Thayer Notes

1950s

Charles Queenan ’52 Tu’53 Th’53: I am a retired attorney who specialized in the areas of tax, corporate, international, and transactional law. I serve as senior counsel and chairman emeritus to the law firm of K&L Gates LLP, having served previously as a partner and chairman of the management committee. I am a life member of the American Law Institute, a member of the Pennsylvania and Allegheny County bar associations (and their tax sections), the fellows of the American Bar Foundation, the Federalist Society, and the Dartmouth Society of Engineers. I have also served as chair of the Pittsburgh Tax Club and the annual Penn State Tax Conference. I lectured on a wide variety of topics, including in the areas of tax, international, merger, sensitive payments, and Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The American Lawyer magazine honored me with its 2014 Lifetime Achievement Award. The award recognized my early growth strategy for the firm as “foundational to the expansion and success of what is now K&L Gates” and that I was “a backbone of numerous local cultural and civic institutions.”

Robert Simpson ’53 Tu’54 Th’54: I am fully retired, just passed age 90, and living with my wonderful wife in a retirement community called Shannondell near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania.

Doug Boike Th’78 and his wife, Dorena, traveled to Budapest, Hungary, as part of a Danube cruise in May 2019.

1960s

Neil Drobny ’62 Th’64: Since retiring to Kalamazoo, Mich., about a year ago, I have gotten itchy to get back into the classroom. Starting this fall I will be an adjunct instructor in the Haworth College of Business at Western Michigan University. I will be mentoring students working on sustainability projects for corporate sponsors. Personal time has been spent enjoying the local lakes and trails and working, in support of a contractor, on a major house renovation.

Wayne Ballantyne ’77 Th’78: After graduation from the Thayer BE program in 1978, I worked at Mitre Corp. for about nine months, then took an electrical engineer position at Motorola in south Florida, very near where I grew up. At Motorola I worked in pager and two-way public safety FM radio development up until around 1995, when we became the primary development site for iDEN Nextel radios, a long and profitable run lasting almost 20 years and helped greatly by the fact we were sole source. My role was lead architect for development of baseband modem integrated circuits, integrated GPS internet protocols, and complex power management integrated circuits. Later, as Nextel started winding down, we developed WiMax and LTE smartphones for Sprint. When Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2012, we also delivered the Nexus 6 to them. Alas, all good things come to an end, and after Google sold us to Lenovo in 2014, our site was closed in August 2015. Fortunately, I was blessed to be able to leverage my ex-Motorola contacts out west and land a position in February 2016 at Intel in Chandler, Arizona, where I have been working on 5G transceiver development ever since. I dearly remember my Thayer experience and colleagues Kelly Carter ’77 Th’78, Bob Fleming ’78, Steve Askey ’76 Th’77, and Jack Maney ’77.

Doug Boike Th’78: I have recently wrapped up my engineering and management consulting career—final years were largely focused on the aerospace industry. It was a wonderful experience, but the travel and time commitments are not missed. I have stayed very active in investment and civic roles and continue to serve as the chair of Oak Ridge Financial Services, a successful community bank in the Greensboro, North Carolina, region. I am now also serving as the board chair of the Greensboro Symphony Orchestra and the North Carolina Brass Band, two wonderful professional organizations. I have enjoyed living in the Piedmont Triad region of North Carolina for 24 years now.

Eric Fisher ’82 and partner Bea Spolidoro practiced architecture from Lake Como, Italy.

1980s

Eric Fisher ’82: Fisher ARChitecture is now practicing for a couple months from our second office above Lake Como, Italy. Bea Spolidoro and I are looking forward to returning home from this remarkable country filled with ideas and thoughts that will inform our designs through the coming year. I got to tell you: Running a progressive architecture firm, or any business for that matter, takes lots of time and effort. You start early and end late. You sit a lot and stare at a screen. Yet, as I learned from my Thayer classes, you can’t output more from a system than what you put into it. So after a while, you get stale. You need fresh input. The Milan museums are spectacular. And it seems that every time you turn a corner in that magnificent world center you come upon an architectural classic. Some of the work is rooted so much in its time you can only admire it, but much of the more recent stuff speaks directly to the challenges of our current time. I know my batteries are re-charging when I see a building and want to adopt its ideas and motifs into my own work! We will return home mid-September to Pittsburgh, the small-but-mighty regional center where we live in the United States. Will our architecture suddenly sprout arches, thick walls, and olive trees like third arms and legs? Certainly not. But will something of the poetry of Italy’s incredible natural landscape and architecture inflect our work in subtle unexpected ways? I certainly hope so!

Robert Mazzarese ’87 Th’97 Th’98: COVID-19 has been kind to the Mazzareses, both professionally and personally. Perhaps most importantly, it gave us a chance to crouch together as a family before we start launching our three teenage boys off to college.

1990s

Vishal Gupta Th’94: I joined Lexmark, an imaging giant, in early 2021 as its chief investment officer (CIO) and chief technology officer (CTO) and am energized to drive the transformation of Lexmark to exciting areas, including Internet of Things and becoming much more relevant in artificial intelligence and data analytics. I was fortunate to win the CIO 100 Award at Lexmark for innovations in digital thread and was also recognized as the top 100 CIO/CTO globally by the National Diversity Forum. My daughter is headed to College in August and was accepted to a seven-year accelerated integrated program for the National Diversity Forum. My daughter is headed to College in August and was accepted to a seven-year accelerated integrated program for BS-MD and we will be missing her.

Jocelyn (Woolworth) Mason ’05 and Brian Mason ’03 Th’04 Th’05 and their three children explored the Pemigewasset River in New Hampshire.

2000s

Brian Mason ’03 Th’04 Th’05: It has been two years since my family and I moved back from the Bay Area to Lexington, Mass. We are settling in and loving the seasons, being closer to family, and enjoying hiking and skiing in the White Mountains. I work at Sonos leading a new category of product development, and Jocelyn is a reading specialist. One of the unanticipated highlights of the past year has been walking my three children to school (one of the benefits of being work from home). Just this past week the five of us ventured up to the White Mountains to go camping on the Pemigewasset River. We hiked to Franconia Falls and played on the rocks all day long. Twenty years ago, Jocelyn ’05 and I met on Dartmouth trips and went to the falls. It was amazing to be back!

Mayank Agrawal Th’08: I completed my MEM from Thayer in December 2007. I have been in the biotech/ pharma space ever since. I am passionate about bringing important treatments to patients fighting debilitating diseases. I currently work at Takeda Pharmaceuticals as director of global marketing in oncology. I get up every day energized knowing that we at Takeda fight tough diseases and the work we do helps serve patients throughout the world. I am particularly proud of helping launch an innovative, targeted cancer therapy for treatment of non-small cell lung cancer across key markets. What has helped me advance professionally is to not be afraid to work outside my comfort zone and gain a diversity of experiences.

2010s

Saryah Azmat ’11 Th’11: I have been promoted to chief business officer of Turnstone Biologics Corp., a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on the development of cancer immunotherapies. Turnstone Biologics, a privately held clinical stage biotech company, is developing breakthrough cancer immunotherapies by advancing two leading and complementary platforms that drive innate and adaptive tumor immunity, to provide benefit to the millions of cancer patients underserved by current treatment options.

Varsha Eluri Th’11: I recently accepted a role as an associate partner at Ipsos, starting in August. I’ll be building and leading Ipsos’ digital strategy capability for healthcare clients. More importantly, my husband and I (not-so) recently welcomed a baby boy, Aariv Eluri-Maddock, who is now almost 9 months old. We are navigating being new parents in this crazy pandemic and are really enjoying all the time we’re getting to spend with our son, which wouldn't have been possible if we weren’t working remotely.

Prateek Reddy Th’11: I’m working as a risk strategist at Stripe. It’s a lot of analytical problem solving, so the core engineering skills are at play all day, every day. There is a lot of skills overlap with credit risk research and investments (most of my professional background after Dartmouth). Managing risk at a very product-centric financial tech firm such as Stripe means I need to understand the intricacies of the technical products being built and analyze all possible vectors of risk, score different users of our products, and come up with strategies to mitigate the various vectors of risk.

Michael Henson Th’14: I’m currently an engineering manager at a tech startup classed Grayshift (grayshift. com). I manage a team working on a mobile forensics tool used by law enforcement and other agencies around the world to solve crimes. Our innovative solutions help law enforcement ensure public safety lawfully. I was employee No. 16 and now we have well over 100 employees.

Benjamin Nollet ’14 Th’14: For the last several years I was down in Houston, Texas, working at the Johnson Space Center on NASA’s Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) mobile robot project as a design engineer. Thayer alum Jeffrey Loo ’18 Th’20 is still working down there. I very recently relocated to Connecticut to be closer to family and will be working at General Dynamics on submarine propulsion systems.

Atri Raychowdhury Th’17: I’ve always been passionate about using technology to empower musicians. I’m leveraging my Thayer (MEM) skills at Sony Music as a senior product manager on the data strategy group, where I launched a portfolio of business intelligence platforms used daily by our artists, management teams, labels, and executives globally to help make informed business decisions and scale Sony’s artists into superstars faster.

Ebrahim Najam Th’19: I’m currently working as an application and electrical engineer at SemiNex, a laser diode manufacturer near Boston. My job entails providing electrical support to customers and designing pulse testing for laser diodes. SemiNex is a small company of around 12 people, which means each of us wears many hats. I have to work with the production engineer to ensure our vendors are on time and make application notes on new technology, such as triple-junction lasers. I’m based in the greater Boston area and still keep in touch with Thayer friends. In fact, I’m applying for the ME program at Thayer this fall. Fingers crossed.

Wanfang Wu Th’19: I am transitioning from engineering into marketing. Specifically, I took a product marketing co-op after one and a half years as an engineer. I was a quality engineer at Abbott Vascular on stents and guidewires. Basically, I was at the corporate level supporting and managing quality engineers at the factories with projects that affect all factories. Product marketing does all the marketing related to a product (whereas other marketers focus on brand or company or the entire set of customers in general) and helps create the resources that sales and other teams use when they need to pitch the product. My current project is to help write web content to redefine our web presence to look much bigger than we actually are.