December 7, 2012 | Eli Freund - School of Engineering

Alumni Notes

What are your UConn Engineering friends up to these days? Read what's new in the careers of Thomas Benjamin, Shar Govindan, Jason Harmon and Chris Xue. Then share your career news with us, too!

Stay in touch with fellow UConn engineering alumni. Visit our Engineering alumni website  or our LinkedIn alumni page and fill us in on your latest activities or learn what your college friends are doing nowadays!  Some recent alumni news follows:

Thomas G. Benjamin (B.S., M.S. Chemical Engineering ‘71, ‘76) is a member of the Catalysis and Energy Conversion Group at Argonne National Laboratory, where he serves as a Technical Advisor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fuel Cell Technology in the areas of technical analysis, program review, and program planning. Thomas also serves on the USCAR Fuel Cell Tech Team focusing on durability protocols and bipolar plates. He received his MBA from the University of Chicago.

Shar Govindan (M.S. Environmental Engineering, ‘03), Director of Social Learning for Bentley Systems, Inc. and a contributing author to the book “Social BOOM!” (2011) has been invited to speak at The Social Media Strategies Summit 2013 in Las Vegas. The summit is among the world’s largest social media conferences, and Shar is joined by speakers from NCAA, Amex, Coca Cola, CNN, PayPal and other top companies. Shar’s wife, Rekha Rangarajan, is also a UConn graduate (Ph.D.  Biochemistry, ’07).

The winner of last month’s football ticket giveaway was alumnus and Plainville resident Jason Harmon (B.S.E. Mechanical Engineering, ’98).  While he enjoyed the game, which pitted the Huskies against the Cincinnati Bearcats, Jason reports that he had “hoped for a different outcome.”  Jason is currently a lead quality engineer at GE Industrial Solutions in Plainville, CT, where he has worked for 14 years.

Xingjian (Chris) Xue (Ph.D., Mechanical Engineering, ‘07) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of South Carolina. He is associated with the HeteroFoaM Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center established by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Basic Energy Sciences.  Dr. Xue’s research interests include materials for electrochemical energy conversion and storage, reliability and durability of functional and structural materials, transport phenomena and electrochemical kinetics. As a graduate student at UConn, Dr. Xue was advised by Dr. Jiong Tang of Mechanical Engineering.