Women In Power

Professional wetland scientist Colleen Puzas was drawn to iCons' interdisciplinary, team-based approach. Describing it as "creative, knowledge-fostering, and hands-on," Puzas says iCons "stimulates students toward action." After graduation, Puzas worked as a consultant, mapping natural resource features and helping to permit large-scale solar energy facilities. Currently, she works as an environmental planner for POWER Engineers, where she also serves as liaison to the Boston Environmental Division Employee Engagement Committee and is an active member of POWER Women’s Network.

For Deanna Kenyon, iCons "fostered a spirit of unapologetic, bold risk-taking" that has informed how she approaches both professional and personal spaces. "The intersection of being a woman in STEM, let alone an LGBTQ+ woman in STEM was overwhelming," remembers Kenyon, who didn't see members of the LGBTQ+ community represented in her field. Kenyon is now co-chair of the Pride employee resource group at Johnson Matthey, a global leader in sustainable technologies. She credits iCons with empowering her to be her true self. Professionally, Kenyon says she "fell naturally into this trail-blazer role," joining the company's leadership program and completing rotations in Philadelphia, Savannah, Boston, and London.

As a first-year student, Dylan Masi was excited to hear about the iCons program's outside-the-box learning methods. "iCons had a greater emphasis on research and exploration than I got in my traditional engineering classes," recalls Masi, who established her career in the utility-scale renewable energy development industry. "I love knowing that I've made a quantifiable impact by helping put hundreds of megawatts of clean energy on the U.S. electric grid," Masi says. She flourishes in her current role as a preconstruction manager for Scout Clean Energy—where she is required to work with people focused on permitting, law, environment, and real estate—in part because iCons prepared her to work on cross-functional teams made up of people with different backgrounds and expertise. 

After hearing Professor Auerbach's presentation on iCons during a weekend visit, Katharine Greco was inspired to enroll as a UMass Amherst student. She started in the program right away and says iCons supported her by providing opportunities to apply traditional classroom learning to the problems she cared about most: energy and climate change. "I also learned relevant skills, such as communication and critical thinking, that allowed me to excel in core classes," she says. Greco went on to earn a PhD in chemical engineering at MIT. She currently supports program development for funding clean energy technologies as a fellow at the Advanced Research Projects Agency at the U.S. Department of Energy.

"iCons was probably the most stable, structured opportunity that I pursued in college," says Marinna Teixeira. "I felt like I was part of a tight-knit community of like-minded individuals who were really passionate about what they were doing," she says and remembers feeling "invigorated and inspired" every time she left the classroom. After graduation, she landed a job at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center's innovation and industry support division. Currently, she works as director of programs to bridge the gap between startups and large, established corporations at Greentown Labs, North America's largest climatetech incubator.