise from the ability to run the engine at its peak efficiency point (since it is not directly connected to the wheels) and from the ability to recapture braking energy by turning the hydraulic drive motor into a hydraulic pump and refilling the accumulators. We have already delivered two vehicles to UPS for evaluation.
— Adams Baker ’06

I am currently working on developing an AC solar module at Enphase Energy. Basically, it is an “intelligent” solar panel that can be connected directly into the grid, which eliminates a lot of the complexity involved with installing solar panels. Additionally, because each panel now handles its own power, there is panel-by-panel monitoring. Each solar panel sends data over existing power lines to a central server, which monitors performance.
— Donny Zimmanck ’07 Th’08, ’09

Vertical farming is a fascinating concept. It involves large-scale agriculture in urban high-rises or “farmscrapers.” Using recycled resources and greenhouse methods such as hydroponics, these buildings would produce fruit, vegetables, edible mushrooms, and algae year-round. This would allow traditional outdoor farms to revert to a natural state and reduce the energy costs needed to transport foods to consumers.
— Laura Weyl Th’08

For more photos visit our Alumni Projects set on Flickr.

I am the director of systems engineering at Angel Medical Systems. We are developing an implantable cardiac monitoring and alerting system that is designed to warn cardiac patients of potentially life-threatening heart conditions. After Thayer I then went on to get my M.S.E.E. at the University of Illinois, with a concentration on control theory and a thesis involving microprocessor applications. I then started working at Bell Labs, working on the very first commercial fiber optic transmission system. I started as a circuit designer but quickly found my calling as a systems engineer. My role through 20-plus years and at least three generations of fiber optic transmissions systems was in writing requirements and managing the high-level architecture and design of such systems. I then somewhat serendipitously landed in a newly formed medical device startup company, Angel Medical Systems, where my role has been primarily that of systems engineer. My main responsibility, particularly early on, was taking the fundamental ideas of the founders and specifying all the details for the software developers, so they could write the code for a reliable heart attack detector with high sensitivity (few false negatives) and high selectivity (few false positives). It was very interesting to me that the microcontroller we use as the heart of our implantable device has capabilities similar to the one I used for my B.E. project so many years ago.
— Steve Johnson ’75, Th’76

I am working in a field that blends engineering sciences into a form of high-tech drug discovery. My company, Trellis Bioscience, discovers antibodies from human blood that become therapeutics.
— Stote Ellsworth ’76

As a partner at Vanguard Ventures, I have invested in medical device companies. One, Asthmatx, produces a device designed to improve the quality of life and reduce asthma attacks in adults with severe asthma without the use of drugs. Results of the Asthma Intervention Research 2 trial demonstrated statistically significant improvements in quality of life measurements and reductions in attacks and emergency room visits in adults with severe asthma who underwent bronchial thermoplasty delivered by the Alair system.
— Tom McConnell ’76

I wrote the New Hampshire Mammography Network Registration database in 1996 and rewrote it a few years ago. Also, my firm, Sylvan Advantage, supports video software for medical simulation.
— Richard Akerboom ’80 Th’82

I have more than 20 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry, including evaluation of emerging technologies and leading technical development focused on business goals, organizational development, and the management of strategic partnerships. I am now CEO of ImmuRx. Previously I was CEO of MIST Inc., a breast cancer imaging company, and before that I led the development of a genomics-based technology platform at Millennium Pharmaceuticals. ImmuRx has just leased space in the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center. We are now trying to use a combination of agonists — molecules that bind to receptors to improve their function — in a metastatic melanoma vaccine that stimulates two receptors of the immune system at once to advance a kind of pincer move on cancer cells. While ImmuRx is working on fighting melanoma, applications could be broad, with potential to target cancer stem cells, bacterial or viral infections, and HIV/AIDS viruses.
— Dave DeLucia ’80

I am president and owner of the Atlas Group. We’re implementing a health care CIO dashboard and associated information technology [IT] process improvements in order to prepare IT infrastructure for electronic records, advanced diagnostics, etc. Our target market is small to medium organizations.
— Mark Tuttle ’80 Th’82

I have done venture capital investing in health care for the last 22 years — most of it at Morgan Stanley Ventures and now at Saints Capital. Twice I have teamed up with John Pavlidis Th’89 to build medical products companies. John was CEO and I was primary investor and chairman of R2 Technology, which makes products that significantly improve the detection of breast cancer from mammograms. Together we built the company and sold it to Hologic. We have teamed up again on a company named Estech, which makes products for minimally invasive cardiac surgery.
— Scott Halsted ’81 Th’82

I work within the facilities and real estate division of New York-Presbyterian. My primary focus is capital planning for facilities infrastructure, including campus utility distribution systems, central plants, and building systems and structures. We are in the middle of developing an eight- to 10-year infrastructure capital reinvestment program that could total as much as $600 million. I’m back in the world of facilities engineering, despite my background as an architect and project management consultant. During the past 15 months with the hospital, I have drawn heavily on my problem-solving and engineering training to quickly learn a new scale of equipment and planning.
— Glenn A. Grube ’82 Th’83

As a professor of materials science and engineering at Johns Hopkins University, part of my research involves characterizing the mechanical properties of biomaterials. While we have focused on human enamel during the last decade, we are expanding our studies to include other biomaterials such as cartilage.
— Tim Weihs ’83 Th’85

For the last 15 years I have owned a company, World Medical Equipment, that refurbishes operating room equipment such as surgical tables, lights, and sterilizers. We shipped equipment to 42 states last year. I did my B.E. thesis under John Collier, designing instrumentation to put in artificial hips.
— Bob Mighell ’85 Th’86

I am on the board of directors of KidsCareEverywhere, which is focused on improving the delivery of pediatric medical care in developing countries. Our current primary project is delivering pediatric emergency medical diagnostic software to developing countries (Vietnam and Cambodia at the present time). We place this advanced software application — which contains a complete set of diagnostic and treatment data and procedures that are all peer reviewed by global experts — in the hands of local clinics in underserved areas. This application of modern technology to understaffed areas significantly improves the quality of care and the knowledge and effectiveness of the local staff. My role involves actively helping with technology distribution models. My day job focuses on clean-tech companies and venture capital.
— Eric Miller Th’85

After 12 years in the medical device industry and eight years in high tech, I have gone into business with a partner to form IMC Services, providing Internet marketing services to small- and mid-sized scientific instrumentation and medical technology companies.
— Carrie Fraser ’86 Th’87

I am currently associate professor and residency program director in the department of emergency medicine at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center in Shreveport. I am the person responsible for training medical school graduates in three years to be emergency physicians who are able to practice anywhere on their own. I currently have 21 residents (seven per year). I developed our program from scratch in 2003 when I originally came to Shreveport from a faculty position at the Medical College of Wisconsin. The education that I received in analyzing systems while at Thayer has helped me tremendously in understanding physiology, which I use every day while seeing patients in our emergency department. Also, faculty that I met at the Thayer School provided role models for me that I referred to when I became an educator. I particularly remember the teaching styles of Professors Horst Richter and Lee Lynd as being the most inspirational.
— Thomas K. Swoboda ’88 Th’88, M.D.

I work for Boston Scientific in the cardiac rhythm management area (implantable defibrillators, pacemakers, and cardiac resynchronization devices). I am the VP of business strategy, responsible for decisions regarding new product and new technology investments in our portfolio. Medical devices are a highly regulated space. Given the lead time in development, testing, and regulatory review, the quality of these up-front investment decisions are critical. I weigh the potential patient benefit (symptoms, mortality), resulting market size and potential adoption, and overall benefit to the health-care system against several risks (clinical, competitive, etc.) and a finite investment pool. Thayer prepared me well for this role, as success is based on an appreciation and understanding of technical development across multiple disciplines and an understanding of economic modeling, decision analysis, and portfolio management that I began to develop in the Thayer M.E.M. program (and later supplemented with an M.B.A).
— Peter Sommerness ’90 Th’91

In 2002, I founded Endless Loop Software in Gainesville, Florida with my husband Peter Schoaff (Cornell ’90). With a B.E. and an M.E.M. from Thayer, I wanted to bring ideas and innovations from academia to the marketplace. Medical and public health-related software projects have been a great opportunity to contribute leadership based on our broad engineering, computer science, and business background. One of our earliest projects involved working with faculty at the University of Florida on a Web-based clinical research platform. That application was eventually licensed to Clinipace and is now known as Tempo. From its initial start-up phase, we worked closely with Clinipace, applying our extensive experience in taking ideas from concept to production-scale commercial quality systems. Clinipace is now a successful digital clinical research organization that focuses on improving the management of clinical research in order to save money and time while empowering project stakeholders to make informed, data-driven decisions. Recently Endless Loop Software has begun exploring opportunities to assist international non-profit organizations with the management, evaluation, and assessment of public health initiatives. Increasing innovation and improving efficiency of health care in low-resource areas is our shared goal.
— Christine Baldanzi Schoaff ’90 Th’92

I started a company recently, ODOS (which comes from the Latin abbreviation for “right eye, left eye”) Industries Inc., and am working to develop and market electronic medical records for the eye-care industry. I’m also a practicing eye surgeon.
— Kevin Cranmer ’92, M.D.

Since founding Acumen in August 2002, we have received FDA clearance on three products, published a number of scientific papers, and established a strategic relationship with Medtronic, one of the largest distributors of medical devices in the world. I am the inventor of the Insight endocardial visualization catheter, and was involved in early-stage IP development and bench-top prototyping. I am the contributing inventor of the Spirit and C315 lead delivery catheters. As founder, president, and CEO of Acumen, I raised $12 million and managed the company from product concept through development, regulatory clearance, and finally product distribution.
— Nick Mourlas ’92 Th’93

I have found my way from engineering into public health. After I left Thayer I went down to Boston to work in a biotech firm in toxicology. During the evenings I finished an M.P.H. in epidemiology and biostatistics at Boston University. I left the biotech firm and started a full-time doctoral program in occupational epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and graduated with a Sc.D. in 2000. I am now a principal owner of Colden Corp., an environmental health, industrial hygiene, and safety firm. As an occupational epidemiologist I help my clients figure out why people get sick at work. We work in heavy industry and institutional settings such as educational facilities and hospitals, as well as network television and major motion picture sets. I get to see how things are made and produced every day (food, television shows, power, glass, movies, paper, pharmaceuticals). It is the perfect combination of engineering analyses and medicine — I identify the hazards in a process or environment and the methods to mitigate or engineer out the hazard and understand what health effects are possible.
— Shannon R. Magari Th’94

I’m an anesthesiologist at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. I have participated in some medical device development and currently am one of four people on a patent for an ultrasound probe holder to facilitate the placement of regional anesthetics. I also use my fluid dynamics training every day when I am caring for cardiac patients in the utilization of transesophageal echocardiography and pressure transducers for intraoperative assessment and management. Yet, what I still love the most is taking care of patients. What I use every day that I learned through Thayer is the analytical framework of approaching a problem and the process of constructing a solution. This is where my engineering experience has not only been very useful to me, but, most importantly, it has benefited my patients.
— Brian Spence ’95 Th’96, M.D.

The Minneapolis-based company I work for, Sophrona, offers online patient communication software to ophthalmology practices nationwide. I handle the strategic and operational management and the development of Sophrona’s Sage Portal, a customizable, secure, online communication portal for patients.
— Marc-Francois Bradley ’96

After designing consumer telescopes for five years, I became a senior designer at a medical device company. I came to appreciate the high-level design and quality work ethic that goes into designing medical devices. After being employed there for five years, I was inspired to provide more value to my former employer and other clients by forming my own niche design team, Dandler Design, which specializes in designing medical devices. My background is in mechanical design, and my firm can handle projects from start to finish: concept definition, industrial design (the artistic “vision” for the product), mechanical engineering, management of vendor relationships, and production start-up, both in the United States and abroad. Right now we’re involved in developing a hand-held acne gadget, Claro; an ultrasound device; and a complex automated external defibrillator. Each of these is in a different stage of development. I manage about 10 engineers, most of whom work for me remotely. I really enjoy the minimalist infrastructure of running a company from my iPod touch, laptop, and cellphone!
— Andrés Dandler ’97 Th’98

I currently work as a program manager at HeartWare Inc., which makes left ventricular assist devices. My role is to manage all activities required to get the devices from a concept stage through clinical trials, and, ultimately, to commercialization worldwide.
— Heather Harries Th’97

After completing my Ph.D. in biological engineering at MIT and a postdoctoral fellowship in a cardiology lab, I am now an assistant professor and associate biophysicist at Harvard Medical School/Brigham and Women’s Hospital, while also teaching a biomechanics class at MIT. My research focuses on studying the effect of mutations that cause muscular dystrophies on the mechanical properties of biological cell (e.g. muscle cells) and how these changes can contribute to the disease. In particular, we are studying how mutations in nuclear envelope proteins, such as lamin, can render cells more sensitive to mechanical stress and affect their mechanotransduction signaling. Insights gained from this work can lead to a better understanding of the molecular mechanism underlying laminopathies, a diverse group of diseases including Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy, Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, and familial partial lipodystrophy. To achieve these goals, we are developing novel experimental techniques to study nuclear mechanical properties in intact cells and isolated nuclei, investigate the physical coupling between the nucleus and the cytoskeleton, and examine how changes in these properties can affect the cellular response to mechanical stimulation.
— Jan Lammerding Th’97

I am a postdoc at UC Berkeley, using engineering approaches to study HIV biology. I recently accepted a job as assistant p­­rofessor of biomedical engineering at Yale, where I will establish my own lab to pursue related research on host-virus interactions. Biological systems are characterized by complex networks of chemical and physical processes about which we have incomplete information. Engineering approaches — including quantitative experimental measurements, model-driven analysis, and rational approximations — are particularly well suited to advancing our understanding and control over biological network function. My research applies engineering principles to understand how viruses, particularly HIV, rewire chemical networks that control host cell communication leading to viral pathogenesis. A better understanding of how viruses alter cell communication might allow us to identify novel anti-viral targets and design more effective treatment strategies.
— Kathryn Miller-Jensen ’97 Th’98

I am an associate professor in the biomedical engineering department at Vanderbilt University. I do research on the elastic properties of soft tissue in murine systems concerned with breast cancer and tibia fracture healing. I also do work in image-guided surgery of the brain, liver, and kidney, and I work in the imaging field of elastography. I am a co-founder of a company that sells an FDA-approved image-guided liver surgery system — the only one of its kind.
— Michael I. Miga Th’99, Ph.D.

I have been involved with medical device engineering for the last eight years. The company I work for, Cardica, designs and develops products for facilitating open-chest and closed-chest (totally endoscopic) bypass surgery anastomoses. Our products are incredibly cool and complex mechanical systems.
— Nate White ’99

I worked for three years at Stryker Orthopaedics. I worked on acetabular implants while in-house and then specialized in prototype instrumentation as a consultant. I have since quit and am in my third year of medical school at the Mayo Clinic. I will probably make it back to engineering someday. Bill Shields ’03 Th’04 still works at Stryker as an engineer, and Nick LaVigna ’00 Th’02 is in the field as a technical sales rep after designing Stryker’s hip navigation system from the engineering standpoint.
— Brian Graner ’01 Th’02

I work at Myriad Genetics as a process engineer. Patients with a family history of breast or colon cancer consult with the doctors about genetic factors that can contribute to their risk of contracting those types of cancer. Their blood is drawn and sent to us. We analyze the blood for mutations in specific genes that are known to have a profound impact on a patient’s likelihood of getting cancer. To handle the large volume of samples, we employ robotics and automation in an assembly line to assemble the reactions. As a process engineer, I ensure that our assembly line is running efficiently.
— Ben Miller ’01 Th’03

I work in a field combining engineering and medicine. I am about to start my third post-graduate year of study in orthopedic surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. With a degree in engineering sciences and biology from the College and an M.D. from Dartmouth Medical School, I feel well prepared for a career as an orthopedic surgeon. My research interests focus on the biologic response to wear particle debris from total joint replacements, and clinical outcomes of surgical techniques in orthopedic surgery.
— Derek R. Jenkins ’02 DMS’06, M.D.

I develop vaccines as an associate director of product development at Emergent Biosolutions in Maryland.
— Katya Kovalskaia Th’02

I am a software engineer, specializing in hardware interfaces, for Medtronic Navigation in Colorado, engineering software for surgical navigation systems. The systems are used by surgeons in the operating room to help navigate instruments through the body. It’s kind of like GPS for brain surgery! My last project was to modify our system so it can be used in conjunction with surgical microscopes.
— Erin Morse ’02 Th’03

For the past three-plus years I have worked on many different medical devices through conception, design, and production — including transcutaneous skin vaccinations, a drug delivery device for weekly in-home injection, and a non-invasive temperature measurement device.
— Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05

I work as a manufacturing engineer for Pall Corp., which manufactures a wide range of filters and filtration systems, including water filters, air filters, and biopharmaceutical filters. All kinds of vaccines and drugs are made using our products. I currently support production of our blood filter media. In addition to daily troubleshooting on the shop floor, I focus on continuous improvement projects, using lean and six sigma tools. (I was certified by Dartmouth Six Sigma.) We have used the lean concept of visual factory, in particular, to facilitate flow and increase productivity and throughput.
— Julie Matteini ’03 Th’05

I work as a product development engineer for Stryker Orthopaedics. I design and develop new implants and instruments for total hip replacement surgeries. I spend most of my time working with orthopedic surgeons to develop new products and with our manufacturing engineers to figure out how to make them. Once we have a validated manufacturing process, I develop and perform tests that ensure the product’s function and strength. This testing is then submitted to the FDA or other regulatory agencies to obtain product approval. Working with orthopedic surgeons has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of my job, due to the highly collaborative environment. I have had the pleasure of collaborating with some of the country’s most innovative surgeons, which has resulted in some very exciting and beneficial products. There is nothing more rewarding than watching a surgeon I have worked with for a number of years use a new product we invented to help a patient.
— Bill Shields ’03 Th’04

I’m a project coordinator at Anshen + Allen, an architectural firm in Boston that designs healthcare, academic, and research buildings. One of our showcase projects is the Green Patient Room, a healing environment that uses green materials and technologies, connects the indoors with the outdoors, and deinstitutionalizes the healthcare environment. I helped create 3-D models and a life-sized mock-up of the room that travels to different cities and trade shows to demonstrate what’s possible. Within the Green Patient Room, there is a menu of solutions and options that hospitals can customize to their particular settings. At Dartmouth, I majored in engineering and studio art. While working at Anshen + Allen, I have become LEED certified and I am currently in the process of becoming a certified architect.
— Patrick McCarthy ’04

I’m working on my Ph.D. in chemical engineering at Stanford. We try to produce proteins at high yield using an in-vitro system. We work with proteins that are difficult to produce in living cells due to improper folding, cell toxicity, etc. I have been working on lymphoma vaccines and novel cancer diagnostics. I have been trying to optimize our in-vitro (or cell-free) system to maximize yields of certain protein targets. The real-world applications are in patient-specific cancer vaccines (specifically for B-cell lymphoma) and for stem cells. For stem cells, the proteins we have tried to produce could help reprogram fibroblast cells (skin cells) into stem cells, which could circumvent the need to destroy an embryo in order to generate stem cells. The biggest challenges have been learning to develop my own projects and experiments without having specific protocols or mentors to follow. As with most things, critical thinking and persistence have probably helped the most.
— John Welsh ’04 Th’05

I’m working on my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering with a focus on tissue engineering. My thesis is on uncovering some key players in embryonic development and applying that knowledge to create steroid-producing tissue through several means: by directed differentiation of embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, reprogramming of ES and iPS cells, and transdifferentiation of terminally differentiated cells. The goal of the project is to set the foundation for a cell-based therapy for individuals with steroid insufficiency resulting from either congenital defects or cancer. The research I did at Thayer really set a strong foundation of problem-solving skills, applying unique approaches, and examining a problem from a variety of angles. I hope to use my Ph.D. as a foundation for a career in academics.
— Jaime Mazilu ’05 Th’06

I am the information security manager for Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. My responsibility is to make sure the organization is compliant with the HIPAA security rule by building an information security program that attempts to identify all of the IT security risks to the organization and recommend and oversee the implementation of measures to mitigate those risks. Information security is a complex and rapidly changing field; hospitals are highly regulated complex organizations. When you combine the two domains, it can quickly be overwhelming. To someone outside the field, you may not be aware just how many automated processes are handling much of the work inside a hospital. For example, when you visit your doctor and get your blood drawn, the sample is placed into a machine that performs millions of tests and automatically routes the results back into your electronic medical record. Tracking available beds, dispensing medications, generating laboratory results, and conducting radiology exams are just some of the myriad processes that are automated within a hospital. Protecting those computer systems requires full-time staff who are dedicated to the effort. The trend toward greater inter-operability and communication between hospitals will greatly aid the provision of health care but can also introduce vulnerabilities. If properly mitigated, the risk is worth the reward.
— Doug Madory Th’06

I am a management consultant with L.E.K. Consulting, and I recently worked on a growth strategy for a leading medical devices company, outlining strategies for becoming a global leader in its blood collection systems division.
— Mayank Agrawal Th’08

I am doing my Ph.D. in biomedical engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, though I am still a rotation student and haven’t started thesis work yet. As part of a class project and in conjunction with one of the research groups in the B.M.E. department, we just finished a prototype automated therapeutic hypothermia machine for use in animal experiments. The lab is studying how therapeutic hypothermia can be applied to the treatment of cardiac arrest. At Thayer I worked primarily on projects involving robotics and electronics. I became interested in biomedical engineering largely because I was thinking about the future; the main fields robotics is used in are military, industry, consumer products, and medicine. I chose to go into medical robotics since this seemed like a noble cause and an area with a huge potential for expansion.
— Kevin Olds ’07 Th’08

Engineer at Work: The Life of a Medical Physicist

If you’re lucky, you’ll go through your whole life without encountering a medical physicist. If you’re a cancer patient, you might come across one but not realize it. Few people know that medical physicists play a crucial part in the design and accurate delivery of radiation therapy.

One procedure I handle is the intravenous delivery of glass microspheres containing Ytrium-90, used to treat liver cancer. The microspheres are infused into the liver via a catheter inserted into the femoral artery through a small incision in the leg and guided to the hepatic artery by fluoroscopy. I spend mornings in the “hot lab,” where the exact dose for the patient is calculated and measured. In the operating room, I set up the delivery device and, with the assistance of a physician, ensure delivery of the total dose. I use a Geiger-Müller device or scintillator to monitor the delivery of radiation and survey areas and personnel that may have come into contact with the radioelements. Afterward I collect all contaminated material and return it to the hot lab for proper disposal.

I also manage the delivery of high-energy photons or electrons for external beam therapy. About 100 patients are treated daily at DHMC on one of four linear accelerators. One procedure that uses these accelerators is stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), in which high doses of radiation are precisely deposited in the brain via carefully oriented external beams. SRS is given to eradicate brain tumors. Working with a radiation oncologist and neurosurgeon, the medical physicist is responsible for localizing the target, designing the plan to treat the lesion and miss normal structures, and delivering the treatment. The day of treatment, a light aluminum alloy frame is fixed to the patient’s skull with plastic pins. This frame is visible in the imaging equipment and is used to give an exact set of coordinates for the target. Aided by specialized software, the physicist uses the image set and advanced algorithms to plan delivery of the desired dose to the patient’s lesion by manipulating beam orientation, intensity, and size. A long series of tests and dry runs ensures that the radiation will be produced and delivered as planned. When the patient is finally brought in for the procedure, all the checks are repeated with the patient in position. Only then is radiation delivered.

Whether or not patients are aware of us, we medical physicists are there: checking, verifying, double-checking, measuring, adjusting, and improving every step of the treatment — and proud to be engineers.

— Christina Skourou Th’06, Department of Radiation Oncology, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center

For more photos, visit our Alumni Projects and Engineering in Medicine sets on Flickr.

Want Us To Ask You Just One Question?

We email our question to alumni. To be included, send your email address to dartmouth.engineer@dartmouth.edu.

The computer is by far the most impressive invention that I have seen and since graduation.
— Charlie Weinberg ’42 Th’43

The spiral tunnels on the Canadian Pacific Railway near Lake Louise. To gain elevation, it makes two complete circles inside the mountain.
— Tom Streeter ’44 TT’48

Fly ash from large coal-burning electric power plants has the same chemistry and uses as the volcanic ash the Romans used in their aqueducts. My company made a patented road base material from lime, fly ash, and various aggregates called Pozzolanic road base. It was a way to use products that otherwise would have ended up in landfills. The patent on lime-fly ash road base material impressed me and had an effect on my life in the 1960s.
— Craig J. Cain ’45 Th’45

What excites me are investigations of electromagnetic principles that permit low-energy electrolysis of water into its constituent parts, oxygen and hydrogen, and the controlling of the H2 output to power or increase the efficiency of an engine or motor. There are some currently in operation. Then there is BlackLight Power’s power source that extracts heat from the manipulation of the hydrogen atom to a fractional quantum state. Both 1- and 50-kilowatt units have been validated by an outside lab. The only input is water. Further, there’s the employment of “negative energy.” These new means of producing energy will power our world in the future.
— Ken Carpenter ’48 TT’50

I’m nominating the open-dredged caissons under the piers of the Huey P. Long Bridge here in New Orleans. This construction innovation is now fairly widely used, but in 1930 most caisson piers were pneumatically sunk to their founding. I’m now involved with widening that bridge without increasing the foundations, and am basing my confidence on the fine geotechnical work done in the 1920s on the site by Karl Terzhagi. Bill Kimball, then an associate professor and eventually dean of the Thayer School, was involved in the analysis. He wrote a fine paper on the geotechnical aspects of the bridge.
— William B. Conway ’52 Th’54

The greatest engineering achievement in my lifetime was Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon on July 20, 1969 and safe return to Earth. The Internet is another. My view is biased because of my 50-plus years in both the aviation and computers/communications fields.
— Pete Knoke ’55 Th’56

The solid-state computer impresses me the most. When I was at Thayer, there was just one chapter in one book that discussed transistors. That invention made possible the integrated circuit, and that made programmable computers possible. Throughout my career with the Naval Research Laboratory and then NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, I used these developments to build ever more capable telemetry systems for launch vehicles and satellites.
— Ron Muller ’55 Th’56

My late husband, Gene White ’56, would agree with me that in all our years of living and working in developing countries, three inventions stand out: the radio, the bicycle, and the sewing machine. Never did we encounter a person who did not want a radio or yearn for a bicycle if all their travel was by foot, donkey, or bus. Likewise, no one needed to be convinced that a sewing machine was a practical item!
— Betsy White (Mrs. Gene White ’56)

Velcro. Taking a look at nature and embodying the idea into a useful closure is quite exceptional.
— Charlie Schneider ’57 TT’58

The steam engine in the 1800s. It was a power source that could be located anywhere and enabled society to move away from oceans and rivers.
— Don Baker ’61 Th’62

GPS is my favorite. I have always loved maps, but GPS puts me into the map. It is a transformative invention.
— Bruce Johnson ’61 Th’62

The most impressive engineering feat that I found during my engineering career was four-color offset lithographic printing. The idea that one can create a rainbow of color by putting dots on a page using just four colors is amazing. It is hard to believe that using a photographic plate where the desired patterns are hydrophobic and attract ink, but the rest of the plate is hydrophillic and kept wet with a slurry, lets one put ink on paper. Further, achieving registration with four separate rollers at paper speeds of more than 2,000 feet per minute is an accomplishment.
— Harris McKee ’61 Th’63

The production of a practical helicopter by Igor Sikorsky in 1939 led to the multi-billion dollar industry serving societal and defense needs throughout the world.
— David O. Smith ’61 Th’62

The Boeing 747. It’s amazing it could get off the ground.
— Frank Barber ’62

Has to be the Archimedes screw. Its impact on agriculture in the Eastern Mediterranean from 300 B.C. until the full development of Europe is only outweighed by the development of fasteners in the Industrial Age.
— Bill Reilly ’67

My joint entry: airplanes and air conditioning. They allowed the full civilization of Florida and California. I guess you also have to tip your hat to the integrated circuit; most of its effects are invisible but also everywhere around us.
— Peter Fahey ’68 Th’69

The two inventions that are most significant to my life may be the TV and the automobile, but they are continuing to adversely alter American society, which isn’t fascinating at all; so lets skip those two. Let’s go with the Hubble Space Telescope. Why does the Hubble fascinate me? Because of this!

Imagine what we might have seen in the cosmos if the engineers hadn’t screwed it up by grinding the lens backwards. Then consider how amazingly they fixed it. I hope this fascinates you too!
— Steve Franzeim ’68 Th’72

The hybrid-electric drive train for vehicles, because it allows for recycling of energy. This may save mankind from itself. If cold fusion ever works, I’ll change my vote.
— Chris Yule ’70

Underwater concrete pylons for bridges.
— Larry Lewis ’71

The Great Pyramid of Giza.
— Stephen Flanders Th’73

The photographic camera. Photos preserve today’s events as well as events of billions of years ago from the farthest reaches of the universe. Photos can evoke profound emotions, making the camera the greatest emotionally related invention, just ahead of the phonograph.
— Steve Arcone Th’77

Favorite of all time: Wright brothers. Newest favorite: Stanley Williams, Hewlett Packard researcher leading the team that discovered the memristor, a fundamental physical component that interacts with electricity in a unique, non-linear way. If memristors can be developed, they may unlock a whole new generation of electronics.
— George Eger ’77

There is no more important human occupation than farming. And nothing has done more to make agriculture possible than the humble hoe. Even the most modern and sophisticated of agricultural plows are nothing more than a large-scale hoe.
— Nelson Valverde ’77

Watermills and windmills are simple and require little tech to deliver local power.
— Knud Eric Engelsted ’78

A case can be made for the Brown & Sharpe universal milling machine. While you don’t see them around anymore, the B&S universal performed an astounding array of work. It could make virtually any machine part or tool — and all motion was controlled mechanically.
— Steve Wyckoff ’78 Th’79

In aviation, I’d have to say the SR-71 Blackbird. It had stealth in the early 1960s, and nothing has been done since that performs anywhere near it. Charles Babbage’s calculating machine is another “ahead of the rest” invention. He couldn’t get it to work because machining wasn’t accurate enough in the day, but someone recently built one and it worked.
— Richard Akerboom ’80 Th’82, ’85

The Panama Canal was a huge project but brilliant in its simplicity. In its day, the lake that was created (Gatun) was the largest ever. The above-sea-level lake reduced the excavation from about 50 miles to only about 10. Many of the large earth-movers we take for granted today were developed specifically for the Galliard cut. The controls managing the water and locks stand basically unchanged for almost a hundred years, and gravity basically powers the entire operation. I am biased, as I’m from the former U.S. Panama Canal Zone.
— William Hale ’80 Th’93

While a graduate student at Thayer School during the early 1980s, I was given access to the ARPAnet, the beginning of the Internet.
— John Hoh ’81 Th’82, ’84

The Internet will be no less important than the invention of the printing press.
— Kim Quirk ’82 Th’83

The Panama Canal — first use of mass-poured concrete among other firsts, and an incredible feat of construction logistics to implement an excellent engineering idea (don’t build a sea-level canal, as the French tried to do, but build a lake and two sets of locks). It remains an engineering marvel for the ages.
— Mike A. Adams ’83

The Wright brothers’ airplane and first successful flight. I am biased, having gotten my commercial pilot license from the Lebanon airport while studying at Thayer. (Now as as president of Performance Motion Devices, in Lincoln, Mass., I’m too busy to get in much flying.)
— Greg Woods Th’83

The invention of semiconductors impresses me most. These are critical to computers, iPods, cell phones, and even today’s automobiles.
— Mark Jones ’84 Th’85

The gramophone.
— Alex Hartov Th’88

My favorite invention of all times is the cell phone. I remember my joy when wireless phones came about. Freedom from the cord! Most important invention of all times, though — AC electricity: home-delivered and it powers everything (including my cell phone).
— Doris Martínez Th’91

The wheel.
— Duncan McElroy ’91

The Toyota production system has inspired much of my work during the last 15 years. It is the most effective system of production devised in human history, and is being emulated by organizations worldwide. The concepts behind the system seem full of paradoxes, yet when they work in concert, they create a powerful, self-managing, ever-improving system.
— Durward K. Sobek II ’91

I am impressed by the Thermos. If you put something hot in it, it keeps it hot. If you put something cold in it, it keeps it cold. How does it know?
— Erik Bliss ’92

Cochlear implants let deaf kids grow up listening and talking, and gives adults who lose their hearing the ability to retain their relationships and productivity! I’ve devoted my career to this technology, first as an audiologist, then academic researcher, and now strategist for the leading manufacturer of implantable hearing solutions.
— Kevin Franck ’92

Most of us could not do our jobs without our computer. It has become the most central tool of our lives.
— Annie Kaskade ’92

While reading my 4-year-old son a book on the first moon landing, I was struck with how amazing it was to engineer the equipment that carried people to the surface of the moon and safely back to Earth for the first time. In addition to working in uncharted territory, the engineers had a tight time frame and didn’t have access to the computing power that exists today.
—Laura Iwan ’93 Th’94

The Golden Gate Bridge.
— Keith Lenden ’95 Th’95

Space travel was and still is an amazing feat. And the Apollo spacecraft had less computing power than my cell phone.
— Vic Almgren ’94 Th’96

U.S. Patent No. 3,605,843 (1971): Cashew nut sheller. Inventors: Thayer adjunct professor Robert C. Dean Jr. and Richard W. Couch Jr. ’64 Th’65. The first line of the abstract says it all: “A method and apparatus for removing explosively the kernel of a cashew or similar nut from its shell while isolating the kernel from contamination.”
— Solomon G. Diamond ’97 Th’98

Uniform screw threads that are easy to manufacture and validate. These didn’t exist in the United States before 1864. I grew up taking the basic engineering infrastructure for granted, that we can all go to the hardware store and get nuts and bolts in order to fasten two objects together. No research required! How I wish we had such a technology base for biology!
— Drew Endy Th’98

The boat is the most important invention ever created. (I’m biased, because my Thayer M.S. thesis involved fluid simulation of an America’s Cup yacht for Professor Horst Richter.) The boat allowed humans to reach Australia 40,000 years ago, spread down the coasts of North and South America 13,000 years ago, and colonize the Polynesian Islands 5,000 years ago. The shipping trade in the Mediterranean Sea supported the rise of the Greek and Roman Civilizations. The global economy started with European explorers in sailing ships. The bulk of trade goods are still carried in ships.
— Joe McInerney Th’99

The plow enabled man to start cultivation, which led to civilization.
— Holden Chi Hoon Lee ’00 Th’01

My favorite invention is the personal computer. My second favorite is the jet airplane. The two together allow me to live, work, and play anywhere in the world I want.
— Will Schoen ’00

The original Ferris wheel was designed and built in 1893. The size of the wheel impresses me — 264 feet high, weighing more than 2 million pounds, and able to carry 2,160 people at one time. People marveled at how such a delicate-looking structure could be so strong and not waver in even gale force winds that tore apart the roofs of buildings and other structures during the fair.
— Lauren Scopaz ’00

The total knee replacement.
— Derek R. Jenkins ’02 DMS’06

As a feat of imaginative engineering: Tarski’s undefinability theorem of 1936 on the limits of truth. For elegance and usefulness: solar water disinfection (SODIS), developed by Martin Wegelin in the early 1990s. My personal favorite: nature’s evolutionary engineering of a tree. It is a masterpiece of simple thermodynamic efficiency, and energy degradation.
— Daniel Bilar Th’03

I am amazed at large structures like skyscrapers and huge planes. On a smaller note, the iPhone is pretty amazing, too.
— Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05

Airplanes. Every time I am in a metal tube with wings I can’t help but to look out the window and marvel at how we ever managed to make this happen.
— Peter Rice ’05 Th’06

I am glad Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press. Paper, given to us by the Chinese, is one of the most important inventions.
— Subha Srinivasan Th’05

A windmill built by William Kamkwamba, when he was 14, to power two light bulbs and a radio for his family of 20 in the remote village of Malawi, Africa. He built it by reading a physics book!
— Afua Amoah Th’06

My favorite invention is air conditioning. Without it, there are a lot of places we couldn’t comfortably live.
— Glenn T. Nofsinger Th’06

One recent invention caught my attention: Last week people broadcast a football game live, in 3-D.
— Trinell Ball Th’07

I’d go with the Internet. It has revolutionized how we communicate, work, shop, bank, learn, teach, etc.
— Thach Bui Th’07

Apollo 11 and the Panama Canal.
— Juan Pablo Fernández Th’07

The bicycle. The design of modern bicycles is so simple that it is beautiful. Every part of a bike — the frame, crank, crank arms, brakes — has a function that is integral to its use. The simple mechanics allow for a robustness and reliability that very few other inventions can achieve. Bicycles made 30 years ago are still used daily with only minimal maintenance. Computers, cell phones, and even cars, become obsolete every five years.
— Calvin D. Krishen Th’07

For more photos, visit our Alumni and Research and Innovations pages on Flickr.

I am the oldest member and former president of The Economic Round Table of Los Angeles. This is a group of prominent executives who meet once a week to discuss world affairs and economics. My talk on energy was an urgent warning that we need to do something now since nuclear, clean coal, solar, and all the other forms of energy take years to put into place. Also, well-meaning citizens are preventing us from using all the gas and petroleum resources we have on this continent.
– Henry C. Keck ’43 Th’44 Tu’44

I am retired but retain a keen interest in energy issues, particularly petroleum consumption. I have been writing on this subject for a local newspaper on occasion. I am convinced that major inroads on the problem await our adoption of electric motor drives for highway vehicles energized with rechargeable batteries off the grid. There have been multiple demonstrations that this is commercially ready and will yield 100-plus miles per gallon. I don’t think the hydrogen route will ever be commercialized. I think ethanol is ill suited as a major energy source. We should redirect our engineering resources to expand wind farms, cost-reduce solar systems, and clean up coal-fired steam generators.
– Richard D. Livingston ’43 Th’44

I am the CEO of Angeli Parvi, a nonprofit dedicated to entrepreneurship at Dartmouth. We just invested $200,000 in Advanced Transit Dynamics, which has developed a clever airfoil to attach on the rear of large trailers. This improves the aerodynamics sufficiently to improve gas mileage by approximately six percent. ATD’s founder is Andrew Smith Tu’07, and the two leading technologists are Thayer graduates Chuck Horrell ’00 Th’01 and Jeffrey Grossmann ’06 Th’07. Thus far execution has been excellent, and we can reasonably expect good financial and good environmental and energy performance.
– John Ballard ’55 Th’56 Tu’56

My main focus, vocationally and avocationally, has been on alternative energy since the late 1970s. The list of my activities includes: consulting to cities to install waste-to-energy plants, developing a 3-megawatt landfill gas power project, and writing several reports for the EPA’s Coalbed Methane Outreach Program (upgrading coal mine methane to pipeline standards, and capturing and using ventilation air methane for power production). Currently I am part of a startup renewable energy cooperative in Addison County, Vt., that hopes to establish a biodiesel production business. My wife and I burn wood from our woodlots – more than 10 cords a year – to heat our 4,600-square-foot home, and we installed two solar collectors for hot water.
– Peter Carothers ’57 Th’60 Tu’60

Our firm, Mohr, Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif., is a leading investors in alternative energy early stage companies. I am supporting environmental research, much of which focuses on climate change.
– William Davidow ’57 Th’58

I am an independent consultant who works with companies to help them be more sustainable. I deal primarily with the prudent use of energy. I also teach courses on sustainable business practices in the M.B.A. program at Ohio State; I started that in 2004 and had 15 students. This year I have 70 students. Topics covered include the status of fossil energy, alternate energy technologies, and climate change. Interest in these topics demonstrated by future business leaders is phenomenal.
– Neil Drobny ’62 Th’64

Until I retired three years ago, I worked for 38 years in the nuclear power industry – nuclear fuel manufacturing primarily – for both General Electric and Westinghouse Electric. I have not been involved other than reading the news about nuclear energy or energy in general since I retired.
– Rhod Hawk ’62

I am the general manager of Southwestern Drilling Co., a small, privately held company that leases equipment and crews to large and small oil and gas exploration companies. Our work has been concentrated on drilling for natural gas. I have 37 years experience in providing such services for the domestic oil and gas industry. As a result, I doubt very much whether Dartmouth would have any interest in hearing what I have to say, as most academicians believe I work in an industry that wants to intentionally ruin our world. They tend to believe the solution is a combination of riding bikes to work each day, having windmills on every square inch of the U.S., and using every available arable acre to grow corn for ethanol subsidized by my taxes. Surely I’d be dismissed as a polluting kook!
– Richard Zartler ’62 Th’63

The thermoeconomics course taught by Dean Myron Tribus during the mid-1960s – with its emphasis on balancing economic, energy, and resource factors in making decisions – was well ahead of its time. Would that all managers and engineers have had the course and lived up to its principles. The world would be a different place by now.
– Steve Brenner ’63 Th’64

Fafco, where I am president and CEO, is the oldest and largest solar thermal panel manufacturer in the U.S. Recently we introduced the next-generation, all-polymer solar hot water heating system, which we developed in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Energy during the last 10 years. The neat thing about the recent introduction is that the entre system comes in a box, which can be shipped for $50 and which, when installed, will do up to half the hot water heating requirement.
– Freeman Ford ’63

In 1997 I bumped into an article in the London Financial Times that described the redistribution of the old Soviet oilfields. As a result I invested in Canadian oil companies that acquired obscure fields in Kazakhstan. For years then, I read everything I could find that hedged my risk in oil. Hubbert’s Peak by Ken Deffeyes opened a vista into a future with ever more expensive oil and seemed to vindicate my positions. I made a bundle. Now I follow the geophysicists who believe that oil production has or will soon have peaked forever. Were I younger I would be obsessive about inventing alternative energy sources. Hybrid fission/fusion?

America and the developed countries have designed a world for themselves in which oil is essential. Suburbs, interstates, air travel, fresh produce, human mobility, large warm houses in the north, and large cool houses in the south all require cheap energy. How do we fuel the transition from this lifestyle to a new lifestyle? Can Thayer create graduates who can engineer new global behaviors integrated with new machines?
– Bob Prescott ’64 Th’67

I am on the other end of the spectrum: The airplane I am working on (as systems engineer) has big huge engines that drive it to speeds way over 1,000 mph. The only energy savings thing about it is that instead of the 500- and 1,000-pound bombs that I used in combat, this plane drops 250-pound bombs. Supposedly they are so accurate that they do more damage than those old ones. In a fight with another aircraft, our F-22 supposedly can see them before being seen and launch a missile for a kill. This saves fuel because there’s no churning and burning dogfight.
– Ward Hindman ’65 Th’68

I’m CEO of a commercial plumbing and HVAC contractor in southeastern Pennsylvania and southern New Jersey. We routinely deal with green buildings, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, building energy conservation, and system efficiencies. Our niche is in a micro-environment rather than big-picture systems. In the early 1980s I owned a solar installation company that failed when oil prices dropped in the mid-1980s. The foreign oil cartel always has the ability to bankrupt alternative energy sources by reducing the cost of oil, destroying their economic viability.
– Harry Santangelo ’66

I am working on an adsorbent to remove NOx, SOx, and Hg from stack gas in coal-fired power plants and other similar applications. Unfortunately, the market is not very strong and way too many utilities have jumped behind the CO2 hype and nearly everyone has forgotten about mercury. Of course they know that CO2 is an impossible task and probably just a natural cycle, but it does allow them to do nothing now.
– D. Dean Spatz ’66 Th’67

I spent the first decade after graduation working on major energy policy in Washington, D.C. Remember the Ford Administration Energy Policy Statement of 1976? Even back then it was obvious that action was urgently needed to avert a major crisis. The solution was to phase out fossil fuel consumption with a combination of conservation, renewable energy and nuclear power. Unfortunately, the political will and leadership to make these necessary changes was lacking. Consequently, we have spent the last 35 years going in the wrong direction. I hope it is not too late to make up for lost time. I am now a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Maryland. I was inspired to go into this field by Prof. Graham Wallis.
– Richard A. Livingston ’68 Th’69

One start-up company in which I am involved, Sanderson Engine Co., is developing a new way to convert reciprocating motion to circular motion, which appears to have great benefit in improved efficiencies and emissions. The technology applies to all engines, pumps, and compressors, and one potential application would make the generation of wind power more practical. I am an investor in this initiative and have provided some consulting from time to time. They are currently in talks with some very well-known companies that have large applications for this technology.
– Bill Holekamp ’70

I’m working on a real estate development project, Forge Village in Westford, Mass. It’s a conversion of a group of mill buildings from industrial to residential use. The energy aspect of the project is twofold: the heating system will take heat out of canal water rather than burning fossil fuels, and the old hydroelectric generator will use water flow to generate electricity.
– Chris Yule ’70

We had discussions back in 1973 at Thayer bemoaning our dependence on imported oil and the growth rate of oil consumption. At that time we were advocating investment into fusion energy as the only real alternative, even to the point of a program not unlike that of John Kennedy’s landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. Too bad it never happened. I would love to see something along this line: A truly “pollution free” solution (ignoring heat, but that’s another issue) with potential for unlimited energy supply. It beats all the others, including wind, solar, and geothermal!
– Jim Bartlett ’72 Th’73

A significant portion of my consulting business is directed at alternate energy sources and strategies, hydrogen systems, including vehicles, and CO2 sequestration.
– John Boyle ’73 Th’79

I am working with the Alberta Oil Sands, the largest reserve that exists in the world after Saudi Arabia. There are 177 billions barrels of oil that are recoverable using existing technology. There are issues with carbon capture and sequestration and with efficiencies.
– Dennis Dembicki ’73

I have had some interesting dialog with the California Coastal Commission (CCC) and Sierra Club regarding the effects that global warming is supposedly having on the location of the Mean High Tide Line (MHTL) in front of our resort, La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club. Both want to take away our private beach on the theory that ocean waters are rising. There are many physical observations that contradict the Sierra Club’s theory. There is now a technology that allows determination of the MHTL by flying over an area with radar-sensing instruments. The resulting data can be converted to a line on a map that shows the MHTL at the time of the flyover. Readings are routinely taken twice a year, and there are now multiple years of data available. We are contemplating a project to determine our “ecological footprint” on our community.
– Bill Kellogg ’73

I work with a group within JPMorgan that invests in alternative energy as well as conventional electrical generation and oil and gas production. We are one of the largest tax equity investors in wind power with investments in more than 44 wind farms in the United States and the largest operating solar power plant built in the last 15 years. Climate change issues affect almost everything that we do.
– Geoffrey Bratton ’74 Th’78

I am a partner in Konover Construction Corp. in Farmington, Conn., and Columbia, Md. We are a full-service construction organization providing design/build, preconstruction, construction manager, general contracting, and owner’s rep services across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic states. Our work-in-place volume for 2007 was about $350 million. Sustainable design practices are in high gear in the construction industry. Konover has two LEED “basic” projects that have achieved certification, and we are involved in several others large projects seeking “silver” certification. But many of our other projects incorporate sustainable design elements/practices without seeking certification.
– Simon Etzel ’74 Th’75

I do work on battery life optimization for cell phones at Motorola.
– Wayne Ballantyne ’77 Th’78

Since completing my graduate degree at MIT, I have been working at Chevron for the last 25-plus years, recently focusing on developing natural gas in West Africa for the North American and European markets. Since 2005 I have been involved with the Olokola Liquefied Natural Gas Project (OKLNG). OKLNG is joint venture enterprise that plans to build a multi-train liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant on the coast of Nigeria and export LNG, propane and butane, and stabilized condensate (a light hydrocarbon liquid used as a refinery or petrochemical feedstock). The overall project will involve development of new offshore and onshore gas production fields, large-diameter gas transport pipelines, the LNG process plant, and a marine export terminal. OKLNG will build, own, and operate the LNG facilities, which will be located in an area of Nigeria that has no industrial infrastructure at present. It will be a multi-billion dollar investment. I was first assigned as the manager of planning and integration for the joint venture project team. Over the last few years I’ve served as Chevron’s OKLNG project coordinator, reviewing the work on concept selection, front-end engineering, contracting strategy, and development planning. My work on OKLNG has meant frequent travel between the U.S., London (where the project team has been located since late 2005), and Nigeria. As a result, earlier this year I relocated to London to be able to work more closely with the project team, communicate with the other shareholder companies, and reduce the amount of time I am spending on airplanes.
– Will Fraizer ’78

I work directly with energy issues on a global basis as president of the drilling and evaluation division of Halliburton. The fundamental issue is that worldwide energy demand is growing at a fast rate, supply is no longer able to keep pace, and there is not sufficient investment in new sources of conventional or alternative energy.
– Cris Gaut ’78

I work for Butler Manufacturing Co., a subsidiary of BlueScope Steel, an international steel solutions company, in its Kansas City, Mo., office. We make steel or metal buildings that are used for everything from the quintessential farms shop to warehouses to facilities like the new indoor track facility at Tufts University in Massachusetts. While mostly misunderstood and suffering from a “tin can” image, most people have overlooked some basic facts about steel buildings. Our LEED data sheets demonstrate that 30 to 75 percent of our raw material is comprised of recycled steel and our finished product is easily designed for deconstruction and recycling. Also, the company earned a Green Globe Award in 2006 for investing more than $20 million to recycle wastewater and use it in steel production, saving millions of gallons of fresh water daily in an area of Australia that has suffered from severe drought for more than 10 years.
– Ron Miller Th’79 Tu’79

ENERGY TO GO: Dave Wolff ’79 sells Proton Energy Systems electrolysis equipment for making hydrogen. Photo courtesy of Dave Wolff ’79

I sell on-site electrolysis equipment for Proton Energy Systems that is used to make hydrogen for applications such as hydrogen fueling.
– Dave Wolff ’79

As a professor of Earth and planetary science at Berkeley I have been working on climate change impacts on hydrologic systems. I am also currently the director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research, where we do a lot of work on wood energy resources and forests as CO2 sinks, as well as on climate change effects on ecosystems and natural hazards (floods, avalanches, etc.).
– James Kirchner ’80 Th’83

I’m working at Burns & McDonnell, an international engineering, architecture, and consulting firm based in Kansas City, Mo. My consulting projects revolve around public “sustainability reporting,” helping clients (many of them in the utility field) explain their actions/plans related to energy. Here’s a random sample of what we’re working on across this industry: transmission (especially for wind), infrastructure development, pollution control (coal plants), greenhouse gas inventories, combined heat and power plants, energy performance contracts, exploring biofuels, wetlands design and rehabilitation, geological consulting, and green building (LEED) facilities for aviation and health care.
– Steve Murphy ’80

I run a strategic marketing team for Autodesk, which makes software used for designing buildings. Our most advanced software is in building information modeling (BIM), a category we pioneered in the early 2000s. BIM is an integrated workflow built on coordinated, reliable information about a project from design through construction and into operations. By adopting BIM, architects, engineers, contractors and owners can easily create coordinated, digital design information and documentation; use that information to accurately predict performance, appearance, and cost; and reliably deliver the project faster, more economically, and with reduced environmental impact. I am responsible for an initiative to support sustainable design through our software by making the environmental impacts of the building design more available to the designer earlier in the design process, when small design decisions can have a big impact.
– Richard Rundell ’80

My environmental engineering major continues to help in my work as an environmental litigator at the U.S. Department of Justice. We are seeing more and more climate change cases, including a recent U.S. Supreme Court case interpreting the Clean Air Act.
– Jim Payne ’81

I work for a consulting firm specializing in energy and environmental policy analysis, OnLocation Inc., in the Washington, D.C., area. We build, maintain, and run a variety of computer models to examine potential energy trends, impacts of proposed government policies, and the associated financial and economic impacts of energy-related investment decisions. Currently, the key areas of interest are potential climate change legislation to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, policies to reduce oil consumption and imports, and impacts of R&D programs. Our clients include the Department of Energy, EPA, several non-governmental organizations and foundations, and various corporations.
– Frances Wood ’81

This is what I am doing with respect to energy: founder and executive committee member of the New England Clean Energy Council; founder and president of the Massachusetts Hydrogen Coalition; co-host of the annual Conference on Clean Energy; president of Velerity Management Consulting, consultant to energy-related companies; and founder and CEO of Blue Sky Green Planet, a development-stage company focused on helping consumers reduce their carbon footprint.
– Brad Bradshaw ’82

In my work at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the federally designated metropolitan planning organization for the 5.5 million-plus population of the greater Philadelphia region, I am managing our newly established climate change initiatives program area. Our most recent task is to prepare a regional greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory, working with the Environmental Protection Agency with the intent of using our work to develop a standard protocol for metropolitan areas to carry out such inventories. During the next year I’ll be leading the development of a regional GHG reduction action plan for greater Philadelphia. I’m also involved on the board of the region’s Smart Energy Initiative, which is working to build the green energy sector in our region. I’m speaking to planning graduate students at UPenn on these issues, as well as to the American Bar Assocation’s environmental group and to the Pennsylvania Association of Environmental Professionals. I’m working with our transportation modelers and those putting together our 2035 long-range plan to evaluate the energy implications of various land use and transportation infrastructure scenarios. I also serve on the climate change/GHG-reduction task forces in two counties and one municipality (Haverford Township).
– Robert Graff ’82

I have recently become very involved in renewable energy through the installation of a photovoltaic solar system at my home in Kennebunk, Maine. What is unique about this system is that it not only produces electricity (rated at 4.4 kilowatts) but also captures the thermal energy absorbed by the photovoltaic panels. In fact, by cooling the array and removing heat energy from the PV solar cells, the electrical production is increased as the photovoltaic cells are cooled. It has been a very gratifying project. Not only do I receive electrical power from the sun, but I also get space heating in the winter with pre-heated fresh air and hot water heating. In the summer my pool is now using the sun to extend the season rather than propane. My home is one of six test locations around the country using this system. It is my firm belief that distributed energy production is a significant part of the solution to the global energy problem. This project has been a lot of fun, as I handled most of the installation myself with some help from some expert roofers and a plumber. My array was the first in my local power district to tie into the grid, which was an education in itself for the local power company.
– Art LeBlanc ’82 Th’84

As a private equity investor since 1990, I have had the opportunity to be involved with investments in a number of exciting alternative energy technology companies, including fuel cells, advanced batteries, solar cells, superconducting magnetic energy storage rings, advanced flywheels, lighting ballast technologies, and energy service companies. I have also invested in process software to manage petrochemical plants to make them run more efficiently. I recently invested in an energy trading and risk management company called Allegro that helps large users of energy manage their energy costs and physical inventory of energy products. For the last eight years I have been on the board of Veeco Instruments, a leading manufacturer of a wide range of process equipment used in the manufacture of solar cells and LEDs. As the world moves toward LEDs for general lighting applications, Veeco will be at the forefront of manufacturing technology. I recently started a new private equity firm called North Bridge Growth Equity, which focuses on investing in private companies in technology and technology-enabled industries, including energy-efficient technology. We are affiliated with North Bridge Venture Partners, a leading early-stage venture capital fund. One of North Bridge Venture Partners’ most interesting investments is an advanced battery company called A123, which uses nanotechnology to create the next generation of lithium ion technology. Applications include hybrid vehicles, power tools, aviation, backup power to replace lead acid, and the military. It is an indisputable fact that the United States currently leads the world in developing green technologies and will continue to do so into the indefinite future. This fact is grounded in both the ingenuity and profit motive of American business. We are not going to solve the environmental and energy challenges of the next 50 years by nonsensical initiatives such as carbon offsets. Rather, we are going to continue to raise the standard of living of all people on earth by developing innovative technologies that increase energy efficiency, decrease the need for oil, and create less pollution. I hope I can play a small part in that ongoing process.
– Doug Kingsley ’84, Th’85

I am president of Accuware, a software development company with five employees and additional contractors overseas. We have developed a software solution for EPV Solar to interface its solar panel testing equipment with its packaging/inventory areas. This is an improvement in their process management to improve quality and accuracy in what they produce for panels.
– Steve Morris ’84 Th’85

I am the director of Resource Systems Group‘s environmental services division, based in White River Junction, Vt. We conduct noise-impact studies for wind farms and biomass energy plants and air pollution studies for biomass energy facilities, and we calculate the air emissions offsets related to renewable energy. An example of a local project we are working on is the air pollution permit for a wood pellet boiler at Dartmouth’s graduate student housing project in Sachem Village. We also did the permitting work for Hanover high and middle schools’ wood chip boilers. These biomass projects are very satisfying in that they have close to net-zero greenhouse gas impacts, rely on a local and renewable fuel source, and save money-especially in these times of high oil prices.
– Kenneth Kaliski ’85

I’ve done legal work for a gas-fired 720-megawatt energy plant in New Hampshire (I deal with air regulations and permit requirements) and work with a team of lawyers that is doing the legal work for several wind farm projects.
– Lisa Wade ’85

I am working with a Hong Kong-based Asian private equity fund, Olympus Capital, to invest capital in the environmental sectors in India. This includes renewables, of which biomass and small hydro, followed by wind, offer most promise. Energy efficiency, smart lighting and metering would also be included, though there are few opportunities in India to find the right platforms at this time.
– Himraj Dang ’89 Th’89

I am currently managing assets for New Energy Capital, a private equity firm in Hanover that develops, owns, and operates renewable energy projects. I am currently managing an 18-megawatt biomass power plant in Maine and three 2-megawatt cogeneration facilities for a commercial food processor with locations in Massachusetts and California. Our areas of focus for new project development include biomass to power, biofuels, cogeneration, waste to energy, and solar thermal power generation. Previously I worked for Northern Power Systems, a contractor in Waitsfield, Vt., that designs and builds on-site power systems in addition to producing a 100-kilowatt wind turbine for small wind applications. While there I developed and managed projects ranging from remote power systems in Antarctica for solar-powered runway lighting and Nuclear Test Ban Treaty monitoring to a complete power generation and 4,160-volt distribution system for the Island of Mohegan, Maine. In 1999 I helped to create the distributed generation group at Northern Power Systems to develop turnkey cogeneration and critical load support systems for grid-connected commercial and industrial customers. I have worked on projects ranging from 30-kilowatt to 30-megawatt utilizing solar power, microturbines, fuel cells, reciprocating engine gensets, and combustion turbines.
– Jim McNamara Th’89

I have just started as technical director of the Swiss watch firm IWC (which was founded by an American engineer in 1868) in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. We are the first watch manufacturer who tries to offset its CO2-footprint.
– Olaf Eichstädt ’90

I am an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Akron working on National Science Foundation-sponsored research involving thermophotovoltaic energy conversion. The devices we are building convert thermal energy into electricity using rare earth oxide fiber structures. We are developing an understanding of the effects of microstructure (crystal structure, grain size, defect density) and macrostructure (fiber diameter, fiber packing) on the narrow band emission of these materials. Our hypothesis was that nanofibers-based emitters should be more efficient than other forms. We have shown that this hypothesis was correct. We are now working on developing prototype devices. We hope that someday these devices could recover 10 percent of the wasted energy in every vehicle, translating to lots and lots of gasoline savings – 14 billion gallons in the U.S. alone.
– Ed Evans ’91

Until recently I worked for General Mills, and I now work for Campbell Soup. As we talk about corporate social responsibility and sustainability, energy and carbon footprints are certainly part of the discussion. In addition, the impact energy prices and biofuels production is having on food prices is pretty dramatic. Since diesel fuel prices have skyrocketed, and therefore it has become far more expensive to ship raw materials and finished products between our facilities and to our customers, we have had to consider raising the price of our products to compensate.
– Brett Buatti ’92 Th’94

My entire career since graduating in 1992 has been in energy. I am currently a principal with U.S. Renewables Group, one of the only (for the moment) private equity firms in the United States focused exclusively on investments in assets in the renewable energy sector.
– Scott Gardner ’92

I am on a volunteer committee for the City of Solana Beach, Calif., called the Clean and Green Committee. We are developing a climate action plan right now, which is a blueprint for the city, based on a mayor’s agreement with 12 objectives that the city signed onto in 2007.
– Annie Kaskade ’92

I work for Ballard Power Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia, which develops proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells for use in a variety of power applications. PEM fuel cells produce electricity from hydrogen fuel and have high efficiency and no emissions. Most notably, we are working together with Ford and Daimler on their fuel cell vehicle programs. My husband and I are also quite focused on conservation at home. Last September, we installed two kilowatts of photovoltaic panels on our roof, and we expect to generate 30 to 40 percent of our annual electricity needs via the sun. I was president of the Dartmouth solar racing team for a few years, so it feels great to be harnessing the sun yet again on a daily basis.
– Laura Iwan ’93 Th’94

After leaving Dartmouth, I pursued an international master’s degree at the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden in sustainable energy engineering with a focus on sustainable power generation. I’m now completing this degree by working on my master’s thesis at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory out in Colorado. I have just started a six-month thesis project where I am working on a wind-to-hydrogen project, using wind (and photovoltaic solar) electricity to produce hydrogen through electrolysis. I am specifically working on a cost analysis sub-project, but I am taking part in a variety of areas and learning a lot about the integration issues of renewable energies and hydrogen production.
– Genevieve Saur ’93

I’m the chair of the Concord (Mass.) Comprehensive Sustainable Energy Committee. We’re working to promote energy conservation and efficiency as well as renewable energy in the town for residential, commercial, and municipal sectors. Right now we’re focusing on municipal issues because we have a budget for town buildings and there are fewer decision makers involved. I’m also leading a high-profile team of local politicians and notables in something called the Low Carbon Diet, which is run by the Mass Climate Action Network.
– Brian Crounse ’94 Th’95

I am a consultant with IBM and I am involved with green supply-chain solutions. IBM research developed a carbon analyzer tool. We modified it for a heavy equipment manufacturer’s forest products division. The tool can measure the carbon emissions created in the supply chain. Currently we can assess inbound and outbound transportation, and it will be able to assess facility carbon creation. The tool also allows scenario analysis to understand how you can decrease carbon emissions while also calculating transportation and inventory metrics. This allows trade-off analysis of carbon, inventory turns and cost, transportation cost and frequencies, service level agreements, and packaging costs.
– Chad Boucher ’95 Th’96

I am a research engineering specialist with ExxonMobil Upstream Research Co. in Houston, Texas. I work at ExxonMobil R&D, in particular the offshore and Arctic division. My previous role was metocean (meteorological and oceanographic criteria) team leader, and now I am leading a research project in the Arctic section.
– Oleg Esenkov Th’95

BRIGHT FUTURE: Michael Müller Th’95 is senior manager of project procurement for RWE, which is planning to build the world’s first zero-CO2 power plant. Photo courtesy of Michael Müller Th’95

I am responsible for the procurement of new power plant projects at RWE Power in Essen, Germany. We are currently facing an investment program of 9 billion Euros until 2014. The investment program includes: one 2,100-megawatt lignite, one 800-megawatt combined cycle gas turbine, and two 1,600-megawatt hard coal fired power plants with the most advanced efficiency; the world’s first zero-CO2 power plant (integrated coal gasification and carbon capture and storage); fluidized bed drying for increased efficiency of future lignite power plants; a CO2 scrubbing prototype; and clean development programs.
– Michael Müller Th’95

My wife, Kirsten Glass ’95, a large-animal veterinarian in Lyme, N.H., just finished sponsoring a B.E. project at Thayer to make her truck more efficient and environmentally friendly.
– Brian Spence ’95 Th’96

I’m working as a research analyst for a boutique investment bank in Atlanta. I see a lot of interesting ideas in the energy space, ranging from hydrocarbon sources such as natural gas, oil, and coal-bed methane to alternatives such as wind projects. The difficulty in finding new sources – along with global geopolitical issues and the need for the U.S. to become more self-sufficient and greener at the same time – have brought the U.S. energy market back to life in the last few years following decades of underinvestment.
– Patrick Orie ’96

I work for a company, Bensonwood Homes, that designs and builds timber frames. Working with the Open Prototype Initiative, we are building a net-zero house.
– Christopher Carbone ’97 Th’99

I work for the venture capital team at GE focused on the energy and water markets. We are solely focused on investing for GE in early-stage companies in the renewable energy, energy efficiency, water technologies, and the traditional energy markets (oil and gas, energy generation, carbon capture).
– Andrew Lackner ’97 Th’99

I work for Tesla Motors. We are making a high-performance electric sportscar. Two other Dartmouth alums work here, too: Krispin Leydon ’99 Th’01 and Diarmuid O’Connell ’86.
– Matt Senesky ’98 Th’99

I do Fluent CFD simulation work for Fuel Cell Energy in Danbury, Conn. We build 1- to 3-megawatt molten carbonate fuel cell power plants. We also do solid oxide fuel cell research. I do gas flow simulations to support both the research and manufacturing groups in the company.
– Joe McInerney Th’99

I’m a research assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire environmental research group. We are working on sustainability in the highway environment, which focuses on conserving energy, water, and materials while reducing emissions into the environment.
– Jeffrey Melton Th’99

As an analyst at Forrester Research, I spend a majority of my time studying the major trends and drivers of new technology adoption. I focus most of my research on software applications that support product development. Tools that support better energy-efficient or environmentally compliant decision making are definitely a hot area right now. Since a large percentage of a product’s energy performance is committed during the concept and design stages of a product’s life cycle, these types of applications can help designers make a big difference in terms of a product’s environmental impact once its being used in the marketplace.
– Roy Wildeman ’99 Th’99

I’m leading the product development at a company called Advanced Transit Dynamics. We are working on bringing to market products to make the world’s trucking fleets more fuel-efficient. Our CEO is Andrew Smith Tu’07, and we have Jeff Grossmann ’06 Th’07 working with us as well.
– Chuck Horrell ’00 Th’01

I’m a director for the Technology Transition Corp., which manages the National Hydrogen Association and the Carbon Management Council. Separate from my day job, I’ve helped to put together a team that will be competing to win the four-person division of the Race Across America. We race this June to bring attention to alternative modes of transportation and carbon-neutral choices. Our goal is to make it from Oceanside, Calif., to Annapolis, Md., in under seven days of 24/7 riding and get as many people as we can to pledge to live carbon-free during the week that we race.
– Patrick Serfass ’00

I recently defended my Ph.D. thesis on infrastructure requirements and impacts for ethanol and hydrogen at Carnegie Mellon. My most interesting project involved modeling ethanol production and distribution in the U.S. The goal was to figure out where it should go, how much it would cost, and emissions from transportation in an optimal scenario. The project showed that ethanol should be used regionally, near where it is produced. High blends (E85 as opposed to E10) should be sold in order to maximize regional use. If ethanol is produced in the midwest and shipped for use in California (this is the case for much of our current production), there are no economic or environmental benefits from using ethanol instead of gasoline.
– Heather Wakeley ’00 Th’02

Before going to graduate school in architecture, I worked for Redefining Progress on ecological footprint modeling (which seems largely driven by the carbon cycle and fossil fuel consumption), and for Energy Nevada and Nordic Windpower (related enterprises developing utility-scale wind power). I am currently finishing my master’s degree in architecture at UC Berkeley, where I am a teaching assistant for an energy and environment course. My design thesis is partly about importing resource footprint into urban areas through facade-implemented growing of food and biomass.
– Christian Cutul ’01

I work on energy conservation for the Harvard Green Campus Initiative. I manage new construction services, a group that works with new construction and renovation projects at Harvard. We review designs, work with design teams to incorporate green features, and manage the LEED certification process.
– Jesse Foote ’01 Th’02

I am an assistant professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania and am involved in research into energy storage for renewables, as well as stand-alone solar and wind installations. I also am involved with an entrepreneurial research project in collaboration with two Ph.D. students at Thayer, Dax Kepshire Th’06 and Ben Bollinger ’04 Th’04. This project, which is being developed through the start-up company SustainX, involves a new method of compressed air energy storage. I will be spending six weeks this summer at Hanover working on this research with Dax and Ben.
– Troy McBride Th’01

I’m working now as a project coordinator for Lifewater International. We do international water development by training indigenous organizations in shallow well drilling, pump repair, sand filter construction, latrine design and promotion, and hygiene education. I’m the manager for all work in Zambia and Mozambique. I got a master’s from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo last year and have been simultaneously working for Lifewater since July 2005. I hope that my research can be a foundation for biodiesel fuel production from wastewater treatment algae. The research I did showed very positive results in terms of potential lipid oil yields, and since the main food source for the algae is human and animal waste, it’s really a win-win situation. It’s going to be published, I hope, in a special renewable energy issue of the Journal of Environmental Engineering.
– Adam Feffer ’02 Th’03

My new company, VisibleEnergy, will provide residential power consumers with an energy-monitoring device and an online community. The monitoring device will deliver a low-cost data feed from the consumer’s electricity meter to the VisibleEnergy data processing center. Our website will translate usage into meaningful terms, allow users to compare their consumption with similar homes, and provide tailored recommendations for cost and energy savings. Our team (my wife, Sarah Kate Fishback ’02, and I) recently won the $5,000 top prize in the consumer division of the Duke Startup Competition.
– Luke Fishback ’02 Th’03

I volunteer to help run an energy conservation program in our elementary school in Rockville, Md. It is done by fifth-grade students, and I am their leader. We do an energy patrol, celebrate the classrooms that conserve the most, and study energy issues, sources, and conservation benefits. Lots of success.
– Katya Kovalskaia Th’02

I work as a consulting engineer for the energy and resources team of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit that does consulting and research work in all aspects of energy and resources. I have only been with RMI for a few months (I was doing energy analysis for green building design for an HVAC firm prior to this), and am currently working on a research project called Next Generation Utility, which looks at the need for a new electric utility paradigm.
– Kendra Tupper ’02 Th’03

I joined ExxonMobil five years ago after receiving my degree at Thayer. Last fall I transferred to a position in Doha, Qatar, within our liquefied natural gas (LNG) business. We work on the global development of marketing plans to monetize natural gas reserves, as well as day-to-day marketing of associated products and related businesses. I am currently living and working in Qatar, the world’s fastest growing economy, working on the world’s largest and most technically complex natural gas projects. We are (probably) in the “golden age of natural gas,” as once-regional markets for domestic pipeline natural gas become interlinked globally by the emergence of a growing LNG business. The use of natural gas as a fuel, particularly in power generation, is important component within plans that consider the use of cleaner burning fuels as a way to reduce emissions, including CO2. The growth of the LNG business makes this increasingly more possible across the globe.
– Garth Castren Th’03

After Thayer I got my master’s in technology and policy, and civil and environmental engineering at MIT. There I worked on modeling renewable energy technologies (wind and solar specifically) and economic policies (renewable energy portfolio standards, tax subsidies, guaranteed government buy backs) for the MIT Climate Change modeling research program. I am currently teaching math and science in a public school in New York City and often include energy topics in my courses. I have offered a renewable energy elective and a course on energy use and the environment.
– Alan Cheng ’03 Th’03

I am working on an energy problem as part of my thesis here at Stanford (I graduate from the master’s program in June). I have teamed up with a fellow product design grad student and together we are exploring the world of solar from new perspectives. What if everyone, even renters, could own small-scale solar and do their part? We have been researching perceptions around energy and environmentalism and have found an opportunity to create products in the solar sector that allow young, environmentally conscious people to express their individuality and empower optimism around energy choices. We aren’t trying to increase solar efficiency or reach grid parity, instead we’re trying to celebrate the possibilities of solar.
– Emilie Fetscher ’03 Th’04

I work at SunPower Corp. doing design engineering for domestic systems in California and New Jersey and international in Italy and Korea. The sun is so hot right now! Being in the renewables market, it is interesting to see how little the environment is involved in the day-to-day working life. I have overheard many say how we are in competition with wind, and comments like this make me realize how large a role policy has in creating this new marketplace for all sustainable technologies to exist. We’ve just moved into an old Ford factory in Richmond, Calif., and the company is about to install one megawatt of solar on its rooftop to become off-grid. Taking on a vertically integrated approach, the company designs and manufactures the solar panels, and designs and installs arrays. Making the simple design/build process more convoluted is the concept of financing, as many large power plant systems are priced such that outside financiers purchase and sell solar electricity to the customer. In trying to balance the multi-variable design and sales constraints, I often think back to my operations research class, and realize that behind this multivariable system of equations, I am offsetting carbon each time I turn on my computer.
– Adam Han ’03 Th’04

For two years I was working at a consulting firm within their energy and environment business consulting group. There we did a lot of work with utilities, ranging from energy sources (coal, gas, etc.) to transmission lines to distribution networks. A bit of work I did was in the photovoltaic and wind arena. For the past year I’ve been working at a private equity fund on their U.S. and natural resources private equity team. Although I’ve spent the bulk of my time working on more general private equity managers, I’ve had some exposure with natural resources managers ranging from oil and gas to clean tech.
– Ethan Levine ’03 Th’05

I work for a management consulting firm in Atlanta, Ga., and we do about 80 percent of our work with energy clients, mainly large utilities and government entities. I’ve been involved in the energy industry in an organization redesign for the country’s largest state power authority, new generation development and resource planning for a top-ten utility, and I authored a white paper on carbon capture and storage.
– Bob Neill ’03

I’m doing doctoral work in the natural resources and earth system science program and part of the ocean process analysis laboratory at the Earth, Oceans and Space Institute at the University of New Hampshire. I hope to be able to use my research to help site offshore wind farms. I work on a sensor called SeaWinds on the QuikSCAT satellite. This instrument is called a scatterometer and is basically a space-borne radar that measures backscatter, the signals reflected off centimeter-scale waves on the ocean surface. These little waves are generally caused by wind, so the strength of the backscatter signal can be interpreted through a geophysical model function to derive wind speed and direction. I’m still in the evaluation phase, but if I have good results, I’ll begin developing a high resolution wind climatology with a web-based interface. This would provide useful information for companies and communities interested in the offshore potential of their area. Some of the major wind energy companies in Europe already use satellite data for siting purposes, and one (Garrad Hassan) has shown interest in my work. Additionally, the nine-year record of data from QuikSCAT means that this research might have additional climate change-related impacts – I could attempt to look for any significant differences between the overall wind patterns in 1999-2000 vs. those in 2007-2008, for instance.
– Amanda Plagge ’03 Th’04

I’m a second-year Ph.D. student at Purdue University and part of a research group that is working on GaN-based white LEDs. The project is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of its solid-state lighting initiative. My part of the research group does the characterization work, which is mainly transmission electron microscopy.
– Patrick Cantwell ’04

I’m a student at MIT, and my research is on how renewable generators fit into modern electricity markets. I’m writing a thesis on how different ways of pricing electricity would change revenues of renewable generators, and I also do some work in quantifying the avoided emissions that can be attributed to new renewable generators or energy efficiency projects. We start with data that the EPA collects for its Continuous Emissions Monitoring system. They measure the CO2, SO2, and NOx coming out of every electricity generation unit in the country by hour. We want to figure out which of those plants are “on the margin” – for example, if someone turns on or off an air conditioner or we install some wind generation, which fossil generators will reduce their output in response. We have a simple program that identifies those generators for each hour (currently we do it from 1999 to 2006) and we take an average of their emission rates as the system’s marginal emission rate for that hour. Then we can compare that emission rate to historical wind speeds by hour for any site. Basically we are answering the question, “If we built a wind turbine in this location in 1999, how much CO2, SO2, and NOx would have been saved?” The main insight/surprise that we have had is that the hour-by-hour operation of the power system is so complex that looking at aggregate numbers (such as annual emissions or renewable generation) can give misleading results. We found that emissions rates on the margin (i.e., from the most expensive plants that are operating at any instant) are much more variable and on average larger than average emission rates; and emissions have seasonal and daily patterns, so it is important to see how they line up with hourly wind speeds or sunniness. The work I have been doing with a research group includes applying this to some test cases in New England. The project I’ve been doing on my own is “Effects of Real-Time Electricity Pricing on Renewable Revenues and System Emissions.” Real-time pricing (RTP) would mean that the price of electricity that you and I pay would vary by hour, depending on how expensive it is to generate in real time (we would have a meter in our house to give us the price). I modeled the effect that this would have on solar and wind generators by looking at how wind speeds and solar radiation line up (hour-by-hour) with price changes due to RTP. We found that the effect isn’t much different than the effect on the average fossil generator (for the four New England test cases I considered). The price for electricity and the wind/solar generation are more random, hour-by-hour, than I expected.
– J.P. Connolly ’04 Th’04

I work for Northern Power in Barre, Vt., which designs and builds wind turbines. Right now we are selling a 100-kilowatt wind turbine and will be producing a 2.2-megawatt turbine in one to two years. The wind market in the U.S. is just starting to develop and grow. Over the next few years I believe we’ll see large increases in wind farms across the country. My job focuses on the power conversion from the wind turbines rotor to grid. Efficiency is key in this area, since typical wind turbine applications stack up turbines and that can eventually lead to large power losses. The “lossiest” components in the converter are typically the magnetics and switches. My design focus is on the magnetics that are used to boost the voltage to a level needed for the grid. To figure out what design changes are worthwhile in the magnetics, we often attach an effective initial cost to any changes to see what the upfront financial cost is and when it would be paid back.
– Magdalena Dale Th’05

I have been working for GE Energy for the last two years, on both the gas turbine compressor and wind turbine aerodynamics teams. I had the pleasure of working with several Thayer grads, including Gunnar Siden Th’85, Dale Apgar ’04 Th’05, and Ryan Conger ’05. Most of my work focused on building 2-D or 3-D computational fluid dynamic models. Efforts for the wind team dealt with enhancing prediction capability to improve blade acoustics and general performance. Recently, I focused on power plant mechanical control upgrades to improve optimization and control. I just completed a large upgrade on one of the world’s largest geothermal power plants in Mexico. I just took a leave of absence from the company to explore other avenues of energy and climate change and complete my master’s in mechanical engineering.
– Eric Fitz Th’05

I recently graduated from Stanford with a master’s in civil and environmental engineering, focusing on atmosphere/energy issues. I am now working at an energy engineering/consulting firm in San Francisco. My work focuses on feasibility studies, project scoping, and implementation support for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects. Recently I have also been working on calculating greenhouse gas emissions reduction potential for renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects.
– Tia Hansen ’05

I work for DC Energy along with other Dartmouth engineers Steven Hsu ’01 Th’02, Lauren Cecere ’06, and Albert Kang ’06. We trade in the energy markets, with our key focus on the deregulated electricity markets, but also in natural gas. Our activities aid in driving pricing efficiencies for producers and users of power alike. The markets provide a means for aiding in economic dispatch of generation units to meet the demand of the system across the transmission grid.
– Daniel Hassouni ’05 Th’05

I’m a project manager for Tamarack Energy, a developer of renewable energy projects, in Essex, Conn. Tamarack primarily focuses on developing utility-scale biomass (clean waste wood) power plants. We are working on several such projects on the East Coast. Clean waste wood is a carbon-neutral (or carbon negative), renewable, low-cost, and environmentally friendly source of power. We are also working on several wind projects in northern New England.
– Cliff Orvedal ’05

I am currently working in the alternative energy field, doing research and development for Mascoma Corp. in Lebanon, N.H., along with a number of other Dartmouth and Thayer School alumni. My work focuses on feedstock pretreatment for the production of cellulosic ethanol.
– Matt Richards ’05

I’m currently in the first year of my master’s at the University of Texas in Austin – my graduate research is actually on wind turbine control systems. I’m also interning this summer in GE’s Power Systems group in Schenectady, N.Y., working on a study of high wind and solar penetration in the western U.S.
– Dave Burnham ’06

I work at Manasc Isaac Architects, which is located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. My work is funded by a provincial agency (Alberta Ingenuity) that has a mandate to increase the amount of R&D in our province’s economy. I am conducting research with the intent of improving buildings that, among other things, use daylight and energy efficiently. I’m looking at how engineering analysis can be integrated into the architectural design process to achieve this end. I’m learning how to use and evaluate the widely disparate array of software packages available to facilitate the analysis of a building’s energy consumption. I’m also familiarizing myself with the design process of a sustainable building – which differs from the design of a standard building, primarily in the degree of coordination between members of the design team – to see how these tools can be integrated into that process. I’ve done a number of studies for several buildings that have been successfully used to convince clients of the benefits of design features that would optimize the amount of natural light in a space.
– Josh Kjenner Th’06

I work for Rumsey Engineers in Oakland, Calif. We design HVAC systems for energy-efficient buildings. We also serve as consultants to PG&E’s Savings By Design Program, which offers incentives for high-tech facilities that incorporate energy-efficient measures into their design. We perform the energy analysis for this program. The incentives are awarded based on the calculated energy savings.
– Hillary Price Th’07

KINGS OF THE ROAD: Advanced Transit Dynamics’ TrailerTail® makes trucks more aerodynamic.  The design team, from left, Jeff Grossman ’06, Chuck Horrell ’00 Th’01, and co-founder and CEO Andrew Smith Tu’07, display a prototype they worked on in Thayer’s machine shop.  Photo courtesy of Chuck Horrell ’00 Th’01

For more photos, visit our Alumni and Energy Technologies and Sustainability pages on Flickr.