Fast Track in Engineering
Fast-paced development
With plans for a new high-rise municipal building in a Boston neighborhood in flux, planning and design firm Sasaki Associates needed a point person to keep the project on track. Nick Brooks, who earned his master’s degree in energy systems just down the street from the project at Northeastern, was an obvious choice for the post.
Success, says Brooks, depends on quickly gaining consensus among stakeholders, who in this case include city officials, neighbors, and the design team. If the project stalls, costly delays follow.
“While trial by fire is often the standard when you first start out, it doesn’t necessarily yield the best outcomes,” Brooks says. He’s glad Northeastern’s Gordon Engineering Leadership Program taught him the problem-solving and leadership skills most people develop over the course of years.
Advancing clinical products
Clinicians know what they want a medical product to do, but it takes an engineer to get the latest devices to market. That’s where Matthew Dickman comes in.
Working as medical science liaison for Massachusetts-based NeuroLogica, Dickman helps develop the latest medical-imaging technologies by bridging the gap between the healthcare professionals who use medical products and the engineers who design them. It’s a post he reached just four years after joining the company at the entry level.
And he’s not just shepherding NeuroLogica’s products to market; he developed a neurosurgery instrument in the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program that’s being considered for FDA testing.
Early leadership
The testing of national security technologies requires months of planning, coordination with multiple government agencies, and an unwavering focus on the end goal—the kind of work assigned to a senior engineer.
But California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory decided to trust Danielle Doane, one of its newest employees, with the job. The mechanical engineer was tasked with overseeing large-scale munitions tests for the lab’s Defense Technologies Engineering Division.
Her finely honed leadership skills come from her time as a Gordon Fellow, surprising even her. “I was able to accomplish more in that year than I ever imagined I could,” she says.