Tag: Employee Spotlight

“We’re working on things that roll up to tangible benefits for the clean energy sector. Not only am I challenged to grow and continue to learn, but the big picture is that our work is making an impact on more lives than just my own.”

“I grew up on the south shore of Boston and I was actually really shy as a kid. But I loved being outside. I was one of those kids that would spend the whole day outside with my neighbors and siblings just playing. As I grew up, that morphed into having a sport for every season. I played soccer, I skied in the winter and even ski raced a bit in high school, and in the summer I sailed. Eventually I coached sailing. I taught kids how to race after racing myself. Thinking about myself academically as a kid, I was definitely a big ol’ nerd. I would get so stressed out about getting 100 on every assignment.

“I always preferred math and science. When I got to undergrad at UVM, I knew I wanted to go into engineering, but I didn’t know which specific sector. At first I was leaning towards biomedical engineering, but started broadly within mechanical engineering. Throughout that first year or two you have that flexibility to explore what’s interesting to you and that’s when the energy sector started to come to light. I absolutely loved thermodynamics and fluid mechanics. I enjoyed solving complex energy problems in the academic setting. I then extrapolated that to ‘well, we’ve got pretty big energy problems as a society, so that might be a career that makes sense for me.’ So that snowballed into taking renewable energy specific courses in undergrad, as well as a senior design project – which is your whole senior year as an engineering student – working with a local company in Vermont to develop a novel audio based condition monitoring system for wind turbines. My experience in undergrad helped guide me towards the renewable energy industry through my courses and hands-on experiences.

“I graduated back in 2017. I also did a minor in Economics while I was there, which at the time had a lot of people telling me, ‘you’re not going to use that; why are you stressing yourself out with a minor?’ But I was interested in it and it’s come full circle. I now work in a setting where I can apply my problem solving skills from engineering with that economics background on our settlement team.

“I’ve been at REsurety for about three and a half years. I absolutely love working at REsurety. I think we do so many things right as a company, and there are a couple core attributes that make it such an awesome place to work. First, the nature of what we’re working on is super interesting to me. We’re working on things that roll up to tangible benefits for the clean energy sector. Not only am I challenged to grow and continue to learn, but the big picture is that our work is making an impact on more lives than just my own.

“I think the other component that we do well is our team. We have a very diverse team with specialities across different sectors. We bring those diverse backgrounds and specialities into our problem solving strategy, and I think that’s really important. On the more lighthearted side, everyone’s really pleasant to work with and I always look forward to connecting with my colleagues in person.

“The renewable energy industry is still young, and relatively small if you compare it to most other industries. This means our generation has a lot of impact on the direction that we go in as an industry and that’s really exciting to me. I think a lot of the solutions needed to fully transition to a clean energy fueled future are still in development and some may not exist yet. We will be the generation that sees these developments come to fruition. There is always going to be a new problem for us to solve.

“Usually if I’m not working, you can find me in the mountains somewhere. In the winter I’ll be on skis, and in the summer I’ll be running. Usually Bruno, my dog, is with me. I think it goes back to who I was as a kid too – I just like to be outside.

“Beyond generally enjoying the outdoors I also like to race, mostly mountain trail running races. In addition to local trail races, I do Spartan Races, which I started when I was in college. Pre-pandemic, I was traveling a lot for them too and competing mostly at the mountain venues. I have a couple of companies that I work with that support my athletic endeavors. I work with SCOTT Sports on their running team. I also work with UnTapped Maple and Atomic Coffee Roasters. They help support me because it gets expensive to be buying sneakers and running fuel every month. I’ve even convinced a couple of our colleagues to do a Spartan Race with me. We do the Fenway Park Spartan Race each fall as a REsurety team and I enjoy motivating my coworkers to work out to train for that.”

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“I decided to lean back into my love for the environment and found that I could apply my expertise in meteorology to support the fight against climate change.”

“I grew up in a northwest suburb of Chicago called Crystal Lake. As a child, I always had an interest in science, especially natural and physical science like earth science, space, and the environment. I remember in elementary school I was the founder of a “Save the Environment” club with some of the other kids in my neighborhood, so you could say sustainability and climate change have always been important to me. My passion for weather actually grew out of fear initially. When I was a kid I was terrified of thunderstorms, and I remember a small tornado narrowly missed my town when I was maybe five or six years old, and that moment left a deep impact on me by turning that fear into curiosity: I needed to know how tornadoes happen, why the clouds looked the way they did, why the clouds were located where they were. And so from that moment on – and I remember declaring in sixth grade – I was going to be a meteorologist, and I stuck to it.

“I ended up following that interest in weather all the way to Norman, Oklahoma, which is where I went to college to study meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. And there I quite literally followed the weather sometimes by doing a decent amount of storm chasing. I’ve seen some pretty mind blowing tornadoes, which was definitely a highlight of my time there in Oklahoma. Then eventually during college I decided – probably to the relief of my mother – that severe weather and storm chasing was more of a hobby of mine than a career choice. So I decided to lean back into my love for the environment and found that I could apply my expertise in meteorology to support the fight against climate change.

“I pivoted my focus to wind energy, which is what I researched in graduate school at the University of Colorado. My PhD dissertation there consisted of running lots of weather simulations of wind farms and how wind farms interact with the area around them, and that’s what steered my journey into the energy space via meteorology.

“My manager at REsurety, Jennifer Newman, and I have a longer history than just our time at REsurety. When I was an undergrad at the University of Oklahoma, Jennifer was a grad student there, so I kind of knew of her a little bit. When I went to grad school, Jennifer was a postdoc at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, also in Colorado. So there we interacted a little bit more through similar professional development groups and peer mentoring groups, and she eventually took the job at REsurety a couple years later. A few years after that, when I was getting ready to defend my PhD, she posted on LinkedIn that she was looking to hire a research scientist – someone who specializes in wind energy modeling – and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me!’. So I applied and came over to Boston and I loved the people and the culture and the work that we do. It was a great fit and I knew right away that REsurety is really where I wanted to be.

“What excites me about the work that I do is getting to work with tons of really interesting data, and getting to repackage that data into stories of sorts, so interesting visuals or concepts to explain interesting or difficult-to-understand topics, and using those stories to then drive actions that support the clean energy transition. All that is something I’m really passionate about.

“My hobbies tend to sit on opposite ends of the exertion spectrum. I’m either on the couch in some corner of the internet or watching Netflix or reading, or I’m in the gym or on a run or trying Pilates and yoga. Pilates and yoga were definitely hobbies that I picked up in quarantine. I was taking a lot of Zoom gym classes and found this great instructor who’s in California, but her classes were only $5 and she was super fun to do Pilates with. That was one silver lining to the pandemic quarantine period. I also recently got a bike, so I’ve been having fun zipping around Boston on two wheels and exploring the area a little differently than I have in the past.

“I also have a dog. He is aptly named Cloudy, and he’s a Border Collie and Corgi mix who’s very cute and gets to take up a little bit of my time outside of work as well. I’ve had him for six years, and I got him in grad school, so he’s been my little cloud buddy for a while now.”

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“The weather had the fun, sciency things going on, and I always had an interest in it.”

“I was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs. I’m a very proud Chicagoan, always will be. Growing up I always had an interest in science in general, in various forms. I watched a lot of PBS documentaries, Nature, Nova – all that good stuff. I’d also watch the local news, which is probably strange for a child in elementary or middle school, but the two segments that always got my attention were weather and sports. The weather had the fun, sciency things going on, and I always had an interest in it. In high school I took a lot of science classes and I applied to meteorology programs for university. I ended up going to the University of Wisconsin, which was the first one that I visited and I loved it from the start. 

“I didn’t quite have a specialty area within atmospheric sciences or meteorology that I wanted to focus on. In 2013, organizations that might fund a Master’s or PhD student working in a research university weren’t sure what their budget was going to look like due to a government budget sequester. That trickled down to impacting admission decisions at universities for potential Master’s students like myself coming in to do research, and I was one of many students impacted. I took that as an opportunity to look somewhere else and try something different, so I decided to go to the University of Reading in England. I never had a study abroad experience during undergrad and I was excited to live overseas for a while. Reading has an excellent Meteorology department so it’s not like I was trading academic rigor for other life experiences. It was fulfilling in multiple senses. I had a really good time living in the UK, and I made a lot of great friends. I make regular trips back there to visit them and see football matches or explore parts of the UK I haven’t been to.

“I was there for a year and a half and in the final portion of the program I was fortunate enough to study wind energy modeling. I had spent a lot of time learning how the atmosphere works and learning about climate change prior to this. My knowledge of climate change was pretty good by then and it was very clear that this is a problem that affects all of us and we need to be acting swiftly on it. I’m a decent coder, I was not an amazing mathematician, so I was probably not going to write the next great climate model. I thought I could contribute to the solution side of climate change instead. 

“I got my PhD at the University of Vermont, and towards the end of it, I had the opportunity to present at a conference for the American Meteorological Society in 2020. I was able to road trip down from Vermont, and it was there that I actually met quite a number of REsurety employees. At that point I hadn’t heard of REsurety, but by being in more energy-focused sessions within the conference I encountered REsurety folks and attended their talks and did the classic networking thing. You always hear that networking is a skill to develop and you never know when it’ll pay off. I’m not the most gregarious or social person but in this case, it definitely paid off when I joined REsurety two years after that conference. After getting my PhD I ended up taking a job in consulting which was based in New York City. I was there for a little over a year, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. But then I saw that the power markets team at REsurety was hiring, and they were looking for someone to work on northeast markets, which is one of the main focus areas I had. So everything kind of fell into place pretty nicely.

“The electricity system is such a complex and nuanced structure with a lot of intricate moving parts, and it also underpins so much of what makes a modern society, particularly in America. It’s fun to work on something that is so foundational to everyone. Then there’s the whole climate change piece layered on top, and with my background that means that I’m highly motivated and constantly thinking about what our behaviors and decisions in the electricity sector can mean for lessening the impact of climate change. I spent a decade of my life studying this, and having an energy systems and meteorology background makes me feel like a tailor-made fit to be a REsurety employee.

“I watch a lot of sports, primarily the Premier League in the UK and college sports – I’m a big Badgers fan. I also try to spend a decent amount of time outside. With the amount of time I spend staring at my computer either in a personal or professional capacity, I definitely try to balance that out with outdoor things, whether it’s taking a walk around the neighborhood, going for a hike, or taking a day trip somewhere. I’m hoping to get back into golf next year. I played from time to time in high school, and I like following professional golf too. I also love visiting breweries and trying out new beer. When I lived in Vermont I went to every single brewery in the state over the course of about two years, which was about 55 in total.”

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“Where I grew up in India was a huge inspiration to me and shaped who I am today. So being able to incorporate parts of that in my music and my creative process is rewarding.”

“I grew up all over the place. I was born in Pennsylvania, but I only lived there for two or three years before moving to New York. Then we moved to Singapore for a year. Then back to New York and eventually we moved to New Delhi, where I did middle school and high school. It was definitely a lot of different cultures and a little bit of culture shock here and there. 

“When I first moved to India, I didn’t grasp how cool the experience was. I had to learn the language from scratch. I had to start at a preschool level because I didn’t know anything. After two or three years, I became fluent in Hindi though, which was pretty impressive, I didn’t think I’d be able to do that.

“For a long time, I really had no idea what I wanted to do. When I was in high school, I took a couple of broad business classes that gave a feel for each field within business. Afterwards, I decided that business would be the best fit. And within those classes, I was pretty good at marketing. I also enjoyed the marketing side the most. 

“I always knew that I wanted to come back to the U.S. for college. I had done 8 years in India, it was time for a change. I went into college as a marketing major. After taking a few classes, I knew that that was what I wanted to pursue.

“I like the connecting with people aspect, because you really have to understand what a person is thinking or what a person is looking for. That human touch in marketing is something that you don’t often find in other parts of business. And there’s so many different ways of targeting people and reaching people. People think and behave in so many different ways. There’s not just one blanket method of targeting or hitting on somebody’s interest. 

“I also really enjoy music. I make music in my free time. It’s mostly hip hop and rap tracks. It’s cool to see how my music has evolved. It started out as just a hobby with my college roommate and it’s now grown to where we’re putting on local shows, meeting new artists from the area, and growing our network in the music space as well. 

“Living in India definitely shaped my taste in music. I actually wrote a whole song about the city that I used to live in. Where I grew up in India was a huge inspiration to me and shaped who I am today. So being able to incorporate parts of that in my music and my creative process is rewarding.

“I just graduated from Northeastern University about two and a half months ago. The clean energy field was always something that I was around growing up, because my dad worked in energy companies. It was never a situation where I was forcing myself to pursue energy. It was just if an opportunity to work in energy came up, I’d definitely consider it. It just so happened to work out that way with REsurety. 

“I’m looking forward to growing and developing more as a marketer in this new role. It already feels like the work I’m doing is very meaningful and making an impact on the organization. I’m also excited for the amount of growth potential that the energy field has to offer. I think the future is looking really bright for it and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

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