What’s New? News from IEP Alumni Network

Picture of a baby — Baby Nicolas, born August 13, 2021

Ana Franco ‘06

German IEP & Mechanical Engineering
Atlanta, GA – My husband and I welcomed our first child, Nicolas Prado, on 08/13/2021
I’m currently still with Siemens as head of strategy for our electrical products division based out of Atlanta, GA.

Family dressed up in Nintendo costumes — Jeff and his family dressed up for Halloween 2021

Jeff Borden ‘09

French IEP & Computer Engineering
Although I am a French IEP grad, this family speaks only Spanish at home. This life-long lover of languages married Peruvian!

Graeme O’Connell ‘09

A family hiking — Graeme O’Connell and his family on a hike during November 2021

Chinese & Biomedical Engineering
Carrboro, NC – My wife Adrien Wilkie and I had our first child in May. Her name is Lesa Jane O’Connell.

Johann Prieto ‘15

German IEP & Mechanical Engineering
Albany, NY – Having worked for PepsiCo right after graduating, I’m now working as an Application Engineer for the Electrolyzer group in Plug Power, where I’ve been since 2019. We are currently hiring engineers for several different roles! (See the Plug Power career page for more details on current openings.)

Joshua D’Ambra ‘20

Student in front of a statue in Poland — Taken from Josh D’Ambra’s recent trip to Warsaw, Poland. At Warsaw University, he came across this statue of the famous physicist and chemist, Marie Curie, holding element 81: Polonium

German IEP & Chemical Engineering
Framingham, MA – I work in Lexington, MA, where I have been employed at Thermo Fisher Scientific for over a year now, working on the production line as a Downstream Manufacturing Associate. My teammates and I work on the separation and purification aspect of injectable drug production: we take the grown cell culture from the “upstream” product and separate it from larger cell waste and such, using various sizes of single-use pipes, pumps, and filters to achieve our desired, more concentrated product. We incorporate various methods of filtration, such as Tangential Flow Filtration, Chromatography separation, and even Ultracentrifugation along the line of our production process. I have learned a lot from just one year of working in biotech and I am very curious to see where it will take me in the future.

For hobbies in my free time, I recently got a gig as a DJ for a comedy show in Cambridge, MA. I am happy to have this opportunity to perform music with some coworkers of mine, as I love to share my music with people around me. I have also picked up learning Spanish and Portuguese in order to better communicate with some of my coworkers at Thermo, as well as talk to some of my neighbors in my apartment complex.

Gianni Figueroa ‘21

People volunteering — Gianni Figueroa and his team volunteering for United Way Day of Caring in Worcester, MA

Spanish IEP & Mechanical Engineering
I am settling into my first full time role post college! I am an Energy Engineer with National Grid, an electric/gas utility that services New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. I work within a team that implements programs to incentivize energy-efficient equipment at the large commercial/industrial level in the MA/RI area.