Alumni Dinner Hits Restart

After two years of missed dinners, graduates of the TCoE, beloved donors, and faculty were eager to return to the table in October for an Alumni Dinner that had been on pause due to the pandemic.

After the rush of pleasure at seeing one another in person again and catching up on any news that had been in storage, three major awards added even more sparkle to the conversation.

Ann Cox ’83 received the Distinguished Lifetime Alumni Award. A project manager for Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and with degrees in civil and structural engineering and a P.E. license in mechanical engineering, Cox has spent more than 30 years working in the aerospace industry. She played a critical role in missions to the moon and Mars as well as space shuttle missions and credits her professors at the University of New Haven for helping to launch her phenomenal career.

“The professors brought such varying backgrounds,” she recalled. They were people who had their own companies on the side, had 30 years’ experience building things, and could share what worked and what didn’t.”

When, at one point in her career, she was hired by Rockwell Industries — a major manufacturing conglomerate involved, at the time, in the aircraft and space industries — it was because of its interest in her structural and stress-analysis work, the kind of work she had performed at the University as a civil engineering major.

“Early on at Rockwell, the structural analysis classes and the modeling I had done at the University really helped,” declared Cox. “Within three years, I got a lead engineer position. I was a civil engineer from the University of New Haven among MIT and Stanford grads.”

The Outstanding Young Alumni Award, which honors alumni who have graduated within the past 10 years and are under 35 years of age, went to Jordy Eduardo Padilla-Solis ’15.

A senior engineer for Thornton Tomasetti in New York City, his focus is bridge design and rehabilitation. Padilla-Solis developed a passion for bridges during an internship for a local construction company that helped build New Haven’s Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge — also known as the “Q” bridge because it spans the Quinnipiac River. It was then that he realized the tremendous impact bridges have on communities. “I chose civil engineering because I wanted to be part of a team that could help transform cities,” he said.

At Thornton Tomasetti, Padilla-Solis is currently immersed in work involving the Queensboro Bridge (also known as the 59th Street Bridge, made famous by the Simon and Garfunkel song).

Over the past several years, he has been using a specialized concrete for bridge rehabilitation known as Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC) and is pitching its various applications to several agencies and the Federal Highway Administration. UHPC’s matrix is extremely dense, is self-compacting, and can eliminate the need for reinforcing steel in some applications. Its low permeability prevents the absorption of harmful materials such as chlorides, so it also affords superior durability.

Finally, the Exemplary Partner Award went to the Tagliatela family, whose unstinting support of the College has helped make it what it is today.

Board of Governors member Stephen Tagliatela ’13 Hon, co-owner of Saybrook Point Resort and Marina in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and co-owner of Franklin Construction LLC in New Haven, with family members Louis Tagliatela Jr. ’17 and Patricia Tagliatela, says that seeing the work and achievements of students and graduates of the TCoE “strengthens our partnership with the University, particularly with the College of Engineering. It’s like reinvesting in our community, and we want to give back to the community that has treated us so well.”

The family has recently established the Tagliatela Family Endowed Chair in Civil Engineering, the Tagliatela Family Endowed Scholarship in Civil Engineering, and the Tagliatela Family Civil Engineering Laboratory. Said Louis Tagliatela, “It’s amazing when you see the display of senior projects and meet the students and see what they’ve accomplished. The intern program that the students have is also so important, especially with Connecticut companies,” he adds. “We want to keep that talent and those skills in Connecticut.”

This story appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of TCoE Trends, the official newsletter of the Tagliatela College of Engineering. Click here to read more from TCoE Trends.