Award-winning teachers, keynote speakers and karaoke singers! UConn engineers are pretty much everywhere in the news this week.

UConn Alum Dr. Lin For Teaching

UConn Engineering alum, Dr. Lin Lin, recently made the news when she received the System-wide Teaching Award for all 12 community colleges in the state. Lin is the assistant professor and coordinator of the Computer Engineering Technology program and the Engineering Science Program at Middlesex Community College. She earned her degree in Electrical Engineering from UConn. From the New Haven Register:

Lin is also an award-winning engineer, researcher and author. Prior to joining the Community College system, she worked as a senior engineer at the United Technologies Research Center.

While there, she helped design and develop the Next Generation Digital Video and other leading-edge projects, and co-authored six patents. Her writing and research has appeared in professional and technical publications on subjects including multi-target tracking. She earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Connecticut. 

Garofano keynote speaker at SCSU conference

Connecticut State University’s Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference featured Jacquelynn Garofano, a UConn Engineering alum, as its keynote speaker. She’s now a research scientist at United Technologies Research Center.

From the Norwalk Hour:

The program included oral presentations, poster presentations, an art crawl in Earl Hall, a panel discussion on careers from Southern alumni, and dramatic scenes played out by students who recently competed at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.

Keynote speakers were Jacquelynn Garofano, an alumna who is now a research scientist at United Technologies Research Center, and Dave Paulson, an alumnus who is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Temple University.

Garofano earned a B.S. degree in physics from Southern in 2006. She went on to earn an M.S. degree and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Connecticut.

Those musical engineers…

And who says engineers can’t sing? Certainly not Alex Surprenant, currently an engineering student here at UConn, who was featured in the Hartford Courant’s look at the Connecticut karaoke scene. From the article:

Because [Jessica] Berube is a trained opera singer with a powerful soprano voice, she has felt pressure to give amazing performances of pop songs that don’t necessarily fit her vocal style.

“My insecurity stemmed from feeling like the expectations would be higher for me even though there are no Italian arias offered in karaoke.”

But when she and her boyfriend, Alex Surprenant, sang Evanescence’s “Wake Me Up Inside,” one had to wonder what she ever worried about.

Surprenant, who studies engineering at UConn, has performed in choirs as a child and enjoys being a part of the karaoke scene.