CLASS NOTES
Energy Entrepreneur Peter Farrell ’02
Peter Farrell ’02 was included in the 2010 Style Weekly Top 40 Under 40 issue where young Richmonders who are on the move professionally are profiled. Here is what they wrote: Instead of going to business school as he’d expected, Peter Farrell enrolled in his own crash course in starting a multimillion-dollar biomass business. During the past year, Farrell has recruited board members and investors for the new business, Recast Energy LLC, which has facilities in Kentucky, Mississippi and the Dominican Republic that produce steam to be distributed as thermal energy to manufacturers. “In this day, investing is not something people would think of doing easily like maybe five years ago,” says Eva Hardy, a former executive at Dominion Virginia Power and mentor to Farrell. “Today you think very hard where you’re going to invest and the fact that he’s been able to pull this off made it very clear to me he has become a first-class businessman.” Farrell is proud to say his father, Tom Farrell, chief executive of Dominion Resources Inc., owns no part of Recast Energy, but he also gives full credit to his father for his respect and desire to give back. With family roots in Sussex County, keeping his sights on ways to help the area is proof. Farrell has invested time and resources to purchase the operating assets of a Waverly particleboard plant to become part of Recast Energy. The plant closed down in 2007, Peter Farrell ’02 started Recast Energy LLC, a biomass business. hurting the tender rural economy, he says. And as a new board member of Tuckahoe YMCA, Farrell’s been working to expand its services to Sussex residents. Farrell also has raised money for two scholarships at his alma maters — one for a Collegiate School student and another for a University of Virginia student. As the youngest member of the Henrico GOP Committee with a contagious charisma to bring people together, Farrell’s political endeavors may be yet another front on which to watch this mover and shaker. Reprinted with permission of Style Weekly. Copyright 2010. All rights reserved. Photo by Scott Elmquist
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He currently resides in Arlington, VA with his wife Lia. MARRIED: Ann Roper to John Bowen on June 5, 2010 in Davidson, NC. Cougars in the wedding party were classmate Laura Johnson and brothers Hart Roper ’96 and Paul Roper ’98. Harry Wilson to Courtenay Martin in Jan. 2010 in Louisville, KY. Cougars in the wedding party were classmate Michael Thalhimer and brother Russell Wilson ’07.
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Patrick Burke is teaching history and coaching soccer and basketball at the Pomfret School in Connecticut after completing his master’s in education leadership at Harvard. Jacqueline DeLoyht is conducting research in the department of anatomy and neurobiology at VCU. She presented her research at the Central Virginia Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience Annual Neuroscience Symposium Dec. 1, 2010, where she received their Best Abstract Award. She will be participating in a poster presentation at the American Society for Neurochemistry Annual Meeting in St. Louis, MO, this March. Brock Saunders is spending a significant amount of time in London working as an investment analyst at Citi. Laura Schewel has cofounded a greentech business called Virtual Vehicle Company (www. vevdrive.com). With a goal of creating “new and exciting uses for the Virtual Test Drive technologies,” the company has garnered several awards – grand prize winner of the University of California Big Ideas Competition, winner of the DOW Sustainable Student Innovation Prize, semifinalist of Clean Tech Open, and semifinalist of MIT Clean Energy Prize Business Plan Competition. While an undergraduate at Yale, she conceived the idea of a cell phone application that would provide data about driving habits and, when analyzed, enable the driver to save fuel and, consequently, save money. Now she works closely with Thomas Wesley Zizzo, son cofounders Gopal of Brady O’Dea Zizzo ’02, Vaswani, a computer was born Oct. 25, 2010.
Spark