Dartmouth Engineer

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 and can be seen at www.pvtsolar.com in the picture gallery. 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.

In the early 1940s Thayer had no machine shop. We three M.E. candidates were charged with building a shaper from raw castings. (A shaper produces a flat surface in metal by repeated, horizontal cutting strokes while advancing the piece a desired amount at right angles to the stroke.) Our professor, Joe Ermenc, arranged with the Lebanon High School to use its machine shop and shop teacher after hours. We drove to Lebanon each Friday, worked until late, and then rolled up in sleeping bags on the gym floor. The shop teacher got us started on various components and then pretty much left us alone. It was back to our sleeping bags in the gym on Saturday night. We completed the machine and installed it in the Thayer basement, one of the first machine shop tools. My companions in this effort were Roger Gaskill ’43 Th’44 and Frank Perley ’43 Th’44.
- Dick Livingston ’43 Th’44

Perhaps most memorable was the water. Yes, water in the lab. Water in pipes and valves and flowing through channels and over weirs. This was the hands-on part of courses in fluid mechanics, water supply, and sanitary engineering. Professor Ed Brown’s good nature helped temper the hard study with pleasant hours. I remember faculty members who relished the physical side of our studies, and demonstrated the importance of “feel” in engineering.
- Sam Florman ’46 Th’46

Machine shop was a required lab course in which we learned how to work metals on a lathe, a planer, and a milling machine as well as learning how to weld. It was taught by a retired machinist from Springfield, Vt., Larry Goldthwaite, who was a wonderful character and a very good teacher. Part of the final exam was to weld two pieces of steel together and then break it in the testing machine, hoping that it broke in the base metal rather than the weld. The course was great fun and has served me well throughout my dealings with steel bridges, including welding fabrication and the machining of the parts that go into movable bridges.
- Bill Conway ’52, Th’54

In the electrical machine lab I turned off the wrong breaker and cut off the field current to a big DC motor that was turning at a good clip. The armature current shot up and burned the commutator bars. Professor Kingsley made me dismantle the motor and trundle the armature over to the machine shop to have the commutator resurfaced. Maybe he called ahead over there, because they made me do the job all by myself: set the armature up on the big lathe, center it properly, set up the tool and the cutting angle, and make tiny shallow cuts until no more burned copper showed. Everybody stood over me and made scathing comments whenever I did the tiniest thing wrong. You can bet that after that I thought twice before I touched a breaker!
- Randy Cooper Th’54

Larry Goldthwaite oversaw the shop with great skill and even greater patience. He showed us how to arc weld two small pieces of steel, drawing a perfect bead with ease and practiced skill. When my turn came I carefully placed my two pieces on the welding bench, pulled down the mask, and set about drawing the best bead I could. Not bad, I thought. Then Larry quietly asked, “How do you plan to get it up from the bench?” Much to the amusement of all hands, I had welded the work firmly to the steel bench.
- Bill Macurdy ’55 Th’57

Dan Paradis ’61 Th’62 and I were working with schlieren images of burning acetylene and other gases in a small lab, and neglected the use of oxygen and the addition of CO2 to the atmosphere caused by burning gases. When we walked out, I passed out. Thus, the dean ordered the creation and adoption of a safety code. (We all contribute to the history of the place in one way or another.)
- Jerry Greenfield ’61 Th’62 Tu’65

Larry Goldthwaite was in charge when I took the course required to be able to have access in the shop. I still have the gear assembly on my desk that we made using each of the machines. It includes a 16-toothed gear, an 8-spline sleeve, an axle threaded on one end and with a larger opposite end, and an internally threaded base. My second memory relates to using a chuck on a tool or drill. Larry taught us the necessity of tightening such devices on each of the three openings – and I still do that today.
- Harris McKee ’61 Th’63

Larry Goldthwaite was a very precise and meticulous man, and it was easy to get on his wrong side with sloppy work. I learned that his somewhat gruff exterior camouflaged a genuinely warm and kind person. I still have on my desk the paperweight that I made during his shop course – four-part assembly that required learning how to use most of the shop’s equipment and a lot of useful techniques, skills that were helpful to me during my career and personal life.
- Andy Urquhart ’61 Th’64 Adv’71

In 1962 I bought my first car, a VW bug. It came with a small, lightweight shift knob that didn’t measure up to my expectations. Thanks to the help of a machine shop teacher, I turned out a beautiful egg-shaped, custom-made, steel gear shift knob. I drilled and tapped it and cut off the shift lever in my new car and threaded that shaft for the new knob. That knob was a real treasure. It was heavy enough that I could toss it from gear to gear and shifting became a snap!
- John D. Pearse ’62

I built a radio from scratch and – the most amazing thing – it worked!
- Sandy Duncan ’63

I took the machining extracurricular course in the machine shop. The most valuable lesson for me was to understand the process of metal evolving from a drawing to an actual part. The lesson was the time and effort required to machine a part. When I became an engineer, I remembered that as I awaited the parts I had designed, and I appreciated the effort invested by our technicians. My second lesson was to leave your work area in better order than you found it. Not a bad lesson, even now.
- Dick Couch ’64 Th’65

My enduring memory is Frank Dulac. He had such an infectious can-do attitude. He always had time for one more request and never lost his patience with students.
- Neil Drobny Th’64

I loved working in the machine shop (hey, it’s part of why I’m an engineer). I had a summer job at Grumman Aircraft on Long Island and got to work in the machine shop, where they built the jigs and tools so that everything they did was one of a kind. It was great that I had the Thayer experience so I understood what they were doing and could learn much more because I was already starting with a strong base.
- Ward H. Hindman ’65 Th’68

In 1963, as part of ES-22: Systems, I was staring at an equation on the blackboard and realized that an ideal seismograph would reduce the connection of a mass to the Earth to zero. The previous fall I’d seen some impressive table air-bearings used in demonstrations of Newtonian mechanics in physics lectures – these air-bearings reduced (horizontal) friction to almost zero for hockey puck-like disks. I imagined a one-dimensional air-bearing built using a rectangular tube turned with an angular edge up, with a right-angle “sled” riding on it. I went to the machine shop and the gentleman there told me to get the specs – hole diameters and spacing – from his counterpart in the physics department. I did so and returned worried that I wouldn’t know how to run the necessary drilling equipment with sufficient precision. The shop’s head honcho expressed doubt that the machine shop could take on the job, given the many holes that would be required and the delicacy of the very small drill bits. I came back the next day to find my completed air-bearing, built from beautifully machined aluminum. I built the rest of the seismograph myself, and it won me a very helpful citation.
- Mark Tuttle ’65 Th’66

My experience was that the idea of a perfect shop at Thayer was that every tool was in place and accounted for rather than out and at work on projects. That is, my experience was not all that positive. However, if I worked with Vic Surprenant, the on-site technician, I could get almost anything done because he was there to help students, not to keep the place in perfect order. I would have loved to have him with me here at Plastic Technologies Inc., where our culture is to “make things happen” rather than to keep everything in perfect order.
- Tom Brady ’66 Th’68

In 1967 I was responsible for making aluminum snow pickets for our Dartmouth Mountaineering Club expedition to put a new route on Mt. McKinley (Denali). I went to the machine shop, was given a catalog, and ordered some stock T-shaped aluminum. When the order arrived, two days before we were to leave for Fairbanks, we realized that the aluminum was not stiff enough. It was too late to reorder, so we reluctantly cut it to size and drilled the carabiner holes. When we unveiled the pickets on the mountain, our shocked teammates were ready to throw us off the nearest face, but we had no choice and used them. Luckily, we had no wrenching falls; certainly the pickets would not have held. Lesson learned: Next time my life depended on a material or design, I carefully researched before I bought.
- Michel Zaleski ’68 Th’69

I brought in a rusted brake drum from my 1967 Volvo to see if I could use one of the machines to resurface it and remove the rust. To my surprise the head of the shop, Fred Schleipman, showed me how to do it! I remember him saying, “You need a carbide-cutting head,” which I had never heard of. I felt guilty putting this dirty, rusty wheel on a pristine, expensive lathe, but I was very impressed that he allowed this “extracurricular” activity. The machine shop gave me an appreciation for the work of a machinist and how one could spend a lifetime mastering those skills.
- Jim Wood ’71, Th’72

Prior to being allowed to run rampant in the machine shop, you were given a project to complete that required the use of every machine in the shop. I was given a drawing of a four-piece paperweight and given guidance by the staff at each step of the project, focusing on both the machines being used, their capabilities, and the tolerances of the build for each of the steps. Our paperweights were sent off to be chromed so that we would have something “sharp” adorning our desks. For my 34 years with General Electric that paperweight has followed me. It still sits on my desk as a reminder that Thayer taught us not just how to think, but to build.
- Jim Bartlett ’72 Th’73

Building the Stirling engine for thermodynamics, we learned a valuable lesson on the cost of tolerances – how much more work it was to the tradesman if someone specified +/- .003 rather than +/- .03. My machine shop experience and relationship with Fred Schleipman paid off later when I was a poor married student and my car window crank (a molded plastic part) broke. Access to the shop and a little design advice from Fred enabled me to machine a metal part that not only solved the problem but looked good, too.
- Mike Sulaver ’74 Th’77 Tu’77

I was a volunteer fireman on the Hanover Fire Department, and during summer term I brought an antique fire truck with me to school. The truck, built in 1919, had a very pitted water pump shaft from rusting, and it would constantly tear up the water pump bearings. I worked with Fred in the machine shop and built a new water pump shaft to replace the old one. Problem solved!
- John Bartlett ’75 Th’78

I learned the most valuable lesson of my Thayer career in the machine shop: Workers on the shop floor know more than I do! Professor Converse required each member of his thermodynamics class to make a Stirling engine so we would understand, in his words, “how things are made.” I emerged with a profound respect for the machinists and their skills. My Stirling engine sits on my desk in front of me as my proudest trophy from my Thayer years.
- Scott Magelssen ’75 Th’76

The summer before my Thayer fifth year, I applied for a job in a printed circuit board manufacturing facility in my hometown. When I told them about the machine shop class I had taken, they hired me on the spot! I also remember the Stirling cycle engine that we built in the machine shop class. It’s interesting to see that large-scale versions are being used to generate clean energy.
- Wayne Ballantyne ’77 Th’78

I still have my Stirling engine. I don’t dare test whether it still runs!
- Pete Leone ’78

A few years back I discovered my Stirling engine. It brings back fond memories of my Hanover experiences.
- Tony Jones ’79 Th’80

My most vivid memory of my Thayer School days was making a Stirling engine. I had very little experience working with tools of any sort, but I quickly grew to love the pleasures of metal shop. I especially recall the satisfying sensation of shaping and polishing the bronze flywheel. When my little machine was done, I calculated its efficiency, which I recall as being dismal. However, once you cranked the thing up it would really buzz along. Now, 30 years later, it sits on a shelf in the family room. My kids still love to pour in the alcohol and get it going. I think they can’t quite believe I made it with my own hands.
- Lisa Saunders ’79

I enjoyed treks with the Mountaineering Club – and I liked the idea of a real-world test for my undergrad course’s machine shop project. So I contacted the REI company and they agreed to send a variety of free carabiners, which I then tested for tensile strength using a very strong machine shop testing apparatus. It was fun seeing where the carabiners failed (near the gate) and ranking their strengths. Blue ribbon went to “D-shaped” carabiners with locking gates.
- Jim Payne ’81

Just the other day my 6-year-old was playing with the Stirling engine I built. I have fond memories of the Thayer machine shop and Roger Howes and Vic Surprenant.
- Terry Wong Th’81 DMS’90

I was never really a designer, but I did need to do some data gathering to support Professor Strohbehn’s work on hyperthermia using ultrasound. We needed to test our disc-shaped ultrasound transducer before attempting to use it in studies with cancer patients. That meant constructing a non-interfering Plexiglas “fish tank,” which is where the shop came in. As I was rather clueless at building, one of the shop guys directed my work and chipped in as I built the tank. Later I filled the tank with de-ionized water and floated a hunk of raw roast beef a few inches from the transducer. The 3 MHz sound heated the meat, and I got temperature readings at various positions. This allowed us to better understand the heating capabilities of the circular transducer when encountering human flesh. It also led to a memorable roast beef dinner.
- Russell King Th’83

I remember the bridge project. We were given three-foot lengths of aluminum strips and a piece of Plexiglas. We roadtripped along the Connecticut River to look at old truss bridges for design ideas. It was my first chance to cut and bend metal with a Bridgeport machine, which was a blast. I got to keep the bridge, which I still display proudly in my study.
- Doug Kingsley ’84 Th’85

In the bridge-building contest, our group made the truss bridge too short. Instead of making the bridge greater than the span required, we made it exactly the width of the span to be bridged. Any weight on the bridge sent it to the bottom. We had to build an adapter on the end of the bridge, which threw off any real ability to predict the bridge deflection due to load. I guess that’s why I ended up in software design.
- Steve Morris ’84 Th’85

I built a mechanical CPR device in the machine shop. The experience was so positive because of Roger Howes. He was very helpful, and I learned a lot.
- Heidi Russell ’84

I always found Roger Howes and his team enthusiastic, willing to help and, most importantly, patient. From the popular truss design competition to my ENGS 21 project, where we designed and built a deep sea cable connector out of a titanium “memory” alloy, to my thesis project on thin film transfer printing, my time spent in the shop was not only productive, it was always fun.
- Eric Schnell ’84 Th’85

Vic Surprenant gave me excellent help in making the machine we used to investigate the wear of UHMPE against stainless steel in low-amplitude oscillating motion. It was a tribology project that I did for Professor Francis Kennedy as a part of my M.E. degree. How exciting it was to make a drawing and have it realized in the real physical world! I made some parts of the machine myself, but Vic made most of them. The finished machine was used for a number of years for tribology experiments with the guidance of Professor Kennedy.
- Leo Smidhammar Th’85

I have fond memories of the machine shop with Roger Howes. Our group built a wheelchair that elevated upwards for access to cabinets and shelves. We used those wonderful machines like the Bridgeport. I grew up in Bridgeport, Conn., so using that machine was very special.
- Nancy Shawah Cheung Th’86

I was a grad student working for Professor John Collier, manufacturing titanium alloy implants for rabbits and implanting them. The implants were basically glorified washers with countersinks and fancy coatings, and I needed numerous sizes to fit the various rabbit tibiae. Titanium is not an easy material to work, and I was not very experienced in drafting or design. I kept my list of implant sizes on a piece of paper by “my” lathe. When there was time, the guys in the machine shop would help me out (like little elves in the night) and make a few of these little implants and leave them in my box. One day I  found a round wire thing in my box. I could not figure out what the elves were up to! I inquired and found it was the smallest diameter implant I thought I needed. Little did I know that this was an “un-makeable” device. I learned two important lessons that have helped me in my career: be careful that you never ask for something that is “un-makeable”, and you need to have made things yourself in order to gain that wisdom.
- Kim Dwyer Th’88

My fondest memory came from the introduction to the machine shop that Roger Howes oversaw. To be allowed to use the machine shop, one had to successfully follow a set of directions for various machines and tools, and until that point in my life I was not handy at all with such things. To this day I keep the device that I had to machine on my desk, and anybody from Dartmouth during the same era who sees it says, “Hey, you’re a Thayer graduate, aren’t you?!” We all built them – and it gave us an appreciation that people have to be able to build what we engineers design. Years later, I became a professor at Vermont Technical College and found that Roger Howes had joined the faculty there, too. He remains a whiz in Vermont Tech’s machine shop as he helps his engineering technology students, but I can still tap a thread when need be – all thanks to the Thayer machine shop.
- Scott Sabol ’88 Th’88

As a master’s candidate and later a research associate under John Collier, I was building all manner of Rube Goldberg devices for testing total joint replacement prostheses. My free access to the machine shop was key, as many of these devices and fixtures started out as rough ideas and only took final shape on the mill or the lathe. Having earned my bachelor’s degree outside Dartmouth, I was unfamiliar with the Thayer machine shop and was amazed at not only the level of access that students had but the amount of patient teaching that Roger Howes, Gary Durkee, and Roland Gauthier provided. Later on, as a design engineer and a project manager, I was always cognizant of the fact that whatever I designed or had designed, someone had to build it, so it better be buildable.
- Jim McNamara Th’89

Together with the Swedish student Stefan Palmgren Th’91, I worked on our B.E. project. My task was to design two planar robot arms for a master-slave configuration, while Stefan designed the wrist with a special force and torque sensor. After finishing the drawings, I had to manufacture the complete structure in the machine shop on the lathe and milling machine. Roger Howes helped, so the work was done properly. Back in Germany, it was no problem for me to get credit for the project.
- Harald Schoenenborn Th’91

For three years I worked for Roger Howes in the machine shop as a T.A. From Roger I learned two vital and related things: How to make myself heard and how to stand up for myself. Roger has a keen eye for group dynamics. Many times I saw him pull a quieter student apart from a group and give him or her a talk – telling us usually that our ideas couldn’t be any worse than those of the louder members of the group, so we must get in there and fight for them. Usually he was right. Roger also trusted me to help students learn the machinery and new techniques. Once he and Roland Gauthier asked me to shut down the shop for lunchtime. All the students stopped working as asked except one, who informed me: “I don’t have to listen to you. You’re just another student.” So I spun around and hit the emergency stop button on the wall, cutting power to all machinery in the room. When he tried to turn the mill on and it wouldn’t start, he turned to me and demanded that I turn the power back on. I told him, “I’m sorry, I can’t; I’m just another student.” This has helped me anytime I’ve been dismissed as “just another X” – you are never quite that powerless. Roger lured me away from a lucrative job at the dining hall with the promise of lower pay and a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich once a week. Best deal I ever made.
- Becca Voelker ’92 Th’94

Roger Howes and Gary Durkee were great – patient with a novice like me and always good with a joke. I had never done anything in a machine shop. They never made me feel afraid to go for it, even though I was scared to death I’d break something.
- Darrin Clement Th’93

One of the proudest entries on my resume is of my experience in the machine shop. Machining metal taught me a ton about planning ahead and doing everything deliberately. Parts were either exactly right or they were junk.
- Zander Lichstein ’95, Th’97

Roger Howes ran the shop with pragmatic rules: “If you’re about to do something stupid, ask first.” “If you bust something, than fess up.” “Clean up before closing time.” With all the high-minded intellectualism around campus, I could have compartmentalized these rules to the shop floor, but there was something in Roger’s manner of teaching that led me to extrapolate instead. After all, what good is an education in mind-bending concepts and theories unless we learn to acknowledge the limits of our understanding, take responsibility for our actions, and respect other people’s time?
- Sol Diamond ’97 Th’98

My senior thesis project was to design and build a better body for the Formula race car. I loved the countless hours I spent in the basement of Thayer. I’d happily come back and do it all over again.
- Erik Weeman ’97

The machine shop opened at 7:30 a.m., an ungodly hour for college students. It didn’t take long to learn that I would have Roger Howes, Leonard Parker, and Pete Fontaine almost all to myself if I kept coming in then. I picked a thesis that would let me spend as much time in the shop as I could and dragged out its completion just to keep working in the shop another term.
- Gus Moore ’99 Th’01

I was fortunate to work closely with Pete Fontaine in the CNC shop and learn many of the aspects of product design and producibility from him. Working with the cantankerous old Bridgeport CNC, I saw firsthand how small tweaks to designs could significantly improve producibility of a system. Knowing the essentials of machining and smart-part design have enabled me to excel in the aerospace industry, where the vast majority of parts are CNC-machined. It always strikes me how students from other universities have no experience with product design and manufacture, and how much they struggle to understand that engineering is not just calculation of solutions to book problems, it is the ability to make an elegant solution to a real-world problem. Part of that elegance is in the ease of manufacture, a skill Thayer School and its machine shop effectively instill in all their graduates.
- Brian Paris Nealon ’01 Th’02

I used the machine shop to create a sculpture for studio art. Kevin Baron was instrumental in ordering materials, as well as setting up the CNC lathe to create a mechanical joint that allowed my sculpture to rotate in the wind. Execution of this sculpture would not have been possible without the machine shop and the enthusiasm and guidance from Kevin for a non-engineering-related project.
- Mat Ackerman ’05

Although I did not use the machines, the staff helped me make some parts of the bioreactor for my experiment. I found the staff very nice, helpful, and professional. I wish I had been an undergraduate there and spent more time on the machines with them.
- Yanpin Lu Th’05

The machine shop is the heart of the Thayer – the place where build happens! I believe that working in teams and getting your hands dirty are the most important parts of an engineering education.
- Brian Mason Th’05

I worked under Kevin Baron programming and running the milling machines. One day when Kevin was out, I ran out of work and asked Leonard Parker what to do. He handed me a bright orange mallet and told me to sit behind the new thermodynamics students building their Stirling engines and “threaten” them. Although a bit harsh, we always made sure that anyone new in the lab was watched. The machine shop was one of the most caring areas, even if no one in there would admit it.
- Tasha Sakaguchi Th’05

It’s funny how attached I grew to a small, crowded, windowless project design lab after spending a ridiculous amount of time in it. We solved problems, ate meals, fretted that we were going to fail the class because we didn’t have our project working a week before our final presentation, and traded high-fives when we managed to get it working.
- Josh Kjenner Th’06

I was intimidated by the machines until Leonard Parker and Mike Ibey began helping me out, making sure I was using the machines correctly. They made the experience way better with their humor and anecdotes of past machine shop “incidents.” I always looked forward to my part of the day spent there.
- Erik B. Marquez ’06 Th’07

I dropped into the machine shop for practical experience on anything mechanical. As a graduate student driving an old car, I found their mechanical advice invaluable in keeping my 1991 car running through five winters. They had so much knowledge and enthusiasm to share.
- Glenn Nofsinger Th’06

Some of the early Advanced Transit Dynamics‘ TrailerTail prototypes were made in the machine shop as part of an ENGS 190/290 design project. Jeff Grossman ’06 Th’07 was on the Thayer team (and now works for ATD), led by CEO Andrew Smith Tu’07. Also helping was Chuck Horrell ’00 Th’01 (also now with ATD).
- Errik Anderson ’00 Th’07

I came to Thayer with a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. This gave me a somewhat unique perspective on the nature of the Thayer machine shop and its role as a learning tool. At my undergraduate institution, the multiple machine shops and casting facilities were guarded from the average student, much as they are at other institutions. In contrast, at Thayer the hands-on spaces are truly integral to the education. My presence there was natural; I didn’t need a “reason” or some kind of lab hall pass to use the facilities. I spent some time in the machine shop and project lab working with James Joslin ’05, the mechanical design wizard of our research group. He was very comfortable working in these spaces and was treated as a peer by the machine shop guys. I know that developed from countless hours learning by doing, and I know his experience was not unique because you could walk by the machine shop on a busy day and see every station occupied by a student. My enduring memory of the Thayer machine shop is that the people responsible for the space recognized that it is there for the benefit of the students. And in order to maximize that benefit and really differentiate a Thayer education from any other engineering education, they tried very hard to make project space seem like an open environment, a natural place for a student to be.
- Devin Brande Th’07

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

My most egregious failure was the XH15 high-altitude helicopter for the U.S. Air Force, a development spanning about three years in the late 1940s.

The Air Force was to provide a new, vertical, supercharged engine, a major modification of an existing un-supercharged airplane engine, as Government Furnished Equipment (GFE). The critical point was that the program was small — only one aircraft and two engines had been ordered. As project engineer, I had no leverage on either the engine manufacturer or the Air Force when the engine would not perform satisfactorily.

On start-up the supercharger drive shaft would snap off, and it took months for the engine people to be convinced that a slip-clutch would fix it. Next, the engine surged with ever-increasing amplitude at about one hertz and the engine guys never did fix this one.

One tarnished silver lining, however, did appear: The supplier of the engine for the little Bell, fabled in M*A*S*H, came up with a substitute engine for flight test development purposes at lower power levels. A favorite test pilot and I had climbed to 15,000 feet above Niagara Falls when the engine quit, not to be restarted. As we autorotated toward the airport my job was to monitor the temperature of the top bearing of the transmission, which supported the entire weight of the helicopter. To save weight and cost — hugely more important in rotary-wing machines than fixed-wing — I had purposely avoided a separate pressure oil system for the transmission alone, relying on engine oil during powered operation and scooped, splashed, and mist lubrication when the engine was not running. If the top bearing became too hot we would have to bail out before the rotor mast jammed or broke loose. The pilot made a beautiful dead-engine landing in front of our hangar to complete the world record autorotation descent.

There were two lessons: The first, as any learned aviation person knew, is never build a new aircraft around an engine that doesn’t exist yet (Boeing and GE violate this, but at their peril); the second is how wise it was to fight to get the word “satisfactory” written into the contract in front of “GFE engine.”
- Tom Harriman ’42 Th’43

The following was a big lesson learned in my very first engineering class. In ENGS 21, the fall of my sophomore year, the class was assigned a project that had to do with sports and recreation. After many hours of brainstorming, our group came up with the idea of creating a “Goal Line Sensor” with the intent of using it in football but with the concept easily applicable to other sports with goals. The idea was to have some sort of sensor signal when the ball broke the plane of the goal line because the refs’ views are often obstructed by the jumble of players on the field. Anyhow, in our proposal presentation, our idea took a severe beating at the hand of several professors. We were told our project was not feasible, and that there were too many potential problems to make this project worth pursuing. We listened to our professors and selected a new project. A few years later one of the other members from that group was reading a magazine and found an article explaining that the very product we had proposed in ENGS 21 had, indeed, been invented and brought to market. I am not telling this story because I am bitter, and I certainly don’t hold anything against the professors, who I believe had our best interests in mind. The lesson to be learned is that nothing is impossible. If you have an idea that you truly believe in, go with it. So what if my teachers told me it was a bad idea; that was their challenge — and should have been my motivation.

As for what I am doing now: After taking the summer off to travel I moved down to the Washington, D.C., area. I work for a company called DC Energy, trading in the energy markets. The work I do is highly quantitative and is extremely challenging, but my co-workers are brilliant and it’s a great working environment. Outside of work, I have kept up all my sports, though skiing is not nearly as easy to do when you aren’t in New Hampshire!
- Daniel S. Hassouni ’05, Th’05

I left Dartmouth with a Ph.D. in 1977 and have stayed at the Cold Regions Lab in Hanover, where I then had a part-time job. I did my thesis on radiowave propagation in the Earth, and still work on it, having published 51 papers to date in refereed journals, mostly on subsurface radar. I’m most proud of my papers, my five NSF grants, and 10 trips to Antarctica, during each of which a discovery always happened. I’ve had no large disasters but many small ones, most of which centered around hiring the wrong people. The lesson learned is to never take on someone who has no vested interest, either in a career or research.
- Steve Arcone Th’77

My most instructive failure was that I applied to medical school during my senior year at Dartmouth and did not get accepted. Instead, I accepted a job offer from a campus interview with GE in technical marketing. I believe that engineering has been a better career path for me than medicine would have been, or perhaps I just learned to appreciate what I have! I have enjoyed part-time engineering careers with NASA, MIT, and GE that have been rewarding and flexible, allowing me to spend quality time with my husband and four children. Presently, I work for GE Aviation in Lynn, Mass.
- Ellen (Sullivan) Sen ’77

I have not failed, I have just found 10,000 potential investors who said “no.” I think there are many starving engineers (or starving artists in a scientific way) who are finding that their science and methods are good but have a tough time convincing markets due to timing, lack of vision, or trends in finance (there is very little venture capital out there right now, for example). Delivering a good product or service is so much more than engineering alone, and Thayer might want to acknowledge that we as alumni could have a clearinghouse.
- Toby Reiley ’81

I worked with Exxon Enterprises Inc. solar thermal systems division in the late 1970s. We had a lot of innovative people, but trying to build a new business in an infant industry with a new product was too much of a stretch. Also, you can be way too early on the technology curve, and that will doom one as well. It is very important to look at the key assumptions and then see how likely they are to occur — if the most critical ones are the least likely ones, then look elsewhere.
- Bob Garman Th’70

For more photos, visit our Alumni page on Flickr.

We asked you to tell us what engineering classes you enjoyed the most. Here’s what you said:

ENGS 15, “Introduction to Product Design”

It focused on preparing business plans for a new product that we designed and built. I thought it had a lot of relevant skills to teach and it had a lot of entrepreneurial spin to it. We had to learn how to be team players, use creativity, and overcome challenges.
—Vicente Ramos ’95

ENGS 21, “Introduction to Engineering”

I discovered talents I never knew I had. Developed long-term relationships with faculty— Sid Lees, especially, and John Strohbehn — and fellow students — Dean Spatz, Chris Miller, and Hector Motroni, in particular. Discovered that learning for the purpose of creating is easier, more fun, and more productive than learning to pass a test, get a degree, or learning for the sake of knowledge itself.
—Frank Barber ’66

I recall our bus trip to Crotched Mountain School to visit with students with disabilities. Our teams had to come up with a project that would help them. My team selected to construct a typewriter that would produce both Braille and typed letters. We were better designers than technicians, as we were not able to produce a working prototype, although we really tried.
—William Judd ’67 Th’68

Learning engineering is a grind, but practicing engineering is fun. Having this course upfront created a vision of what I was really working for through five years at Dartmouth and two at Carnegie Mellon.
—Tom McWhorter ’69 Th’70

It taught me the very important lesson that I cannot work with everybody. It wasn’t a fun lesson to learn, but it’s one of the most important. I think about that class every time I hire someone or come into a work team.
—Kiersten Muenchinger ’93

ENGS 21 because of the entrepreneurial/creative/team components.
—Sam Winslow ’94

I loved how it covered the whole product development cycle, from identification of a need to prototype and marketing. It was a great experience so early in the major.
—Elizabeth Davis ’99

I didn’t want to be a practicing engineer, and this class really helped me apply engineering problem-solving skills to a business settings. The option evaluation, teamwork, market research, data support, and presentation skills I learned gave me a leg up at my first post-graduation job as a management consultant.
—Lindsay (Bowen) Coe ’00

I enjoyed the teamwork. I encouraged my non-engineering-major friends to take it and they all loved it, too!
—Sujan Patel ’01

The projects required innovation, and students were given the freedom to find problems and solve them in their own way. At such an early part in the curriculum for an engineer, most programs would not allow engineering students the ability to be this creative. I believe this class embodies why Thayer produces phenomenal graduates. This class, as well as ENGS 190/290, prepared me for my career as a project manager for Abbott Diabetes Care. I will be forever grateful for the lessons these classes taught me, as I still use them every day.
—Mara (Bishop) Winn Th’01

My group decided to design a blind-spot detector, which involved selecting and wiring some chips together on a board. We had no idea what we were doing and thought we were doing something pretty advanced. The next year I took ENGS 31 and realized that the whole project would have been pretty easy (with many fewer sleepless nights) if we had only known something about digital electronics.
—Kelly Cameron ’04 Th’05

ENGS 22, “Systems I”

We learned how to calculate the heat loss from a bald guy’s head in the dead of a Dartmouth winter. Professor Hans Grethlein didn’t have much hair.
—Tom McConnell ’76

ENGS 22 with Al Henning was the first class that took all of that crazy non-linear math and made it “visible.” The class mapped the theoretical formulas to the real world and showed how you could use them to predict a physical problem.
—Alinia Uy Asmundson ’96

ENGS 31, “Introduction to Digital Electronics”

I remember the synthesizer that Nik Nesbitt, Caroline Howe, and I built for digital electronics. We went to the music department and recorded several different instruments as they were played. We captured the waveforms and programmed them into digital components. Not only could we play music using the keyboard, but we were able to record, play back, fast forward, and rewind. The look of delight on Professor Hansen’s face when we presented the project is one that I will never forget.
—Brad Davis ’85 Th’86, ’87

In this class you could start out knowing absolutely nothing and end up creating some really interesting tools and toys.
—Krispin Leydon ’99 Th’01

ENGS 33, “Solid Mechanics”

I watched Professor Kennedy weigh the bridges before the competition. He ran out of weights, so he used cups of apple cider (which he had on hand for the occasion). Nothing was better than watching Leonard’s joy as he pumped up the hydraulic ram to smash our hard work to toothpicks!
—Bob Batt Th’00, ’01 Tu’06

ENGS 35, “Biotechnology & Biochemical Engineering”

This class is what jump started me on my current career path.
—Roberto Barbero ’01 Th’02

ENGS 37, “Environmental Engineering”

As an environmental lawyer for the Ohio attorney general I brought many Clean Water Act enforcement cases against municipalities. It always helped to know a thing or two about design of wastewater treatment plants. I do similar work now with the U.S. Department of Justice.
—Jim Payne ’81

ENGS 44, “Sustainable Design”

The class was filled with informal brainstorms, mind-maps, prototyping, and a lot of laughs. I continue to apply what I learned to my career in product design.
—Brian Mason ’03 Th’04, ’05

ENGS 50 [ENGS 23], “Distributed Systems and Fields”

Professor Laaspere’s class on field theory was very difficult, but it caused me to look at the world in an entirely different way. It was inspiring.
—Bill Kellogg ’73

Professor Wallis’ fields class pulled  together various engineering disciplines into a unifying theme. It also made me really appreciate the beauty of math. Perhaps most important, it was in this class that I learned “there’s no partial credit in life” (his reason for giving us none)!
—Bill Rockwood ’81

Professor Sonnerup challenged you to think about how different systems use the same underlying mathematics.
—Joyce Nagle Th’90

Professor Kennedy catered the course to the students. I felt like I learned more in his class than I did in any other course at Thayer.
—Patrick Orie ’96

ENGS 51 [ENGS 33], “Solid Mechanics”

No question, ENGS 51 with Francis Kennedy.
—J. Tobias Reiley ’81

From a standpoint of fun: Professor Kennedy’s ENGS 51. From a standpoint of practicality and usable content: ENGS 67, “Digital Electronics.”
—William Loginov ’85

ENGS 52 [ENGS 26], “Control Theory”

It helped me think through problems more thoroughly and take the human element into account. We read a critique to an article and everyone in the class agreed how bad the original article must have been. We then read a rebuttal to the critique and weren’t sure what to think. It is important for people to figure out the truth on their own.
—T. Mark Jones ’84 Th’85

ENGS 56, “Introduction to Biomedical Engineering”

The instruction was on the engineering principles of current biomedical technologies — hyperthermia treatments for cancer, MRI, respiratory models. It was the best integration of academic and practical instruction.
—Kevin Franck ’92

Professor Collier gave an overview of various aspects of biomedical engineering. The most memorable moments were getting a brain MRI scan for each student and inspecting failed artificial hip and knee joints. I also liked “Physiological Control System Modeling” with Professor Daubenspeck. We only had three students in the class, and we had extreme flexibility to choose our own models. Professor Daubenspeck was enthusiastic and fostered creative thinking.
—Jan Lammerding Th’97

ENGS 61 [ENGS 25], “ Thermodynamics”

My first thermodynamics class almost took me out! Professor Ermenc knew his subject cold but had a distracting speech habit: putting in the filler word “here” every 30 seconds or so. Once in awhile he’d cross you up with a “there.” With my thermo skills and his teaching, I was grateful he gave me a D in the course. The next semester I earned one of my best A’s from him in heat transfer. Come to think of it, his “here” rate was lower in heat transfer.
—David Porter ’59 Th’60

Thermo with Professor Richter. My only regret was that I did not take his courses earlier. He was, by far, the best professor I had at Thayer.
—Logan Bullitt ’94

I liked thermo with Prof. Richter, although that was one of the hardest. I also liked building the Sterling engine in the shop. I spent three summers in the machine shop.
—Mike MacAvoy ’93 Th’94, M.D.

It’s a tie between thermodynamics with Professor Richter and “Organizational Design” with Professor Joyce. I use what I learned in those classes every day.
—Sean Casten Th’98

ENGS 62 [ENGS 34], “Fluid Dynamics”

My grades at Thayer were not strong and I semi-elected to forgo the fifth year and go directly to Navy flight training. After six years in squadrons I was sent to the postgraduate school in Monterey, Calif., where I and other entering classmates took an engineering record exam. I scored in the low 90s, and my fellow classmates, who had attended other major engineering schools, scored mostly in the 50s and 60s. The people giving the test suspected foul play, and I was called in to chat about the test. While my grades did not reflect it, I really did learn and retain a lot, which enabled me to enter the most difficult program (physics) and do quite well.
—Jim Vohr ’57

Professor Graham Wallis derived the problems for the final exam from the The Tempest by Shakespeare. Each problem was preceded by a passage of The Tempest. Then the problem was restated with specific assumptions and values (i.e., wind velocity, mass of the angel Ariel, shape of the angel’s wings, etc.). Professor Wallis ideally matched hard engineering science with a masterpiece of literature.
—William Weston ’72 Tu’74

ENGS 63 [ENGS 24], “Science of Materials”

I had a huge “aha moment” when I finally understood the 3-D structure of steel, and hence understood why steel is so much stronger than plain iron. At Thayer School I learned to think in a logical and structured way that has served me well.
—Jack Oswald ’84

With its blend of physics and engineering the course directed me toward my life’s work.
—Ken Jones ’85 Th’87

ENGS 64 [ENGS 32], “Introduction to Linear and Digital Circuits”

The professor was very good and had a wonderful sense of humor — and also took us on a hiking trip in the White Mountains.
—Bart Lombardi ’52 Th’54

My best Thayer courses were taught by George Taylor. In this course we learned the fundamentals of each part of a circuit, why it existed, and what function it performed. The final exam was fun. It was open book, and we had to explain what was happening as the current flowed through the entire circuit. Professor Taylor was good at explaining the fundamentals and always challenged us to excel. He was very approachable, understanding, and helpful.
—Charlie Schneider ’57 Th’58 Tu’58

Professor Stratton seemed to enjoy his subject and made the class enjoy it, and, consequently, I think we all learned more than we might have otherwise. Professor Stratton always had time for us if we needed help. He genuinely enjoyed teaching, and it came across to the students.
—Steve Askey ’76 Th’77

Without a doubt, Professor Stratton’s electronics class.
—Venkatesh Nagar Th’90

Professor Stratton’s classes.
—Joshua McCurdy ’99

No one loved his subject matter and the students more than Professor Stratton. You didn’t get the full Thayer experience without getting the Professor Stratton lecture on gassing up your car the day before Thanksgiving.
—Joshua Payne ’96 Th’97

ENGS 73, “Materials Processing and Selection”

We did a project where we learned to weld and study the property changes from welding on various metals. In our group presentation on our finding we learned the value of teamwork and learned to appreciate the contribution of different individuals
—David Prince ’79 Th’81 Tu’81

ENGS 76, “Machine Engineering”

The class where we had a large box of parts and had to build a robot for a competition combined practicality, theory, and amusement into one package. Incidentally, I happened to win that particular competition.
—James Rourke ’95

We spent endless hours teaching ourselves Pro/ENGINEER and working in the machine shop to get our “robo-hockey” player just right.
—Gus Moore ’99 Th’01

Professor Kennedy’s ENGS 76 was a great hands-on experience.
—Ron June ’02

Tons of work but rewarding. The combination of interesting subject material and a fantastic project made it worth it. We worked extremely hard but produced a great project.
—Ariel Dowling ’05 Th’05

Learning about the mechanical systems that surround us every day, then building a project incorporating all aspects of classroom learning into a friendly competition requiring dirty hands and innovative thinking. Throw in a superb professor, Kennedy, and there you have it.
—Dale Apgar ’04 Th’05

ENGS 100 & 101, “Structural Theory and Design I and II”

Structures with Professor Minnich: very practical, always interesting. A class I built a career on.
—Victor Macomber ’46 Th’52

While studying for the open book final exam I realized there was only one configuration of end-supported beams we hadn’t already had as a problem or class example. Preparing for the exam, I carried out that analysis. It turned out that the problem on the final was the one that I had prepared; I had only to change x to -x and copy my work. That problem definitely helped my grade.
—Harris McKee ’61 Th’63

ENGS 105, “Computational Methods for Partial Differential Equations”

Professor Lynch’s numeric methods required extensive programming and dealing with a plethora of math equations every week. I spent a whole evening just finding a bug in the program. It was fun, though, when the final result was shown in the beautiful graph. Professor Lynch made complex things simple to understand.
—Ming Qi Th’01

ENGS 116, “Computer Architecture”

Professor Linda Wilson’s class explored the hardware/software system dividing line. Usually computer scientists operate on the software side and hardware engineers on the hardware side; Professor Wilson asked us to consider both to improve our understanding of computer architectures and design skills.
—John Carey Th’01

ENGS 141 [ENGS 156], “Heat, Mass and Momentum Transfer”

Three courses leap to mind: Graham Wallis’ “Heat, Mass and Momentum Transfer,” for learning how to solve PDE’s with such geometries as the rolled roast and spherical turkey problems; Hans Grethlein’s “Experimental Design” — or how to get the most bang out of the least buck when gathering data; and “Engineering Economics,” a concise course on the time value of money in project decision-making.
—Richard Gregor Th’71

Each week Dr. Graham Wallis gave us impossible problems and encouraged us to work together to figure them out. He stimulated numerous conferences and discussions in the old “barn.” To show no ill will, he invited us to his house in Norwich for swimming and picnicking. His wife was kind enough to teach me how to make bread. Besides my very average career as an engineer and surgeon, this skill has distinguished me over the years. I also enjoyed Prof Ed “Brownie” Brown’s “Water Resources” [ENGG 110]. We designed Quabbin Reservoir and conduits to reach Boston, complete with pumping stations, etc. It made me feel like a real engineer!
—Peter Areson ’72 Th’73, M.D.

ENGS 160, “Biotechnology and Biochemical Engineering”

Professor Gerngross gave each student oral interview tests.
—Brian Graner ’01 Th’02

ENGG 171/ENGM 181, “Marketing”

Engineering economics changed my entire future as I changed from a focus on surveying and construction to a focus on the financial aspects of business. I retired as the treasurer of New England Telephone Co.
—John Cogswell ’55 Th’56

Marketing with the late Professor Caroline Henderson put a different perspective on problem solving — how to look at, identify, and solve non-technical problems.
—Shailesh Chandra Th’91

ENGM 176, “Total Quality Management”

Our project allowed us to visit a company and solve a problem that they had. It was a fantastic experience.
—Heather (Bartholf) Harries Th’97

ENGG 181, “Legal and Ethical Analysis”

I used George Taylor’s engineering law for a whole career. That and his engineering economics (I proofed all the problems in his text before it was published) were the two most useful courses.
—Tom Jester ’63 Th’64

George A. Taylor taught contract law and a return on capital investment course utilizing discounted cash flow rate of return analyses. George was straightforward and emphasized only a few basic precepts in each course. In the opening lecture he would write on one blackboard the half dozen things he wanted us to retain after taking the course. I still remember his cardinal points, and use them. My classmates referred to him as “The GAT” — a play on his direct straight-shooter style and his initials.
—Bob Woolman ’57 Th’58

ENGM 183, “Operations Management”

Group activities in Professor Hall’s class made it fun, interesting, and memorable. I’ve used material from that class in several work projects. I’ve also utilized information from “Issues in Engineering Management,” specifically the content on TQM.
—Ashly Downey Th’03

Case study discussions were a welcome relief from the usual engineering lecture class, and Joe Hall did a fabulous job relating the material to actual business situations and his real-world experiences. Games and simulations were a great part of the class and made for a friendly competitive atmosphere among classmates.
—Kristian Lau ’04

ENGG 191, “Physical Metallurgy”

Metallurgy — with a great teacher, Ed Brown. I used the basics of my Thayer courses for the rest of my career.
—Alan Wright ’51 Th’52

ENGS 197/198 [ENGS 190/290], “Project Initiation and Completion”

In my fifth-year project with George Whitehead we fabricated a silicon alloy junction diode with materials we obtained from some generous companies. It was a great learning experience that helped prepare me for graduate school.
—Ralph “Dick” Spencer ’61 Th’62

ENGG 296 [ENGG 390], “Master of Engineering Management Project”

My choice: the M.E.M. project class.
—John Merhige ’94 Th’95

More Faves

I really enjoyed surveying — it was as precise as we were skillful.
—Richard Livingston ’43 Th’44

My favorite Thayer class during the 1946-47 year was Professor Ed Brown on “Strength of Materials” There was excellent give and take — we didn’t just sit there taking notes. And we learned. As we approached finals we decided that memorizing the numerous formulae overtaxed our delicate brains. We petitioned him, forcefully, to allow us to use a helpful compendium of just about any formula we had encountered during the year. He reluctantly agreed, on condition that he prepare the list. Expectantly, we came to the exam. Sure enough, he had a stack of (folded) formula lists as well as the exam itself. We were pleased with our success. When we opened the list, it said only: F=ma. Professor Brown had won (as usual), and we had learned an important lesson: Stop moaning and get on with the work.
—Tom Streeter ’44 Th’48 Tu’48

My favorite course was a tutorial with Jim Browning. I had become interested in jet engine design through one of his thermodynamics course, and I came to him with a question along the lines of, “Why don’t they do such and such?” His reply began, “Well because,” and ended with, “Gee, I’m not sure. I’ll tutor you in a one-hour credit course and you can either figure out why it doesn’t work or why it is a sound idea.” We determined that the idea really would work, although the metallurgical demands due to certain heat differentials were pretty severe. The experience led to Jim Browning hiring me during my final year as a Tuck-Thayer to work on the development of his plasma jet torch, the precursor to Thermal Dynamics.
—Em Houck ’56 Th’58 Tu’58

At the time our Thayer class was marching through Cummings Hall there was not yet a discipline known as “computer science.” But, on the heels of an exceptional course on numerical analysis with Professor Tom Kurtz of Dartmouth’s math department, I decided to pursue a career in that high-tech field just unfolding. The two mandatory summer courses between our undergraduate senior year and the following graduate year at Thayer were just what I needed to cement that career proposition into place. One course dealt with digital computers and the other with analog computers, and the syllabuses for the two were coordinated—we could solve some of the same problems in two different ways. Professor Carl Long taught the digital course, and it was absolutely fabulous. I enjoyed it so much that it was one of the few courses I aced. Professor Long was a gifted teacher and a kind and patient man. He opened up the new world of digital computers and made it exceptionally attractive. Forty years of working happily in the computer industry followed for me, I was indeed very fortunate to have had Carl’s introduction.
—Peter Robohm ’60 Th’61

In George Taylor’s methods engineering course there were no right or wrong answers. The only requirement was to think “outside the box.”
—Neil Drobny ’62,Th’64

Professor Taylor’s methods engineering was a favorite class.
—Rick Van Mell ’63 Th’64

In Myron Tribus’ thermoeconomics class we learned about the value of doing a complete input/output analysis of all the transfers of material and energy across the boundaries of a system and then tying these flows to the economics of each flow. It made such complete logical sense that it has impacted much of my view of situations during the rest of my life! Things are more complex than they appear on the surface. For example, hybrid cars seem to be more economical for society than gasoline-powered cars are, but the impact of the efforts needed to make the batteries and then to dispose of them may, in fact, be more of an environmental/economic burden than the gasoline-powered car is. The class was small and the focus was on practical applications of the theory. A truly life-changing experience.
—Steve Brenner Th’64

After 40 years, I no longer remember course names and numbers. However, it is clear that one course taught by Bob Dean to the fifth-year students was a watershed for me. Professor Dean totally shaped my career with his energy, creativity, and enthusiasm. He taught us that creativity (the sort that results in patented inventions) can be learned. He was inspiring at a very personal level. Each evening before bed he dictated notes detailing the issues that he had to deal with. That helped to make his subconscious work on the issues all night. His energy seemed boundless. I would hand in a paper late in the day and find it on my desk in the morning marked up in excruciating detail in red pen. The course itself was nearly irrelevant. The contact that it created between us and Professor Dean was life-altering.
—Robert Prescott ’64 Th’67

I took only a single Thayer course after having received a double major in physics and chemistry from the College. However, I found that course so interesting that I changed my major from physics to electrical engineering at Stanford and got my Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1975. So, even though I run a Silicon Valley chip company, my engineering career began with only a single course at Thayer.
—T.J. Rodgers ’70

Professor Kennedy’s metallurgy class was great — working with steel samples, a furnace, and a tub of water. I also loved Horst Richter’s thermo class — he kept telling us how the “wapor was doing za verk.” Thermo definitely had the most interesting problem sets. I loved the bridge-building class. My group’s bridge, which I still have, won for least deflection but got dead last for predicted deflection. I guess my team was good with a milling machine but not so good with a calculator. I took a class called “Corrosion” [ENGG 190] and Professor Frost managed to make rust interesting. Fluid dynamics had to be the highlight, if only because I finally understood applied calculus.
—Doug Kingsley ’84 Th’85

Complex variables was the hardest course I ever took, dealing with things that I now only remember by name like Riemann sheets and Cauchy’s theorem. It was my favorite because of the professor, Bengt Sonnerup, who I remember fondly.
—Doug Rand Th’85

Millet Morgan’s antenna course was my favorite. There were two of us taking it. Millet, who was already retired at the time, was a lot of fun to listen to. He took us on a field trip to his property, where he had an ionospheric probe. He showed us his private antenna system, which allowed him to listen to a classical music station that broadcast from Montreal. The Morgans very graciously served us lunch on the occasion.
—Alex Hartov Th’88

I loved so many courses! Loved product design with Professor Robbie, loved working in the machine shop for thermo, machine design, intro and the project courses. Loved the camaraderie of bridge building for solid mechanics and robot building for machine design. But maybe in the end I keep coming back to manufacturing processes as the most memorable. All the field trips, seeing all the different manufacturing plants — I think about it each time I drive from the Baxter R&D building I work in to meet with some of the engineers over in the Baxter manufacturing plant down the road.
—Mariangelica Rojas ’99 Th’00