The OLINformer

November 11, 2006

In the news…

Filed under: FYI, Photos — Allison Bahme @ 12:54 pm

On my way into work today, I heard Seahorse Power mentioned in a little blurb on NPR (yes, again, I am a big nerd and I listen to public radio on a regular basis).

“Who or what is Seahorse Power,” you ask?!? It is a very cool local company that one of our alumni works for - his name is Jeff Satwicz and he is a mechanical engineer. He and another Olin student started working on a solar-powered trash compacter with 2 Babson MBA students in their sophomore year; that idea became the “Big Belly” which can be found in several cities in the US and Canada!! I even went out and took pics of one near Copley Square right here in Boston!

Big Belly 1 Big Belly 2 Not my finest photographic moment, but you get the idea

So back to the radio broadcast - it was that Seahorse had been named to Inc.com’s The Green 50 list, “a collection of entrepreneurial companies that are showing what it means to run good businesses, attack the most pressing problems of our time–and make serious cash along the way.” Click here to see the press release from Seahorse Power.

On that note, here’s the dirt on Jeff and a few other alumni:

Jeff Satwicz is a mechanical engineer at Seahorse Power Company, and has led successful efforts to reduce manufacturing costs and improve product performance. He brings experience in product testing for Department of Defense projects on remote vehicles. He spent September 2001 to May 2002 as an Olin Partner at the Franklin W. Olin School of Engineering, helping professors design and test curriculum for Olin College. In addition to rigorous study in math, science, and engineering, the innovative curriculum emphasizes hands-on projects, teamwork, entrepreneurship, and the arts and humanities. Jeff has been working with SPC since May of 2003.

Drew Harry - “Over the summer, I worked with another alumnus (Jon Chambers, my freshman year roommate) to create Thinkature, a visual workspace and communication application on the web. We launched on November 1st at http://www.thinkature.com and have attracted a lot of positive attention. In September, I started as a first year Masters student at the MIT Media Lab; I work in the Sociable Media group. My current project is to develop new ways of expressing online identities through visualization of past online activities.”

Joelle Arnold - “Less than a month after graduation I joined DfR Solutions, an electronics reliability and failure analysis start-up in the Metro DC area. Being employee number 9 has been as great as I ever hoped. Some tasks are familiar: grinding and polishing, microscopy, mechanical testing, writing reports, giving presentations. But I’ve gotten to grow as well: meeting with clients, managing interns, designing investigations, planning and manning an expo booth and even a little bit of product development. Now that I think about it, I got a taste of all those things at Olin, only now I do them all the time. My job features a variety of projects and roles, and it’s the flexibility and diversity of my work that I love about being at a start-up. While yesterday I was supervising vibration testing of a mounted circuit board, today I’m assembling a thermal cycling setup to test solder joints and tomorrow I may be cross sectioning capacitors in search of defects.
I’ll be starting my graduate course work this spring at the University of Maryland - College Park, courtesy of my employer. And if you’re interested, we’re looking to hire employees 12, 13 and 14…”