Areas to Support

“It’s nice to be a part of something that helps change the world.”

Tommy Cecil ’06 and his wife, Katy, are parents to 14-month-old twins and in the thick of the juggle that comes with nurturing successful careers in law and medicine while taking care of young ones at home.

However, there are some deep-rooted habits that fewer hours of sleep haven’t been able to shake, including making an annual gift to Olin.

“Each year Katy and I sit down and decide what our philanthropic priorities are going to be,” says Tommy, who is a longtime Olin donor. “We have adopted Olin as one of our primary philanthropic interests—it’s nice to have that as part of our identity.”

By now, giving back to Olin is a “reflexive habit,” says Tommy. “We believe in the college and want it to do well.

Beverly Wyse P’15 has served on Olin’s Board of Trustees for eight years, gradually expanding her leadership role on the Board over time.

First, in 2019, Wyse served as chair of the presidential search committee that selected Gilda A. Barabino as Olin’s second president. “She is a tireless, passionate woman who has the capacity, the network, and the brilliance to shape the world and we are so fortunate to have her,” says Wyse, whose enthusiasm for Olin’s future under President Barabino’s leadership is evident.

In October 2021, Wyse took over as chair of the Board of Trustees. It is work Wyse enjoys and finds meaningful at this stage of her life after a long career as an executive at Boeing. “The work with and for the college gives so much to me, in terms of what I am looking for at this stage of life, including an inspiring, impactful mission with fascinating, dedicated people who help me on my personal journey of wanting to be a lifelong learner.”

Wyse’s son, Elliott, graduated from Olin in 2015. “Elliott graduated with a portfolio of design projects, had learned to work in teams and understand, through experience, how to best apply his strengths. He made lifelong friends, both men and women, who are some of his closest friends today, who share his values… The college years are so formative, and his experience was powerful for him, beyond the excellent and thought-provoking education.”

Furthering the unique experience offered by an Olin education is one of the reasons Bev and her husband, Steve, have been donating to Olin for more than 10 years, most recently making an impactful and multiyear gift to the Presidential Strategic Initiatives Fund.

“Simply put, we believe in the mission. Gilda’s mission on equity has taken our support for Olin to a new level, in that we are also passionate about equity and equality. Without a substantial improvement in addressing equity, I believe our society will continue to deteriorate in terms of the divisiveness that is so prevalent. The new mission will focus not only on the students’ understanding of equity in the context of their interactions on campus, but also on how engineering plays a role in making the world more, or less, equitable. This is a mission that we care very much about, and you must contribute to the things you care about.”

Despite retiring from Boeing, Wyse has a full schedule. She has joined several boards and thoroughly enjoys the work, but it is her family that is her focus. If she ever forgets that, she has the word for family in Welsh, “teulu,” tattooed on her arm.

Wyse has a large, extended circle beginning with husband Steve, sons Evan and Elliott, daughters-in-law Emily and Tian, and one-year-old grandson Owen. She also has six siblings, and she recently found out through 23andMe and Ancestry that her family is bigger than she thought and includes a newly found sister, Lorinda, and a new niece, JeanTu.

Despite the upheaval brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, the past few years have been busy ones for Diana Dabby, professor of electrical engineering and music.

Diana has authored a new patent and received $300,000 in funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for her musical variations project, CantoVario.

CantoVario involves research at the interface of musical variation, chaos science, signal processing, and acoustics. With three active projects in the works—an Audio Variation Engine, a MIDI Variation Engine, and a Chaos+Music Science Museum Exhibit prototype—Diana has broad ambitions to change the way musicians and nonmusicians listen to, interact with, and create music, both on- and offline.

Her work with musical variation has also infused her artistic process. She composed “Parallel Lives, Distant Mirrors” to explore parallel universes in Iraq and America. The work offers audiences a new kind of concert experience: a variation concert where seat location determines which variation they hear.

To support the Olin Conductorless Orchestra, she authored “The Engineers Orchestra: a conductorless orchestra for developing 21st century professional skills.” It received a Best Paper Award as part of the ASEE 2021 Distinguished Lecture Series. The paper advances an argument for establishing conductorless orchestras at engineering schools.

As the college eased out of COVID restrictions, Diana had to figure out how to introduce live music back into the Olin community.

“Preparing for live music again at Olin turned out to be an odyssey,” she said. As an example, the Wired Ensemble course involves string, wind, brass, percussion, and vocal ensembles rehearsing and performing throughout the semester. Considerations of PPE, air exchanges, and safe rehearsal/performance practices pervaded the academic year. For OCO auditions, she ended up reserving five separate rooms, then timing warmup and audition slots in coordination with Olin’s air exchanges in the MAC so that enough time elapsed between wind/brass players and other players. “It was like solving a giant puzzle!” she says. It was well worth it, though, to see friends, family, and colleagues enjoying live music on campus once again.

For years, Olin has been Diana’s professional as well as creative home. She describes the college as a “remarkable community of people, all working together under a creative umbrella that resonates and delivers.”

Every year, she has committed to giving back by donating to the Olin Fund.

“I believe in Olin’s mission, Engineering for Everyone. I’m also grateful for the long rope Olin has given me to create in all facets of my intellectual and artistic life, whether engaged in teaching, research, or composing a new work,” she says. “Simply stated, at Olin, I find creativity in all I do, often coupled with the freedom to take risks. This is a community that’s resonant with the future, yet it starts with us in the here and now. It just feels natural to give back to the institution that’s given us so much.”

Catherine Chen and Feng Pan, parents of Emma Pan ’21, live just 15 minutes from campus, but Catherine remembers despite the family’s proximity to campus, Emma didn’t come home until the Thanksgiving break.

When she finally did come home for a visit, Emma wasn’t alone. Beginning that first fall and continuing throughout the pandemic, Emma always had a group of Oliners in tow. “Olin feels like a big family; it feels like home,” says Catherine.

Emma was an art student who also happened to excel in math in high school, and her parents were surprised to see her end up at an engineering school. But the Olin environment “gave her the power to do this kind of engineering program and gave her the opportunity to take on leadership roles,” says Feng. “This was the right school for her.”

Catherine and Feng appreciate the community of creative-minded students at Olin—especially the way they can see and identify opportunities to create things that benefit society.

Olin’s style is so unique, added Feng. “It brings real-world projects to the classroom. Once students graduate, they can easily solve many kinds of problems.” Emma never had difficulty finding an internship or summer fellowship, said Catherine, something they were impressed by and incredibly proud of. Their daughter was able to be selective in selecting a fellowship because she was so well prepared.

Catherine and Feng continue to give back to Olin’s UROP and Innovation Funds because Emma benefited from them so deeply as a student.

“We want to continue to support these bright minds financially and give them opportunities to bring their thoughts to life,” says Feng. “College is a time for kids to grow, and they need support to test their ideas. If even one of their ideas becomes a benefit for society, then that’s worth it to us.”

I’ve always been excited about engineering and science, and I loved to tinker with things that my parents would bring home from work,” says Andy Barry ’10. “When I learned about Olin, I was really sold on the project-based learning atmosphere, and I’ve been interested in that kind of work ever since.”

After graduating from Olin with a degree in electrical and computer engineering, Barry went directly into a Ph.D. program at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He entered the world of robotics research and began working on autonomous drones—specifically fixed-wing UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles).

After earning his Ph.D., Barry began working at Boston Dynamics, where he worked for five years on the now well-known Spot, a quadruped robot. Barry’s work focused on increasing functionality in the robot’s arm; he even became “YouTube famous” when a viral video of Spot featured him in the background.

After seeing Spot through the product life cycle, Barry started considering what he wanted to do next. An avid reader of academic papers, he realized that some of the machine learning techniques he’d been using at Boston Dynamics were starting to take off in the field of biology—a class that Barry had taken and loved in his time at Olin.

Without any connections in the field, Barry began sending out applications. He found a good fit at the Broad Institute in Ben Deverman’s lab, where he is now a machine learning scientist working on gene therapy aimed at safely and effectively treating patients with severe genetic conditions.

“It’s been a wild ride, going from someone who was pretty senior in an industry to being kind of at the bottom again and learning how to do new things,” says Barry. “But this is a very ‘Olin’ thing to do—jumping in and figuring out how to teach yourself to do something you’ve never done before.”

Barry continues to give back to Olin each year to ensure other students have the opportunity to learn these same lifelong lessons.

Barry was a young professional still early in his career when Olin’s full-tuition scholarship became a half-tuition scholarship for students. For Barry, the opportunity to graduate from college debt-free was “the chance of a lifetime.” That is why he supports the Alumni Merit Scholarship Fund each year.

Olin’s new vision of Engineering for Everyone resonates with Barry and his classmates. When supporting the AMSF, he thinks of families that can’t afford to send their kids to school; students who can’t afford to work for non-profits; students who want to accept jobs that focus on engineering for people who don’t have similar resources.

“Graduating from Olin with no debt offered my classmates and me a lot of flexibility,” says Barry. “We were very fortunate. Making a gift that can help that happen for other people is meaningful to me.”

“Now is the time to pay back some of the money Olin spent educating me.”

For Zack Davenport ’20, an Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship (ADE) capstone project in the Mississippi Delta launched his desire to use education to bring good into the world.

In the summer of 2018, Davenport helped convey to students how engineers think—a style of problem-solving that was new to these high schoolers, many of whom had never seen a 3D printer or used a soldering tool before.

While he was on location, Davenport met the founder of Lobaki Inc., located in nearby Jackson, which uses immersive VR technology to make education more accessible and engaging. He did a side project for them that summer, and that innovative work for Lobaki led to an invitation for more projects the following summer, which led to a job offer after Davenport graduated in 2020.

“I felt really lucky because they were one of the few companies hiring during the pandemic,” said Davenport. “It’s the perfect work for me because I get to do all of the super fun design stuff that I grew so passionate about in college, but in VR I’m not limited by the laws of physics as much and I can create whatever I want.”

Today, Davenport is Lobaki’s manager of education and special projects, an important role that has him running the company’s VR content development for educational experiences used in schools across the state of Mississippi.

“A lot of what I learned at Olin was harnessing my passion for creativity and bringing my ideas to life by designing things through ME,” said Davenport. “Olin teaches you how to dive into a problem or discipline that you’ve never had experience with, and how to be in that space of learning new things and growing as a person and a professional. This kind of problem-solving

mindset can get you far in life, no matter what your discipline is.”

“I gained so much from my Olin experience, and even since graduating, I’ve felt like I’m still a part of the community,” said Davenport. “Donating to Olin not only makes me feel connected to the community, but also helps ensure that the College is able to give to future students what it gave to me.”

Susan and Chris Murphy, both members of Olin’s first graduating Class of 2006, have maintained a longstanding commitment to the College over the years along with their peers.

“Alongside all of our classmates in the class of ’06, we personally benefited greatly from the merit-based tuition scholarship, in a manner that was unique to Olin,” says Susan.

Since the inception of the Alumni Merit Scholarship Fund, the Murphys have split their donation between the AMSF and the Olin Fund each year. “Our goals are to both support the current great work being done at Olin via the Olin Fund, and to also support the long-term goal of reviving a full-tuition merit scholarship for all students via the AMSF.”

Susan and Chris live near Boston with their children and enjoy connecting with other alumni families in the area. After graduating from Olin, Chris pursued a Ph.D. focused on subsea robotics at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI). He enjoys building subsea systems and working on how to sense and communicate underwater using acoustics. “I enjoy the mix of engineering, math and science required to work in such a unique domain,” he says.

Susan recently joined Boston University as the executive director for a new research initiative around sustainable finance after spending the last 12 years in the consulting industry. Her new role in BU’s Impact Measurement and Assessment Program is to lead academic research projects that help the finance industry understand how they can incorporate environmental and social metrics into their corporate assessments.

“The Olin community has always inspired me to produce high quality work that can make a positive difference, and it continues to do so,” says Susan. “It’s a community full of people that take on hard interdisciplinary challenges, set high expectations for each other on what can be achieved, and then support each other to make such achievements reality.”

“Olin gave us so much—financially via the merit scholarship, educationally, and personally via the network of amazing people that we now know well. We want to ‘pay-it-forward’ and ensure others can likewise have such great experiences.

Emily Tow joined the Olin faculty in 2019 after earning her doctorate at MIT in Mechanical Engineering. This year she is teaching Quantitative Engineering Analysis (QEA) and Transport Phenomena. She also leads the Clare Boothe Luce Program at Olin, a research program for women students.

It wasn’t an accident that Tow chose Olin for her first teaching position. Instead, it was a mission-driven decision. “I believe in changing engineering education in support of changing the world.”

At Olin, Tow’s passion for thermal science, teaching and sustainability drive her work. Her lab’s current research focuses on improving energy efficiency in water reuse, and she is working with four students to develop a low-energy batch reverse osmosis system for increasing water recovery from contaminated agricultural runoff.

Tow donates to Olin, with emphasis on the Aaron Hoover Fund, because she wants to be part of an effort to meet the full financial need for women students of color.