Alumni Spotlights: Fall 2025

Thayer’s Board of Advisors took a technical tour beneath Tottenham Stadium during their off-site meeting in London. (Photo by Jennifer Seiler)

The Advisors 

Thayer's Board of Advisors gained global perspectives into engineering and innovation at its annual off-site meeting, held in May in London. Advisors took a technical tour beneath Tottenham Stadium, visited the Imperial College of London Dyson School of Design Engineering, and met with the president of the Royal Academy of Engineering. The board also met with London-area alumni, parents, and incoming members of the class of 2029.

The Advocate 

The community gathered in Hanover in October to honor Barry MacLean '60 Th'61 and his half-century of service to Thayer School. His deep commitment to Thayer began in 1974 with his election to what is now known as the Board of Advisors — a position he has held since, including time as chair. In addition to providing vision and direction, MacLean ensured the school had the funding it needed as Thayer’s chair of the Will to Excel campaign in the 1990s, committee member of the Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience in the 2000s, and member of the Thayer Advancement and Campaign Committee through 2023. 

MacLean (left), with Van Citters, was presented with a painting by local artist Doug Henry of Thayer's new expanded buildings.

He advocated for Dartmouth Engineering as a College trustee from 1991 to 2001 and supported a range of campus activities as a member of the friends of rowing, football, and skiing, as well as club sports, the Hood Museum, Skiway, and libraries. For his commitment to Thayer and Dartmouth, MacLean has earned numerous honors: Sylvanus Thayer Fellow (1979), Robert Fletcher Award (1989), and Dartmouth Alumni Award (2007). In 2010, Dartmouth awarded him an honorary degree.

Former Dean Charles “Hutch” Hutchinson, who served 1984-94 and 1997-98, credits MacLean with saving Thayer: “Barry MacLean … helped recruit me to be dean of Thayer in 1984. It was a very difficult time. Thayer was in danger of going under financially and being closed down by the College. Barry, [Thayer Advisor] Jake Krehbiel, and some others really went to bat for Thayer, shoring up its finances and helping to convince the College that Thayer should stay intact. … In the end, their efforts saved Thayer.” As chair and CEO of Chicago-based MacLean-Fogg—a family-owned company and global provider of automotive and truck components and devices for power utilities worldwide—MacLean was named to the Illinois Manufacturing Hall of Fame. He and wife Mary Ann, who predeceased him in 2016, raised children Margaret ’87, Duncan ’94 Th95 Th’96, Gillian ’95, Elizabeth, and Adrian. Read More

Mira Murati Th’12

The Visionary 

With technical skills, elite backing, and a mission to open the black box of AI, Mira Murati Th’12 may reshape the way the world builds and interacts with intelligent systems. The former chief technology officer of OpenAI and a central figure behind ChatGPT has launched her own AI startup—and she’s doing it in blockbuster fashion. This summer, her Thinking Machines Lab was raising a $2-billion seed round at a $10-billion valuation—a practical necessity since training large models and building scalable infrastructure requires capital on a massive scale. It’s also a high-stakes bet to reshape the way AI is built and understood. Thinking Machines Lab will focus on making AI “more widely understood, customizable, and generally capable,” highlighting a shift toward both transparency and user control, according to the company website. That positioning places it in competition with AI giants such as Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s xAI, as well as OpenAI, where she spent more than six years contributing to the development of ChatGPT and other advanced AI projects. If she succeeds, Murati’s new venture will be one of the most well-capitalized AI startups in the world—and one of the first led by a woman.

Judy Geer ’75 Th’83

The Competitor 

Olympic rower and entrepreneur Judy Geer ’75 Th’83 received an honorary doctor of humane letters at Dartmouth’s 2025 Commencement ceremony. As a student, Geer transferred to a newly coeducational Dartmouth, joining the class of 1975 her junior year. She immediately took advantage of life in the north woods, majoring in ecology, singing with the Handel Society choir, helping found the women’s swim team, and most notably, rowing with the women’s crew team. With the encouragement of her coaches—and while pursuing her AB and BE—Geer tried out for the U.S. Olympic rowing team and went on to compete in the 1976 and 1984 Summer Games (the United States boycotted the 1980 Games). “I was actually training for the Olympics all the way through engineering school,” she says. “I really think balance is important … going out and getting a workout would refresh my mind and I would come back and be more efficient and organized.” Geer then joined Concept2, a Vermont-based rowing equipment and exercise machine company cofounded in 1976 by Dick Dreissigacker, who would later become her husband. “My education prepared me really well for working in a small business because I could understand the engineering and I could write,” she says. “I became a translator of the engineering and technical information we had to get to our customers.” In 2008, Geer and Dreissigacker bought the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, which serves athletes with a focus on the lifelong sports of rowing, cross-country skiing, biathlon, biking, and running. Geer is the ideal role model, having won the 40-49 women’s single division at the 2001 Head of the Charles. She continues to row, work, and enjoy time with family, including children Hannah ’09 Th’10, Emily ’11, and Ethan ’13 Th’15.

Louis Latulippe ’25 Th’25

The Racer 

Louis Latulippe ’25 Th’25 came to Dartmouth for the skiing. But it was the engineering courses and handson projects in the MShop that fill his time off the slopes. “Since high school, I’ve been trying to combine school and skiing to reach the highest levels in both,” says the Quebec native, who has raced slalom for the Big Green in every regional carnival, scoring his first Eastern Intercollegiate Ski Association win as a senior. His other first as a senior: earning the George A. Colligan Memorial Prize—awarded to an undergraduate in recognition of outstanding performance in materials science—during Investiture. As he looks for his next challenge, Latulippe insists his two passions take a similar approach: “Sometimes, when you’re going through a difficult time on the slopes, it’s like working hard toward some engineering problem you can’t solve. Taking a step back and trying to look at the problem in a different way is something that’s useful both in engineering and racing.”

The Scholars 

Two engineering graduates will go overseas this year and engage with other countries and cultures as Fulbright scholars. Engineering sciences major James Quirk '25 will teach English in Switzerland. A former fellow with the Dartmouth Center for Social Impact, he has competed with the alpine ski club and as a U.S. Chess Federationrated player. “I have transformed into a children’s storyteller, a chess coach, and a teaching assistant, but I have always loved expanding my worldview as a teacher and a learner. I wish to participate in Fulbright because of each grantee’s responsibility to uphold both roles throughout the program,” Quirk says. Biomedical engineering major Danny Will ’25 has received a Fulbright award to Erlangen, Germany. Will was a recipient of five undergraduate research award grants, a pitcher on the baseball team, and cofounder of the nonprofit Teen Vision. “The goal of my Fulbright research project is to help engineer a new family of bioactive glass, a biomaterial that has potential use in human bone and soft tissue regeneration,” Will says. “Additionally, I hope to develop personal friendships by mentoring Erlangen youth and playing and coaching baseball with the Erlangen White Sox.”

Meeting the Demand 

Mine water engineer Larry Breckenridge '95 works in the hard-rock mining industry—“and we are in the middle of a mining boom,” he says. “We are trying to supply the world with the copper, critical metals, battery metals, and precious metals required for de-carbonization.” It’s an effort to meet the unprecedented demand for metals and minerals used to develop advanced materials for windmills, solar panels, batteries, and electric cars. As principal environmental engineer at Denver, Colo.-based Global Resource Engineering, Breckenridge applies his double major in environmental science and engineering to counter the opposition to mining while building projects to protect water. “I joke that I’m strip mining to save the world, but it’s not a joke,” he says. “The world has a choice: One mountain in Panama or the Great Barrier Reef (and a livable climate). I know for certain which one I will choose.” Breckenridge, who recently hired chemistry major Yuliya Subotskaya '24, remains committed to demonstrating that the world does not have to choose between clean water and mining. For a recent project in Armenia, for example, he designed a mine tailings closure cover that produce near-zero leachate, which through time will prevent metal and salts from leaching into the surface and groundwater after the mine’s closure.

The Translator 

As a research software engineer at the Topos Institute, Kristopher Brown '14 Th'15 tackles the big, global questions. “I work on helping scientists and engineers represent their knowledge and models of the world,” he says. “We accomplish this with a branch of math called ‘category theory,’ which formalizes the notion of a ‘good analogy’ in a practical, computable way.” It’s an effort that builds on his PhD research at Stanford, where he applied machine learning to computational chemistry problems and studied knowledge and data integration issues more broadly. At the Berkeley, Calif.-based Topos, he takes a four-pillar approach to building a society in which all communities flourish. The nonprofit’s mission is to pioneer mathematical systems science, develop tools for collective modeling, forge new practices for pro-social technology, and create new sustainable structures for public good. Brown’s latest effort intertwines an interest in philosophy with his research. “I now collaborate with renowned philosopher Robert Brandom on how recent developments in the philosophy of language can lead to practical tools for self-understanding and communication, with consequences for our understanding of science and AI.”