CLASS NOTES
CLASS NOTES 2010s
AZ Big Media named Koevary, also a UA research assistant professor, one of 20 influential millennials working in Arizona for 2017.
Medical products manufacturer Xeridiem hired Summer Garland, BS/BME 2016, after she led a companysponsored senior design team to two first-place Engineering Design Day awards. In 2017 she mentored another Xeridiem-backed team that refined the original project, for safer nasogastric tubing for hospital patients, and won for best prototyping. Caitlin Schnitzer, BS/ChE 2013, works off the Israeli coast for Schlumberger Technology Corp. The senior field engineer went right to work programming and monitoring equipment for Schlumberger after graduating from the UA. She has worked on drilling operations in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska’s North Slope.
Caitlin Schnitzer
UA mining engineering grads won second place in the alumni division at the 39th International Collegiate Mining Competition in Georgetown, Kentucky, in March. More than 200 contestants from five countries tested their gold panning, land surveying and other old-fashioned mining skills at the event, which commemorates the 91 miners who died in the 1972 Sunshine
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ARIZONA ENGINEER
2000s
Nailed It!—Dave Vatterodt, BS/MGE 2004, helps UA team take second place, alumni division, at an international mining competition in March 2017. At left is Tim George, BS/MGE 2007.
Mine disaster. “We’re a very tight-knit group,” said John Featherston, BS/MGE 2008, a mining engineer at Small Mine Development LLC in Battle Mountain, Nevada. “We all work in mining or related industries in several different states, and we use this annual competition as a way to get together and catch up on each other’s projects,” he said. “It’s almost like continuing education, but with a lot more camaraderie.” Nurcin Celik, MS/IE 2008 and PhD/ SIE 2010, received a 2017 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers. She is an associate professor at the University of Miami College of Engineering. Jen Watson Koevary, BS/ME 2008 and PhD/BME 2013, is chief operating officer of Tucson-based Avery Therapeutics Inc. The company has licensed a patent portfolio for its product MyCardia, a beating heart graft technology that has shown significant improvements in heart function in preclinical trials.
Moe Mukiibi, MS/ EnvE 2005 and PhD/ EnvE 2008, has managed water technology and cleanup projects for federal and state governments and Moe Mukiibi corporations. He founded the Tucson-based nonprofit African Children’s Charities, which made headlines in 2014 for its collaboration with a UA medical team to provide life-saving surgery to an orphaned Ugandan boy. Mukiibi is president and chief technology officer of FWM Technologies and Stonehouse Water Technologies.
1990s
Cisco Systems Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technology Officer Salman Asadullah, BS/ECE 1995, visited the UA campus in November 2016 to meet with College of Engineering administrators and faculty and share his experiences and career advice with students.
Heart Healthy—From left, Avery Therapeutics COO Jen Watson Koevary, Avery and Sarver Heart Center researcher Jordan Lancaster with frozen MyCardia heart graft, and Avery interim CEO and chief medical officer Steven Goldman, MD, a professor at Sarver Heart Center.