When an eye doctor performs surgery, chances are Michelle Pelletier played a role in ensuring the quality of the doctor’s instruments.

The University of Rhode Island engineering graduate supports the manufacturing lines that produce the instruments for cauterizing tissue in the eye.

As a process engineer for Beaver-Visitec International, 25-year-old Pelletier also has reduced costly waste during the manufacturing process and assisted the company with integrating technologies from acquired firms.

“I’m not pushing paper at a desk all day,” Pelletier says. “I prefer being on the manufacturing floor to being at my desk. I feel like I’m having an effect on the products we’re making.”

Based just outside Boston, Beaver-Visitec snapped up Pelletier in May 2010, just three weeks after she earned a master’s in chemical engineering from URI.

The company assigned her to a team of engineers, machine operators and quality control experts. Together, they launch products and monitor manufacturing lines.

Pelletier carries on a family tradition steeped in helping others. Her father works in the chemistry lab of a hospital and her mother retired from a nursing career. Growing up, the young Pelletier dreamed of becoming a hairdresser. Then in high school she discovered a love of science and became determined to land a career as a pharmacist.

She was accepted to the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences but at the last minute decided to stay closer to her Woonsocket, RI, home and attend URI.

“It never even crossed my mind I would be an engineer,” she said.

Ultimately, the versatility of an engineering degree enticed her, and she graduated with a bachelor’s in chemistry in 2008 and stayed for her master’s.

While a graduate student, Pelletier researched self-healing concrete that piqued the interest of engineers, the media and anyone upset about crumbling sidewalks.

Pelletier found herself conducting interviews with Motor Trend magazine, the Providence Journal, a radio station in Puerto Rico, the local nightly newscast and dozens of other news outlets. Public Works magazine named her a “trendsetter.”

“I just could not believe how big it got,” she said. “I was just getting phone call after phone call.”

At Beaver-Visitec International, she can hardly believe how fast she plunged into a whole new realm of research and development. And her work promises to put her on the path as a trendsetter once again, albeit in an industry very different than concrete.