INTERNATIONALENGINEERING

PROGRAM

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International Engineering ProgramUniversity of Rhode Island61 - 67 Upper College RoadKingston, RI 02881

Fall 2012 Volume 15 Issue 1

Jeff Borden ‘09 FIEP/CPE earned his M.S. degree in Systems Engineer-ing from WPI, and was just promoted to Baseline Coordinator, responsible for the next installment of the US Navy’s ballistic missile defense.

Kyle Chase ‘12 GIEP/MCE is BMW’s newest test engineer, testing the Blue-tooth connectivity of all the infotainment systems with smart phones along with side projects of testing the overall info-tainment system including GPS, Blue-tooth, and audio systems. He describes it as a “dream job” working with great peo-ple, the majority of whom are German.

Joshua Clements ‘02 GIEP/CHE was promoted to Manufacturing Manager at Amgen Inc. He reports that although he doesn’t have the opportunity to use his German at work, he did spend three weeks this fall touring Switzerland, Ger-many, and Austria with stops in Kaufer-ing, where he lived and worked at Hilti for his IEP internship, and Munich for Okto-berfest.

Chris Cummiskey ‘04 GIEP/FIEP/CHE, who is an engineer for ExxonMobil in Houston, Texas, is now on regular assign-ment in Iraq.

Alexandra Dempsey ‘09 FIEP/ELE earned an M.S. degree in Systems Engi-neering from WPI, and will walk with fel-low alum Jeff Borden in May.

Mark Dowdell ‘09 GIEP/CVE was pro-moted to Senior Engineer at Pare Corpo-ration, a multidisciplinary civil engineering firm in Lincoln, RI. This fall he married his girlfriend of six years and honeymooned in the Azores, where he “spent an absurd amount of time speaking with vacationing Germans, a definite bonus of the trip.”

Jason Frost ‘99 GIEP/ISE moved to Ans-bach, Germany for a two-year assignment for Bosch. As head of the group responsi-ble for the thin wire bonding technology for Bosch globally, he supports plants in Ja-pan, China, US, Germany, and Hungary. At work, he reports to speaking German 90-95% of the time with local colleagues, so he applies his German and engineer-ing skills on a daily basis. His three-year-old daughter attends an all-German kin-dergarten and is already becoming fluent.

Sonia Gaitan ‘05 SIEP/CHE, who now works as Senior Supply Network Planner at McNeil Consumer Healthcare, an affili-ate of Johnson & Johnson, recently gave birth to baby girl Juliana Rae in August.

William Garcia ‘12 GIEP/CVE recently started a new job at JMC Civil in Pleas-anton, CA. He says that the IEP was an overall great experience, especially in the diversity of experiences it offered him.

Adam Greenberg ‘08 SIEP/MCE will be

Dear Friends,

What a dramatic fall we’ve had! Shortly after welcoming two terrific new staff members on board, IEP Coordinator Heather Price and Fiscal Clerk Lisa Pratt (a shared appointment with the Chinese Flagship Program and the Con-fucius Institute), we weathered hurricane SANDY, which hit Rhode Island on Oc-tober 28. Sandy caused a near week-long power outage in both IEP houses and our offices, and disrupted prepara-tions for the 15th Annual Colloquium on International Engineering Education starting on November 1st! Despite all the obstacles, with IEP housing residents sporting flashlights and eating “out” in various other URI dining facilities, An-gela Graney’s emergency leadership on campus allowed the rest of the IEP staff and directors to concentrate on running the Colloquium. We turned it into a suc-cess despite many cancellations from travelers affected by the storm’s path. Thanks to everyone for keeping up your good spirits! A special thank-you goes to GIEP alums Tom McLaughlin (`91 GIEP/CHE) and Andy Marchesseault (`05 GIEP/MCE, ‘09 MS) for sharing their educational and career paths on the alumni panel.

The Spanish IEP is experiencing a growth spurt. Director Megan Echevarría an-nounced that she will be sending more than 20 students abroad with the SIEP in 2013-14, which is more than double the current numbers. Since the SIEP growth coincides with an economic crisis in Spain, and an uncertain situation in Mexico, Megan is looking into alternative sites for SIEPers to study and intern, and has begun the process of establishing a memorandum of understanding with a

university in Chile; at the same time, the Department of Modern and Classical Lan-guages and Literatures is in the process of developing a Portuguese minor in or-der to take advantage of the many oppor-tunities available due to Brazil’s thriving economy. It works in our favor that URI has just been accepted as a host site for the “Science Without Borders” program sponsored by the Brazilian Ministry of Ed-ucation. URI will receive its first group of Brazilian students in the Fall of 2013. The IEP has also been approached to initiate a program transfer plan agreement with SUNY Adirondack City College, which would allow their linguistically trained stu-dents to transfer directly into the IEP.

I just returned from a whirlwind company tour in Southern Germany following a pre-sentation about the IEP at the Forum on Education Abroad in Dublin in early De-cember. It was gratifying to visit with col-leagues at ZF and witness Nicholas Put-nam (‘12 GIEP/MCE) who is thoroughly enjoying what the trainee program holds for him in the immediate future: after his

rotation in Friedrichshafen in a techni-cal department, Nick will move on to a logistics division in Saarbrücken for three months, followed by another rotation in Beijing where ZF is building a new facil-ity which is logistically supported by the Saarbrücken division. Nick’s international horizon, which began to develop through-out his time in Northern (Braunschweig), then Southern Germany (BMW internship) in his 4th year, is thus expanding rapidly to a truly global scale. A few hours farther North-East, I met with the first TU Braun-schweig/URI alum to become a C.E.O. of a German company: Tobias Lührig (TUBS Diplomingenieur/URI MBA ‘99 and IEP board member) took over leadership of Beinbauer Automotive in Passau, a prom-ising new partner for the IEP! Congratula-tions, Tobias!

With the year drawing to an end, I wish all of you the very best for a peaceful, happy, and healthy holiday season and an ener-getic start into 2013!

--Dr. Sigrid Berka

Director’s Notes

Alumni Updatesgetting married on January 24, 2013 in Jamaica. He currently works at Ports-mouth Naval Shipyard as a Quality As-surance Engineer.

Jonathan Greene ‘99 GIBP/Finance ’00 wed Kendall Gutweiler on Decem-ber 8, 2012. He currently works as an attorney representing disabled veterans for the law office Chisholm, Chisholm & Kilpatrick.

Nevan Clancy Hanumara ‘04 FIEP/MCE recently defended his Ph.D. in Me-chanical Engineering, focusing on the design of medical robotics and devices. He continues as a post doc in the Pre-cision Engineering Research Group at MIT, with a focus on tech commercial-ization, design, and teaching.

Aaron Hebenstreit ‘08 GIEP/MCE ’08 began a Chinese-English M.A. in Inter-pretation program at Monterey Institute of International Studies, with German as a secondary working language.

Craig Higgins ‘96 GIEP/ISE ’96 has spent the last year working for Edgetech in West Wareham, MA. This spring he was in a severe motorcycle accident, but luckily he reports that he is alive, well, and very thankful. In recent years he has traveled the world with the com-panies he has worked for and has es-tablished good working relationships with many German companies along the way.

Lindsey Hopkinson ‘02 GIBP/Inter-national Business has been Market-ing Coordinator for Hazen and Sawyer, P.C., an environmental engineering firm specializing in water and wastewater, for five years. She recently started to co-lead the effort for international proposals for Asia for her company. This summer she used her German skills again when she took her boyfriend Michael Scarpa to Europe for the first time. Highlights included visits to Lake Bled and the Ju-

IEP Hosts the 15th Annual Colloquium on International Engineering Education in Newport

lian Alps in Slovenia, and brushing up on the Italian she first studied on IEP exchange in Braunschweig.

James Isherwood ‘11 GIEP/MCE starts a new job in January 2013 with MMIC in St. Johnsbury, VT. He will be the first dedicated R&D Engineer in a new R&D department under the director. The company started by making mobile surgery rooms and has ex-panded into other quick deploy structures such as mobile field hospitals for the military.

Aaron LaPointe ‘01 GIEP/CHE recently visited the IEP from Washington. He works for the Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate of the U.S. Army and is currently Acting Branch Chief for Countermine Tech-nology.

Hostos Monegro ‘05 SIEP/CPE completed his M.B.A. in May and is now a Senior Strat-egy and Operations Consultant working with the major entertainment and media studios in LA/Hollywood. He advises studios on re-mediating issues related to their business operations, workflow improvement, digital distribution analysis, and solution selection. He enjoys the senior level client interac-tion that his role requires, in addition to the beautiful LA outdoors.

Jesse Schneider ‘94 GIEP/MCE, based out of BMW headquarters in Munich, is now on a two-year “expat” assignment at BMW North America in New Jersey. IEP alums Zachary Karas ‘08 GIEP/MCE, who earned his M.B.A. from Boston College in May 2012 and started a job as Senior Vehicle Engineer at BMW in June 2012, and Eric Sargent ‘03 GIEP/MCE also work at the same location, so BMW is in good hands!

Greg Taylor ‘02 GIEP/MCE ’02 welcomed his second child, Evan Kenneth Taylor, in June. Greg works for Siemens Energy in Charlotte, NC, and writes that he has been making good use of his IEP skills, having recently been sent to inspect generators in Oman and Brazil.

After a day of presenting, panelists Wen Xiong, Wenchao He, Sigrid Berka, and Megan Echevarría enjoy the International Wine & Cheese reception at the Hotel Viking in Newport.

Nicholas Putnam ‘12 GIEP/MCE (top row, 7th from the left) with colleagues in the ZF trainee program in Friedrich-shafen.

URI President David Dooley (left) introduces keynote speaker William Colgazier (right), Science and Technology Advisor to the Secretary of State, U.S. Department of State, who spoke on leveraging science and technology for international diplomacy.

2012 Colloquium on International Engineering Education in Newport, RI

TU-BS Exchange Alumni NewsVolker Staffa (TU-BS exchange Spring 2010) graduated this year from his Logistics/Business Studies program at the Hamburg Uni-versity of Applied Sciences and now works as a Junior Analyst in the Research & Analysis Department of Statista, the leading German statistics company on the internet.

Philipp Stein (TU-BS exchange Spring 2011) finished his Diploma in April, and now works at the Institute for Soil Mechanics and Foun-dation Engineering at TU-BS. The position includes education, re-search, and third-party projects.

Ines Walther (TU-BS exchange 2001-03) has been working as a geotechnical engineer in Connecticut since finishing her M.S. at URI in 2003. She and her husband purchased a house in Milford, CT in August.

Peter Wiedenhoff (‘05 Dipl. -Wirtsch. -Ing, ‘11 Dr. -Ing. TU-BS) is now a senior consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in Munich. While on vacation in New England, Peter visited the IEP with his wife and talked to interested students.

“In recent years, researchers in Spain have been looking into ways to harness ocean wave energy. Tecnalia, the engineering research and design firm that I completed my internship with, has been involved in planning a demonstration site in the Bay of Biscay where companies can perform full scale tests on their prototype wave energy capturing devices. My project involved determining the probability of weather windows. In other words, given an amount of time to do an installa-tion or maintenance procedure that requires a significant wave height under a threshold level, how many times in any given month could a window of time like that be expected? My internship was a great ex-perience and very relevant to my field of study (ocean engineering).”

--Lauren ‘Schambach, ‘13 SIEP/OCE

This fall, we checked in with former exchange students who studied at URI as students from TU-Braunschweig in Germany.

Sonja-Lara (Kurz) Bepperling (TU-BS exchange 2004-05) sends greetings from Switzerland, where she works for an engineering and consulting company in Zollikon, south of Zuerich. She married in 2008, and moved to Switzerland in 2009. She is still in touch with friends from RI, and was lucky enough to visit some this past August.

Stefan Maretzki (TU-BS exchange 2005-06) sends greetings from Harmstorf. In 2012 his two-year-old daughter Finja welcomed a new playfellow: her brother Jesper was born in March. Stefan reports that he enjoyed attending the recent IEP alumni event in Braunschweig, and dubs it a great success!

Torben Schulze (TU-BS exchange 2009-10) finished his studies at the TU-BS in 2010, writing his German Diploma Thesis at Volkswa-gen headquarters in Wolfsburg. In fall 2010 he became father to a baby girl, and in May 2011 he married. For the past year he has been in the international CAReer program at Daimler Corp., which has included travel to the Detroit R&D facilities of Mercedes-Benz North America, and to Beijing.

“When I was working with IH Cantabria, I was working on ocean transport modeling. The majority of my projects were predicting or backtracking oil spills based on local ocean currents, wave states, and wind speeds. I also worked with their modeling program to try to improve their predictions using a stochastic method of prediction.”

--Matt Perkins, ‘13 SIEP/OCE

Surfing on the wave of trash at Oceanográfica in Valencia.

Lauren and Matt at the Picos de Europa.

Churros con chocolate in the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca.

Things got off to a great start at the Heidi Kirk Duffy Center this academic year. We welcomed 75 students into the IEP and TI Houses. This included 13 5th-year students return-ing from their year abroad and 11 exchange students from France, Spain, Germany, and China.

We prioritized community-building programs this year which led us to have a very successful IEP retreat in the fall semes-ter, run by the Student Organization Leadership Consultants, a group of URI students who have received advanced training in leadership and group development. We also had several other social and cultural programs organized by our own stu-dent leadership group, House Council, and Emma Montague, our graduate housing advisor.

As a cohesive community, we were even able to survive four and a half days without power, thanks to Hurricane Sandy!

While we are sad to say goodbye to some of our fall exchange students, we are looking forward to welcoming five exchange students in the spring, and several more returning from their year abroad.

Megan Echevarría moderates “Teaching Languages for the Professions.”

Left: IEP House residents find creative ways to hoist their bikes to the 3rd floor.

Above: Residents display their pumpkin-carving skills at Halloween.

IEP Welcomes New CoordinatorWe are fortunate to have attracted a superb writer to the IEP team; Coordinator Heather Price has an M.A. in Writing (Po-etry and Fiction) ‘02 from Johns Hopkins University, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing--Poetry from The Ohio State Uni-versity ‘11. Heather has experience teaching Writing at Roger Williams University, Bryant University, and presently at URI, as well as working with minority students through the URI Talent Development program, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Tal-ented Youth. She has already left her mark by polishing IEP students’ scholarship and grad school applications, refining grant proposals, and coordinating the IEP message through interlinking digital and social media outlets such as Facebook, Blogger, and electronic bulletins. She is now strategically de-veloping our high school and alumni outreach, as well as the program’s website presence.

Welcome, Heather!

Lisa Pratt, Nicole Bonvouloir ‘13 FIEP/MCE, and Heather Price hold the fort at reception.

Heidi Kirk Duffy Center News

Damon Rarick delivers a pitch to “Just Add German.” Wen Xiong shares strategies for teaching Advanced Technical Chinese.

IEP board members Angus Taylor, Mike Byrnes, Laurie Burger, and Wenchao He, Kirsten Brecht, and Robert Slater share insights about language preparation to meet industry needs.

Sigrid Berka honors John Grandin with a special volume, Bridging the Languages with Engineering, on occasion of the IEP’s 25th anniversary.

5th-Year Ocean Engineering Students On Their Year in Spain

Thank You, Sensata!We express our sincerest gratitude for the generous support of the IEP over many years to retiring C.E.O. of Sensata Technologies Tom Wroe, as well as to Sensata’s representative on the IEP advisory board, Don-na Kimmel. Donna has left the company, but will still be serving on the board. Sensata will be represented by V.P., Business Development Gary Baker (‘88 MCE/Applied Math). A big thank-you also to IEP alums Neil Petrarca (‘99 GIEP/MCE), Patrick Hartnett (‘10 GIEP/CVE, ‘11 MBA), Jennifer (Dail) Anderson (‘00 GIEP/ELE) and newly hired Ruben Auer (‘13 CIEP/MCE) for presenting career opportunities at Sensata to a group of 40 interested IEP students on September 24.

Luis Gonzalez ‘13 SIEP/CVE poses with Spanish and French exchange students at the IEP retreat.

Coast of Santander, Spain.