Casey Fontana ’19PhD

Casey Fontana ’19PhD is currently the Technical Manager of Offshore Siting and Energy Assessment at Invenergy in Chicago, IL. She has been involved in offshore wind for 10 years, with experience in both academic research and industry project development. Fontana holds a BS in Civil Engineering from The College of New Jersey and a PhD in Structural Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.  

Fontana performed the majority of her graduate research under the NSF IGERT fellowship and was able to collaborate with a number of different disciplines involved in offshore wind topics during this time. Her specific doctoral research with Sanjay Arwade and Don DeGroot was focused on multiline anchor systems for floating turbines, and she was able to perform some of this work under the guidance of Vryhof Anchors in Rotterdam, Netherlands. She still happily engages with UMass Amherst through her participation in the Offshore Wind Industry Advisory Board. 

In her current role with Invenergy, she is responsible for turbine siting and layout design, wind resource assessment, and energy yield analysis, primarily for the Leading Light Wind and Even Keel Wind projects. She was thrilled to help Invenergy secure its first offshore wind offtake contract for the Leading Light Wind project in her home state of New Jersey. Her favorite offshore wind topics are super-sized turbine models and layout optimization, and she leverages her graduate school experience to conduct small research projects whenever possible. She also takes advantage of peer mentoring and looks to share career lessons learned with her younger colleagues. 

She has been actively involved the American Clean Power Association, serving as conference chair for the Resource and Technology conference, and judge of the DOE collegiate wind competition at the annual CLEANPOWER conference.  

Fontana met her other half, Philip, while studying at UMass Amherst, and traveled back to western Massachusetts to tie the knot with him last summer. In her spare time, Fontana and her husband enjoy cuddling with their English bulldog Freddie, watching horror movies, and taking advantage of all the live music Chicago has to offer.