3 minute read
Alumni Snapshot
same, but we love how our alums are making their mark by carrying the Olin culture with them as they tackle the real world with curiosity, passion and purpose. And we’re pretty darn proud that 87% of our alumni would choose Olin again.*
TOP GRADUATE SCHOOLS
Boston University
Cornell
CMU
Harvard MIT
Northwestern Stanford
UC Berkeley
University of Washington
WPI are
TOP EMPLOYERS
Amazon Apple athenahealth
Google Hubspot
Johnson & Johnson
Microsoft
RightHand Robotics
Skydio
Tesla
Woods Hole
Oceanographic Institute
SUMMER INTERN EMPLOYERS (2021)
Amazon Robotics Apple
Boston
MathWorks
National Grid Nissan
SpaceX Tesla
Toyota Research Verizon
Watts Water
OLIN-FOUNDED COMPANIES
Accelerate Wind
Big Belly Solar
Indico
Lever
Righthand Robotics
Skydio
Twelve
99%
Frances Haugen ’06 olin.edu/kris-dorsey olin.edu/frances-haugen
Frances Haugen was named a TIME magazine 100 Most Influential People of 2022. She is a 2006 electrical and computer engineering alum from Olin’s first graduating class. She returned to campus to share her personal and professional path working on ranking algorithms at Google, Pinterest, Yelp and Facebook and ultimately why she made the courageous decision to blow the whistle on Facebook in 2021.
Today, Kris is an associate professor at Northeastern University, where she has recently been honored by AnitaB.org — a nonprofit social enterprise seeking to achieve intersectional equity in the global technical workforce by 2025 with a 2022 Emerging Leader Abie Award. The award recognizes a junior faculty member for high-quality research and significant positive impact on diversity.
Kris will be honored at this year’s Grace Hopper Celebration, which brings the research and career interests of women in computing to the forefront. She’ll speak about her work using soft sensors and robotics, which she one day hopes to use to help understand and prevent persistent lymphedema after breast cancer treatment.
“I encourage you to work at Facebook,” she told the audience. “It’s the most important job you can have right now. … Many good people work there. But they are working within a system of incentives that makes it hard to make good decisions.”
“How did we get here? Not enough people were sitting at the table,” said Haugen. All communication technologies throughout history have been disruptive. Each time, we’ve had to “recognize the consequences, think really hard and figure out new ways forward. But we did it.”
Dr.
Rachita
Navara ’11
olin.edu/rachita-navara
The innovative curriculum with an emphasis on entrepreneurship at Olin attracted me right away,” said Dr. Navara. “I knew I wanted to go into medicine and innovate within it, so I needed a special toolkit of engineering and ‘learning how to learn’ to help me succeed. I was also looking for a well-rounded curriculum that could support my interdisciplinary interests. During my bioengineering training, I minored in both creative writing and Hindi/Urdu language. I took sculpture and painting and opera singing through Olin’s co-curricular program—all while preparing for a career in medicine.”
Andy Barry ’10
olin.edu/andy-barry
“I’ve always been excited about engineering and science, and I loved to tinker with things that my parents would bring home from work. When I learned about Olin, I was really sold on the project-based learning atmosphere, and I’ve been interested in that kind of work ever since.”
While attending medical school at UT Southwestern, she delved further into cardiology, and during her internal medicine residency at Stanford, Dr. Navara conducted research on the mechanisms of atrial fibrillation or “AFib.”
She has received international recognition for her research on AFib. Throughout her work and research on arrhythmias and innovation, she recognized a clinical area of improvement for both patients and physicians — use engineering to automate the process of electrocardiogram (EKG) monitoring the result of which is more convenience for the physicians and clinical team, fewer hospitalizations, and easier access for patients.
Dr. Navara’s idea led to the creation of her company, SafeBeat Rx, in 2020, which uses software to automate the specific features of EKGs that doctors use to track drug side effects.
@Dr.RachitaEP
After graduating with his degree in electrical and computer engineering from Olin, Andy went directly into a PhD program at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). After earning his PhD, Andy began working at Boston Dynamics, where he worked for five years on the now well-known Spot, a quadruped robot. After seeing Spot through the product life cycle, Andy started considering what he wanted to do next. An avid reader of academic papers, he realized that some of the machine learning techniques he’d been using at Boston Dynamics were starting to take off in the biology industry — a class that Barry had taken and loved during his time at Olin.
Without any connections in the field, Barry began sending out applications. He found a good fit at the Broad Institute in Ben Deverman’s lab, where he is now a machine learning scientist working on gene therapy aimed at safely and effectively treating patients with severe genetic conditions.
