MEM Graduate Enters the Fashion World

Andrea Marron MEM’12, first recipient of the Conrades Distinguished Fellowship

Andrea Marron MEM’12 is making over the digital strategy of a well-known fashion label and in doing so, the image of the average MEM graduate.

As a twentysomething, Marron dons the title Director of Digital Strategy for a premiere fashion house, Nicole Miller, has run a short-lived but successful dressmaking business of her own, and she is just getting started. Like so many other women out there, Marron is paving the way for a new engineer—in her case at the intersection of fashion and E-commerce.

“Nicole Miller was one of many fashion brands that did not anticipate the rapid growth of E-commerce and did not make it a core part of the business,” says Marron, who in 2008 received her BS in Optical Engineering from the University of Rochester. “I saw this as a great opportunity to get involved on a very challenging project to bring Nicole Miller up to speed digitally.”

She joined the company for her MEM internship, and last March came on full time to head up digital operations for Nicole Miller CEO Bud Konheim ’57.

Konheim, Marron’s mentor, was an English major who took some time away from Dartmouth to work on Wall Street and then at his father’s textile factory because his father had gone bankrupt. Eventually, after graduating he also took over his mother’s business, and later in 1982 hired Nicole Miller to design clothing, making her a partner. Konheim had always farmed out his E-commerce tasks to a third party, but under Konheim’s guidance, Marron is in the process of bringing the web operation in-house.

“Since I started full-time in March, it’s felt like we are all running a startup within Nicole Miller,” says Marron, first recipient of the Conrades Distinguished Fellowship at Thayer School, awarded in recognition of leadership potential. “E-Commerce sales have nearly doubled since July 2012. Our digital strategy for 2013 includes the launch of a state-of-the-art website in May. We hope that this along with other tech investments will double sales again in 2013.”

Marron wears any number of hats on a given day, many which she tried on for size at Thayer. In 2008, she was named one of Businessweek’s 25 top entrepreneurs under the age of 25 for the custom-made dresses she made at a company she launched in 2007. On her website, Marron had customers designing their own custom dresses for $200 through an online interface, a seamstress busily making the dresses, and customers receiving their orders in just 10 days. Maron moved on to pursue more scalable ideas at Thayer, and the experience became a stepping stone for Nicole Miller and whatever comes next.

“I really like the space I’m in now, straddling tech and fashion,” says Marron. “I want to learn as much as I can about business, tech and fashion at Nicole Miller and eventually, run my own business or perhaps a few, more than likely in e-commerce.” —Anna Fiorentino

Recharging New York By CampStove

Restless New Yorkers found a bright light in a city without power after Hurricane Sandy. A stand, popped up by a group of engineers in Washington Square, held what appeared to be a century-old device—a camp stove. But a sign hanging from the table reading “Charge Your Phone” implied the opposite.

This modern gadget known as a BioLite CampStove, invented by Thayer alum and avid camper Jonathan Cedar ’03 and Alexander Drummond, converts heat from the fire into usable electricity using renewable resources for fuel instead of petroleum. BioLite’s humanitarian response to Sandy had those thrown off the grid flocking from all over Manhattan to sip a cup of coffee while they waited for their phone to charge.

BioLite engineers offered powerless Sandy survivors a way to charge their phones.

When a fire is lit inside BioLite CampStove’s metal fuel chamber, a thermoelectric generator converts the heat into electricity to run a fan. The air from the fan then oxygenates the fire and creates a clean burn. As noted in the recent issue of Dartmouth Engineer, the excess power of up to four watts can charge small electronic devices through a USB port—making this CampStove a hot little commodity during a power outage.

“After additional pop-up stations in DUMBO (near BioLite’s Brooklyn Headquarters) and by City Hall Plaza, traffic spiked, emails poured in, and we depleted our inventory within a week,” says BioLite intern who was among those BioLite engineers in NYC, Joel Kaushansky. “Several requests came in asking ‘Where will you pop up next?’ and ‘Can you donate stoves to our relief efforts?,’ which posed a logistical challenge for us: how do we deploy these safely and effectively to the areas that need it most?”

The engineers from BioLite donated and transported 18 CampStove kits to an emergency distribution center in Queens. Each included a CampStove, wood pellet fuel, fire starters, and additional safety instructions.

The experience gave the young company, which supplies the CampStove as well as a biomass cookstove called HomeStove to 70 developing countries, a chance to test their stoves in a large scale emergency and within an urban environment for the first time—and peace of mind that they had helped those hit hardest by Sandy.

“While much of BioLite’s work focuses on energy access in developing countries, Hurricane Sandy was a palpable reminder of the need for energy security here at home,” says Cedar, BioLite Chief Executive Officer. “I was really proud that our team was so eager to help.” —Anna Fiorentino

Mobile Health Fingerprinting

Ryan Halter’s team created a wearable mHealth prototype, a wrist strap, with bioimpedance-based biometric capabilities. Eight removable electrode locations gauge a person’s electrical properties.

Nowadays there isn’t a job a mobile device can’t handle, or so it seems. A new field called mobile health, or mHealth, introduces maybe the most useful to date.

Dartmouth’s Institute for Security, Technology, and Society is among those developing mobile devices and portable sensors that can be tucked in everything from bracelets to necklaces to wrist watches in order to monitor an individual’s health. This new technology is providing an unprecedented level of access to healthcare and helping doctors with early detection—monitoring electrocardiogram signals from a heart monitor, obtaining glucose readings from a glucose meter, or controlling insulin injections, for example.

But these devices aren’t foolproof—not yet anyway. That’s where Thayer Assistant Professor of Engineering Ryan Halter comes in. Halter is busily working with Dartmouth Professor of Computer Science David Kotz ’86 and graduate student Cory Cornelius ’07 to ensure that health records of those who are being monitored with mHealth devices will remain private, and safe from security breaches.

Specifically, he went searching for a way to prove that the right medical data is paired with the right patient and not just the person who happens to be wearing the device. What Halter and his team found was a way to analyze the electrical properties of the tissue—or the bioimpedance—of the person wearing an mHealth device.

“Most people are already carrying portable phones with sophisticated computation, and some type of sensor. An insulin monitor or heart rate monitor, for example, can easily wirelessly communicate with these devices, and that information can be transferred to a database and monitored by medical personnel,” says Halter. “The difficult part is if someone puts the wrong device on and their heart rate speeds up. There could be a conflict with who is actually treated.”

Halter’s team discovered they could identify a patient by placing electrodes into the mHealth sensor to measure how easily and accessibly currents flow through their body. Data linked to those currents could then also be sent via cell phone to the medical personnel.

“A person’s bioimpedance is not unique across entire population, but usually is within a small group, such as a family who might wear the same device,” Halter explains.

Halter and his team completed a successful test run of this electrical fingerprinting technique in a bracelet created by Cornelius on a test group of 50 Dartmouth students last Spring. Ninety percent of those individuals were accurately identified using Halter’s method. Next, Cornelius, Kotz, and Halter plan to test the robustness and wearability of the identification sensors on a larger sample over a longer period of time. Eventually, they hope to use the bracelet with mHealth devices, specifically one prototype in the works by Dartmouth’s Institute for Security, Technology, and Society called Amulet. —Anna Fiorentino

Life After Teaching: Horst Richter

Horst Richter may have retired from teaching in 2008, but he still occupies office number 114 in Cummings Hall. The long-time fixture—and Thayer School’s first director of undergraduate studies—took a few minutes to reflect on three decades of teaching courses from Thermodynamics, his favorite, to one he created for all Dartmouth students called Technology of Sailing, and his current role as a researcher and advisor.

Horst Richter

What have you been up to since retiring from Thayer?

As a retired professor, I have the unique advantage of working patiently, and slowly, on an interesting project I stumbled on at Thayer—one that very few have explored. I am attempting solve one of the problems of cold spray technology.

What exactly is cold spray technology?

In thermal and cold gas spray systems, small particles are injected into a gas stream. This gas-particle, two-phase mixture is accelerated to supersonic velocities in a converging-diverging nozzle, basically a spray gun, that is aimed at a substrate to be coated. In a process similar to spray painting, the particles have high velocities at the point of impact on the substrate so they deform plastically and adhere to the surface. In order to design the cold spray nozzle correctly, we need to understand the momentum and heat transfer phenomena for small particles at supersonic or transonic velocities. In collaboration with Dr. Chi-Yang Cheng from Ansys, Inc., we have been developing mathematical models and running numerous computer simulations in an effort to put together a set of heat transfer correlations for these particular flows. These transport phenomena are also of interest in explosions, if small combustible particles are entrained.

What brought you to Thayer school in the first place?

In 1972 I came to Thayer from Germany to research for a year, after I was invited by former professor Graham Wallis. In 1975 I took a faculty position and moved here permanently. Since then, for nearly 40 years, I have been going back to Germany at least once a year, sometimes to visit friends and extended family and other times to do work.

What work brought you back to Germany?

Thirty years ago, a Germany colleague of mine and I initiated and continued to be involved with Thayer’s first German study abroad program in Aachen, Germany, and every year we had three students coming from Aachen. It ceased to exist in 2004 when the German government stopped the program. Now, we do a separate German exchange program with a university in Hamburg, which I also initiated with another colleague in Germany.

Can you tell me about your experience with the America’s Cup? 

From 1995 to 1998 I worked with the America’s Cup syndicate, called Young America. We were the first to introduce fluid dynamics evaluations of sail performance with a computer code. Two graduate students assisted me by computing the flow around sails and improving sail shape. Later in 2003, with the help of sail manufacturer North Sails, we did computations for other America’s Cup syndicates like Stars & Stripes and Luna Rossa.

Why is it important to you to continue working at Thayer?

Thayer has gotten bigger every year since I arrived, but I would say the atmosphere has not changed at all. It is still the small collegial school that I initially fell in love with, and will continue to be a part of as long as the dean provides me with an office. –Anna Fiorentino

Sustainable Builders

By early 2014, Dick Wenzel ’71, Th’72 will watch proudly as the first tracks for the world’s fastest and California’s first high-speed rail are laid. The $68 billion project marks the pinnacle of Wenzel’s 40-year career, planning, designing and managing for San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) before joining contractor AECOM 31 years later in 2006 to engineer the plans for and give an environmental assessment of one of nine sectors of the new 500-mile high-speed rail stretch from L.A. to San Francisco. The tracks will later extend 300 miles to Sacramento and San Diego.

“When I was hired by BART in 1979, the organization had just built the first computerized electric train, followed by the whole world having computerized trains,” says Wenzel, who also holds advanced degrees in city planning and computer modeling. “I thought I missed out on developing a new transit technology, but then in the 1990s California decided to build the fastest high-speed rail line in the world, the environmentally responsible alternative to bigger airports and 1,400 miles of freeways.”

Comparing his career to the Engines 21 Class he once took, the environmental jack-of-all-trades gained from Thayer the ability to excel in different project areas well—much like his son Drew Wenzel ’08, Th’09, M.E.M’10, who is now pursuing a M.S. in Sustainable Design & Construction from Stanford University.

“Both my father and I tend to have a little knowledge about many fields, as opposed to being experts in a single field,” says Drew. “I think that usually means we tend to fill interstitial project roles, connecting people and resources as necessary to ensure progress is made towards the end goal.”

Drew provides environmental building consulting guidance for planning, design, construction and operations to Google Inc.’s Real Estate and Workplace Services department. After just two years at Google, he developed a system to track and improve the environmental performance of Google’s offices and buildings worldwide.

“I celebrated in 1972 when environmental quality standards were written into law with the National Environmental Policy Act. Now Drew is majoring in environmental engineering and making a career out of sustainable design,” says Dick.

Both father and son are just as dedicated to the cause of their alma mater as they are to the environment. They are Annual Fund agents and Dick recently completed his presidency of Dartmouth’s San Francisco Alumni Club.

“When I went to Thayer we had great professors but the school was in a small older building. We did the best we could with the labs we had,” says Dick, whose daughter Shelley ’14 is also pursuing a Dartmouth degree in environmental studies. “Today I walk into the Great Hall, and I see a state-of-the-art auditorium and classrooms. I donated to the school, because I just wanted other students to have opportunity that I did. What I didn’t know is that one of those students would end up being my own child.”

Furey Heads to the Olympics

Sean Furey.

On August 8, Sean Furey ’04, Th ’05, ’06 will compete in the Men’s Javelin Throw for an Olympic medal. The 29-year-old San Diego resident, originally from Methuen, MA, finished 12th in the World Championships in 2009, and went on to win the U.S. National Championships in 2010, before placing fourth in the Olympic trials. Furey found a few minutes before heading to London to talk to us about attending Thayer, preparing for the games, and the benefits of being an engineer and an athlete.

How did you prepare physically and mentally for the Olympics? Leading up to my departure for London on July 31, I followed the same high-intensity, low-volume training schedule that I use in the regular season, while continuing to work at my regular part-time job as a defense contractor for Raytheon. That routine involves swimming, sprinting, lifting, doing gymnastics, flexibility training, and mostly throwing. My personal best is 82.73 meters, and that ranks me in the middle of the pack—about 16th in the world. I’m one of about 50 in the preliminary round competing for 12 spots to move on in the competition.

I am just as nervous as I would be for any of the top American or world meets. The aura around the Olympics could add pressure, but I think I’m doing a good job of keeping that out of my head and focusing on how to execute my throws. Since I was in high school I have been a good thrower, managing to win a couple of state championships. I always knew I could be one of the best throwers in the world—if you want to make it to the Olympics, you have to believe you can be the best. 

Can you talk about experiences or individuals at Thayer who shaped your career as both an athlete and an engineer? I still use the statistics and technical estimation skills I learned from Ron Lasky, both at Raytheon and in my javelin career. Thayer forced me to stick to a very rigid schedule, and to eliminate procrastination. I actually enjoy that I get a mental break from javelin when I’m working and from work when I’m training.

How do your worlds as an engineer and an athlete cross? Just being able to think like an engineer—to make quick decisions and do quick calculations—gives me an advantage in the javelin. For five years I have recorded all kinds of information in training journals, from the number of throws I make, distances, and the weights of the implements I throw, to technical cues such as the position of my leg. This allows me to go back and see what worked for me and what didn’t. Using a training journal is common, but most don’t record in the level of detail that I do, and unlike most, I am able to understand what is truly a trend versus a coincidence.

What was it like working on the Turbo Javelin for your ENGG 390: M.E.M Project? Tom Petranoff owns a company called Turbo Javelin that makes training javelins, which are basically injection molded three-foot spears that replicate the flight of a javelin. Tom asked us to come up with research on how to make a low-cost training javelin that breaks down into smaller pieces. He was looking for an indoor training tool that was easy to produce and travel with, and inexpensive. We came up with a report that met his criteria, and after a few iterations of the material research we did he developed the training javelin.

It was fun a fun project and amazing to work so close to something I am so passionate about. Thayer teaches you to find something you’re passionate about—your own problem—and solve it. —Anna Fiorentino

New Fab Machines

Christian Ortiz ’11 Th ’11 took any remaining guesswork out of the Thayer School Machine Shop’s new easy-to-use equipment. He revolutionized an app, which will be housed on an iPad next to each machine, that guides students to use the new computer-controlled tools. It’s just one more feature of the new shop, in an area called the FAB Lab, that will make machining at Thayer easier and safer than ever before. 

“These new machines in the FAB Lab are all sensorized and more or less have computers attached to them that allow you to export your Computer-Aided Design (CAD) images onto them,” says Ortiz, who is now finishing up his year term as Thayer Design Fellow. “Once students discover this new functionality, and how fast they operate, they will be overwhelmed with excitement.”

Walls are being torn down, windows are going up, and the floor plan of the Machine Shop reconfigured to aggregate new work spaces to completely remodel the shop by August 1. This will free up staff to keep an eye on up to 55 students from every vantage point in the Machine Shop a given time. About $700,000 in new mills, lathes and digital and other equipment will replace machinery that in some cases date back to World World II era.

A section of the shop will be dedicated to designing production materials, such as molds, dies, jigs and fixtures, while a larger subset–the new FAB lab–will serve as a space for students to get down to hands-on project work. They can improve their functional prototypes with 3D scanning and digitizing, computer numerical control of the machine tools, conversational programming, and onsite video tutorials.

“Our re-engineering effort recognizes the key role of design software to support the fabrication process, and maximizes the power of these tools help students build the projects of their imaginations,” says Manager of the Machine Shop Kevin Baron. “A FAB lab can be a stepping stone to more industrial production methods that take place in the larger machine shop, or it can meet the needs of engineers who do not want to dive deeply into the product development process.”

The first Fab Lab opened at MIT in 2001, where Baron worked before joining Thayer, as a high-tech, small workspace with computers that help students digitally fabricate functional working models of basically anything quickly and with ease. While traditional machine shops are a place for students to make things out of metal, at Thayer’s FAB Lab students will be able to make things out of foam, fiber glass, plastic, fabric, wood, rubber and other materials using a variety of processes from sewing to scanning to sculpting. These approachable-scale machines, which don’t require staff supervision, will be available to students during extended evening hours.

“We expect this area to serve as a launch pad for student designers to gain familiarity with the techniques of production and to make small models independently, before moving out to the larger-scale capabilities of the workshop,” says Baron. “The FAB Lab will provide powerful fabrication tools that designers can learn to use in less than a couple hours. This space provides a resource for designers who want a fast and easy way to produce functional working models of their product designs on their own, whenever they want.”

Baron, who proposed the improvements, says that since Computer-Aided Design software is driving design at Thayer, it makes sense to provide students with computer-controlled fabrication tools. In addition to embracing the digital revolution, he will also now staff the shop with a large cadre of temporary, part-time student assistants to support other students working in the machine shop.

“Our challenge has been that nearly all projects that students work on are accomplished in a 10-week course, but it can take longer than 10 weeks to really learn how to use many of the tools we had,” says Baron. “Our new machines will now input data from design software and coach students through the design process, allowing them to make something in just a couple of hours.” –Anna Fiorentino

New FAB Lab Machinery:

LaserPro Laser Cutter

Stratasys Mojo Rapid Prototyper

Formech Compac Mini Thermoformer

Desktop Computer Numeric Control Router

Roland Vinyl Cutter