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College of Engineering Announces 2022 Distinguished and Outstanding Young Alumni Award Winners

April 1, 2022 Community

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The UMass Amherst College of Engineering has announced the recipients of its 2022 Distinguished Alumni Awards and Outstanding Young Alumni Awards. These ten gifted alumni embody the best of innovation, dedication, and leadership, helping shape the future of engineering within the Commonwealth and the world.

The Distinguished Alumni Award

The Distinguished Alumni Award represents visionary leaders in their respective fields, and the recipients of this honor have reached exceptional levels of professional and personal achievement. This award recognizes distinguished leadership, service, teaching, innovation, and other exemplary accomplishments that positively impact society and the engineering profession.

This year’s five recipients of the Distinguished Alumni Award:

Carl Christenson ’82, ’84MS, Mechanical Engineering
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Altra Industrial Motion

Gillian Gregory ’82 MS, ’86PhD, Civil Engineering
Vice President and Senior Project Manager at GEI Consultants, Inc.

Thomas Martin ’94, Civil Engineering [Biomedical Engineering Awarding Department] 
Vice President of Commercial Operations and Analytics for Spero Therapeutics

Antonis Papadourakis ’85PhD, Chemical Engineering
President and CEO of the LANXESS Corporation, President of the Americas for the LANXESS Group

Karen St. Germain ’93PhD, Electrical Engineering
Division Director of the Earth Science Division in the Science Mission Directorate at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

The Outstanding Young Alumni Award

The Outstanding Young Alumni Award recognizes emerging leaders in the early stages of their careers. Recipients of this honor are generally no more than 10 years out from receiving their UMass Engineering Ph.D. or generally no more than fifteen years out from receiving their UMass Engineering B.S. This award acknowledges outstanding professional and personal achievements and highlights each recipient’s ambitions and potential to impact UMass, the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world.

The five winners of the 2022 Outstanding Young Alumni Award:

Monique Farrell ’14, Chemical Engineering
IT Operations/Transformation manager, currently immersed in a technical leadership program at Northrop Grumman

David Hurwitz ’04, ’06MS, ’09PhD, Civil Engineering
Director of the Kiewit Center for Infrastructure and Transportation

Julie E. Matthew ’04, Chemical Engineering [Biomedical Engineering Awarding Department]
Manufacturing Senior Manager at Amgen

Dragana Perkovic-Martin ’08PhD, Electrical Engineering
Instrument Manager for the Venus Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar on NASA’s VERITAS mission in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Radar Science and Engineering Section

Thomas Sebastian ’12PhD, Mechanical Engineering
Senior Technical Staff Member of the Structural and Thermal-Fluids Engineering Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory

A ceremony honoring our Outstanding Alumni on April 28 will also mark the beginning of the College of Engineering’s 75th anniversary, with celebrations culminating during Homecoming 2022, October 24-29. On the official milestone day, September 1, a special exhibit will open in the University of Massachusetts Science and Engineering Library (SEL) in the Lederle Graduate Research Center Lowrise.

For more information on the Outstanding Alumni Ceremony, please contact Jillian Farrell in the Engineering Office of Development.

(April 2022)

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