STEM
Science, Technology, Engineering & Math
Victoria Knight-Connoni
Director, Microbial Evaluation, Indigo Agriculture
Victoria is a Director in the discovery group at Indigo Agriculture. She earned a Bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of Rhode Island and a Ph.D. in microbiology from University of New Hampshire. After graduate school she made the transition to industry and became fascinated with the potential of bacteria found in the soil to produce bioactive compounds such as antibiotics and anti-fungal agents.
In her current role Victoria works with a discovery team that includes many collaborators from around the world to access novel bacteria and fungi from the plant microbiome. These microorganisms have evolved in conjunction with plants over millions of years to optimize their health and maximize their productivity. Victoria and her colleagues are working to identify microbes that help plants thrive under drought or nutrient poor environments.
David Grosjean
Senior Staff Engineer, Butterfly Network
David is a failure analysis engineer at Butterfly Network, a company that makes handheld ultrasound devices for whole body scanning. He received a Bachelor’s degree in applied math and physics at Yale College, then a PhD in engineering physics at the University of Virginia. After that, he did his post-doctoral training at NEC in Japan. Since then, he’s worked at Analog Devices, Qualcomm, and now Butterfly, all in yield enhancement and failure analysis roles on MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) as a manager and individual contributor.
In all his jobs in industry, figuring out why and how things don’t work has been central. Designers create new things, and he figures out why they don’t work and helps to fix them. It is a role that requires physics, electrical engineering, chemistry, computer science, statistics, curiosity, and flexibility. There is a lot of working on different pieces of equipment (so not always at a desk or in meetings) and with people from all over the organization, as well as (occasionally angry) customers. It's rarely dull, and there's always something new to learn.
Beth Martino
Biomedical and Robotics Engineer, BioSurfaces, Inc.
Ms. Martino is a manufacturing engineer at BioSurfaces, Inc. BioSurfaces is a medical device research company that uses a process called electrospinning to create implantable medical devices. Currently, Ms. Martino is leading a project to develop equipment used to produce access grafts for hemodialysis. Ms. Martino earned Bachelor’s degrees in both Biomedical Engineering and Robotics Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic institute and has experience with device design, software development, electronics and biomedical applications. Ms. Martino has also worked as an Animal Care Technician at Taconic Biosciences.