Alumni Spotlights: Fall 2024

Oct 01, 2024 | Dartmouth Engineer

Spotlights on recent achievements of Dartmouth Engineering alumni.

Natasha Herring '12 Th'13

Transitions

Longtime Thayer Board of Advisors member Samantha Scollard Truex '92 Th'93 Tu'95 has ended her nine years of service, the last four as board chair. The CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based Upstream Bio, Truex has served in leadership roles at multiple venture-backed companies, including as CEO of Quench Bio, COO of Synlogic, and CBO for Padlock Therapeutics. Drawing on her BE in biomedical engineering, she was previously vice president of corporate development at Biogen. Replacing her at the board helm is Todd Cook '93 Th'94. He serves as managing partner of Boston's Bain Capital Double Impact, a fund that invests in companies providing financial returns alongside social and environmental impacts. The engineering sciences-economics double major has spent his career at Bain Capital, and previously worked 20 years as a member of the North American private equity team. Thayer also welcomed four new members to the Board of Advisors: Amber Bryant Colon '12 Th'12, Mike Doogue Th'98, Sujan S. Patel '01, and David Swift Th'84. In other leadership news, Natasha Herring '12 Th'13 joined the Dartmouth Alumni Council as Thayer's alumni representative July 1. Also on July 1, Will Griffith '93 joined the 26-member Dartmouth Board of Trustees. The engineering sciences and history double major is a partner at ICONIQ Capital, a global investment firm; founder of its growth-equity platform; and cofounder of IPI, ICONIQ's digital real estate business, which is dedicated to scaling data centers globally to support the cloud economy.

Oliver Bub '20 and Billy Bender '24

The Olympians

Isalys "Ice" Quiñones '19 Th'20 and engineering sciences major Billy Bender '24 are two of the six athletes with Dartmouth connections who headed to Paris to compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics. Heavyweight rower Bender, a two-time first-team All-American, and teammate Oliver Bub '20 qualified for the Games by winning the men's pair this spring at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Team Trials. They weren't on the same team at Dartmouth but competed in pairs together in 2022, when the Norwich, Vt., native took the winter term of his junior year off to join the California Rowing Club, where he was paired with Bub. They finished 10th overall. "I feel like I have always been the best athlete when I'm out of my comfort zone," he tells The Norwich Times. "When these guys are better than me and I know I need to step up my game, that's when I've been my best." When he's not in the lab or on the river, Bender helps install PV solar trackers as an intern at Solaflect Energy, founded by his father, Bill Bender '78. Quiñones returned to the basketball court for her second Olympics. Part of the first-ever Puerto Rican women's Olympic basketball team at the 2020 Tokyo Games, Quiñones was starting center at the 2024 Games, where China stopped the team's advance. Quiñones also works as an environmental engineer at QNOPY Inc. based in her home state of California. She is reportedly pursuing an offer to play professional basketball in France and plans to juggle the sport as well as her engineering role.

Joe Brown '00

The Professor

Professor Joe Brown '00 easily transitions from nanoscale technology to big-picture ideas. Before joining the University of Hawaii at Manoa (Honolulu) mechanical engineering department in 2017, he researched nanoscale device and materials engineering—first when he cofounded a company that provided nanotube textiles used on NASA's Juno mission to Jupiter and then while earning an MS and PhD at the University of Colorado Boulder. "In the field of nanosystems, we aim to actively control physical behaviors at sizes from human scale down to the atomic scale," he says. "This means we have widely varying projects but with some common themes of applied mechanics, materials synthesis, instrumentation design, multiscale data acquisition, and data analysis." Real-world projects include designing mechanical attachments for microchips and space systems, fabricating new materials for gas sensors and storage, and developing safety improvements for the commercial fishing industry. He entered the field through the mentorship of Professor Ursula Gibson, who brought him onto a project that became his undergrad honors thesis and first journal publication, "Ordered Arrays of Amphiphilic Gold Nanoparticles in Langmuir Monolayers." As department chair, Brown says, "I try to create such opportunities for as many students as possible." When he gained tenure in 2022, Brown realized he could take on something big that will occupy the next 20 years. "I've started to think about how to make meaningful contributions to technologies for global sustainability and structural materials synthesis," he says. "In order to pursue these directions, I would like to understand more about how electrons move in and out of surfaces."

"I remember the depth of understanding I received from my undergraduate classes and look at those as standards."

Joe Brown '00

Nate Brakeley '12 Th'12

The Captain

Lock and flanker Nate Brakeley '12 Th'12 retired last winter from Major League Rugby with a 42-12 win over Spain as captain of the U.S. men's team. He had a great run, notching more than 50 matches since starting in 2013 with the New York Athletic Club, which won the Division I Club National Championship in 2015. When the engineering sciences major wasn't in class or the lab, he was leading the Dartmouth men's team to Collegiate Rugby Championship 7s titles in 2011 and 2012. He continued his education at Cambridge University, earning a master's in energy technology while playing for the school's team. He chased achievements in his career—as deployment strategist at software developer Palantir Technologies and now as data analyst at real estate tech firm Compass—and on the pitch. When he was named to the U.S. national team in 2018, he juggled test matches and training sessions during the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan with full-time remote work. He anticipates his future will include rugby in some fashion. "I still have strong ties to Dartmouth, and so definitely within the college game in some capacity, maybe more at the high school level," he told FloRugby in December. "I definitely don't want to step completely away from the game. It's given me too much, and I enjoy it too much to just stop cold turkey."

The Game-Changers

A collaboration between legendary football coach Buddy Teevens '79 and a team of Thayer School engineers and athletes—including John Currier '79 Th'81, football player Elliot Kastner '13 Th'14 Th'15, and rugby captain Quinn Connell '13 Th'14—has gone far beyond X's and O's. Together they developed the world's first robotic tackling dummy, the Mobile Virtual Player, or MVP, to help reduce unnecessary contacts and injuries suffered during football and other sporting practices. The MVP debuted on Memorial Field in 2015, and the robotic tackling dummies have since been adopted by a majority of NFL teams, plus college and high school programs around the world. Its latest showcase is the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington, DC, where it's part of the new "Change Your Game" exhibition exploring the inventors, athletes, and technologies that have changed how sports are played. "The exhibit tangibly conveys that we all are innovators and hold within the ability to create," says Connell, CEO of the Bradford, Vt.-based MVP Robotics LLC. He shares that DHMC researchers earlier this year published a study in Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine that found the use of a mobile tackling dummy in football practice was related to a reduced number of sports-related concussions. "It effectively validated our mission."

Kirsten (Stadler) Th'99 Th'00 and Mike Doogue Th'98

Creative Partnership

Kirsten (Stadler) Doogue Th'99 Th'00 and Mike Doogue Th'98 began their careers together at Allegro MicroSystems in Manchester, N.H., a semiconductor company where Mike is currently senior vice president and chief technology officer. The pair, who met as engineering students in Thayer's Partner School Dual-Degree Program, now live in nearby Bedford with their three children. After graduating from Thayer, Kirsten worked in marketing at Allegro, interfacing between engineers and customers and evaluating the feasibility of certain products. "One of the amazing things that Thayer does is create engineers who can communicate," she says. During weekends and evenings, Kirsten practiced hand-embroidery techniques, drawn to the creative and detail-oriented aspects of the art. While earning a diploma in technical hand embroidery from the Royal School of Needlework and taking courses from the Embroiderers' Guild of America, Kirsten explored historic pieces at the Victoria and Albert Museum: "You look at them and start to do a kind of reverse engineering of the piece," says the established embroidery artist. Mike began working at Allegro as a chip designer. He loved how it gave him opportunities to create new product lines and interact with customers. "My job is to understand the problems our customers don't know how to solve yet and then figure out how to bring them solutions in the next two to five years," says Mike, who says he appreciated how Professor William David Stratton made complex electrical engineering topics approachable, digestible, and fun. He's looking out even longer as he develops the company's strategy, which involves mergers and acquisitions and bringing in new technologies. That growth mindset has also enabled connections with his alma mater: Since Mike has been at Allegro, the company has hired more than 10 graduates. "Thayer cultivates independent-thinking, project-based engineers who are able to go out and make a splash in the world."

Keith Dunleavy '91

The Entrepreneur

Inovalon founder and CEO Keith Dunleavy '91 was honored in May for "audacious goal of leveraging data and analytics to improve patient outcomes and to improve the economics of our entire health care system," according to Martin Weinstein '81. Dunleavy, who earned an AB in biology modified with engineering before earning his MD at Harvard, was inducted into the new Dartmouth Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame. He was "the first one in the office in the morning and the last one to leave the office at night," said Weinstein in introducing his colleague. "He employed creativity, courage, tenacity. Yet none of that defines Keith's superpower. Those magical traits are truly exceptional, but nothing when compared to the desire to make life better for others." Dunleavy founded the Bowie, Md.-based Inovalon, a cloud-based health care software and data analytics company headquartered to empower a data-driven transformation of health care. Inovalon uses cloud-based software platforms for more than 20,000 health plan, hospital, provider system, pharmacy, and life sciences customers across the entire health care ecosystem. Designed to leverage the industry's largest connected primary-source health care dataset, Inovalon's software and analytics are informed by data pertaining to more than 1 million physicians, 640,000 clinical facilities, 372 million patients, and 78 billion medical events.

The Adaptive Architect

Sudden, disruptive changes in business require rapid adaptation, says Alex Conn '68 Th'69 Th'71. "Enterprises need to embrace just-in-case thinking and build in flexibility to adapt capabilities for plausible scenarios. They must act rapidly while continuously reassessing the uncertainty inherent in the context." The managing partner of West Roxbury, Mass.-based SBSA Partners has been developing, practicing, and teaching solution and enterprise architecture at high-tech firms worldwide for almost three decades. Now he and colleague Leo Laverdure share lessons learned in The Strategic Enterprise Architect's Dilemma: Balancing Fitness for Today's Purpose with Fitness for Tomorrow's Disruptive Context. Find his blog at blog.sbsapartners.com/blogs.

Jill Ladegard '04 Th'05

A Global Designer

Phoenix, Ariz.-based Jill Ladegard '04 Th'05 has worked around the world in fields ranging from environmental engineering to mining, where she is now program director at global design firm Stantec. "I'm designing and planning the engineering to build large mines that will support the future renewable energy transition with raw materials," she says. "I work with teams of engineers to design all the infrastructure you need at a mine site, which is everything you would need for a city: power, water, roads, infrastructure." The multitasker most recently turned her problem-solving approach to strengthening connections among alumni as president of the Dartmouth Society of Engineers (DSE). "One of my favorite things about Dartmouth was the opportunity to engage in research and see real-world engineering applications. My vision for DSE is to help build connections between Thayer students and alumni working in industry to increase the number of internship opportunities, connect alumni who need focused solutions with project-based classes, and increase opportunities to network and build professional relationships."

"There's huge opportunities to do things from a more sustainable perspective."

Jill Ladegard '04 Th'05

The Fellows

Three of the 13 Dartmouth recipients of 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowships are engineering alumni, along with one honorable mention. The mission of the program is to "ensure the quality, vitality, and diversity of the scientific and engineering workforce of the United States." Alumni include Amritha Anup Th'23, a PhD candidate in biomedical engineering; Mia Giallorenzi '23 Th'24, bioengineering; Xiaoran Zhu '19 Th'20, ecology; and Alexander Carney Th'23, PhD candidate in quantum engineering (honorable mention). The awards, which include an annual stipend and access to professional development opportunities, enable fellows to pursue research interests. "The program has a history of funding students who become lifelong leaders," says F. Jon Kull '88, dean of the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, "contributing significantly to both scientific innovation and teaching."

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