Meet the Siebel Scholars

Sean HarringtonStanford University, Business, Class of 2007

Sean Harrington helps electric and gas utility companies motivate their customers to reduce energy usage and carbon emissions as Director of Client Solutions in the San Francisco office of Arlington, Virginia-based OPOWER.

OPOWER offers a suite of products that allow utilities to provide actionable insights to customers beyond standard energy bill usage data. It combines information from the utility companies – like meter and account data – with third-party statistics like weather and demographics. The result is a customized report showing comparisons to similar homes or businesses, highly targeted what-if scenarios, usage trends, and other detailed insights to drive reductions in energy usage. As of early December 2010, OPOWER has saved over $21 million on energy bills and abated over 272 million tons of CO2, according to its website.

Sean joined OPOWER as its first West Coast employee and heads up the small but growing team in San Francisco tasked with bringing on new utility customers. Currently, OPOWER boasts eight of the ten largest utilities in the United States as clients.

Outside of the office, when he’s not teaching his toddler French or caring for his infant daughter, Sean is probably running. He’s an ultra runner, going extreme distances. He and his wife were part of a 20-person relay team that ran non-stop around the world, covering 15,200 miles and 16 countries in 95 days. Last year, he visited the Grand Canyon to run from the South to the North Rim and back in 14 hours, covering 48 miles and 10,000 feet of elevation gain and loss.

In addition to his Master’s degree in Business Administration from Stanford University, Sean holds a Bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Calgary.

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Allison BarmannNorthwestern University, Business, Class of 2004

For the past three years, Allison Barmann has been directing the Itasca Project for McKinsey & Company, where she works with local CEOs and civic leaders to improve the regional competitiveness and quality of life in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region.

As a Project Manager, she helps this virtual organization tackle education, job growth, infrastructure, and other civic issues to directly impact their local community. For example, to improve the quality of education for Minneapolis public schools, they developed a strategic plan for the district, and are now offering support and guidance to the schools as they implement the plan.

Managing the Itasca Project allows Alli to both embrace her interest in the social sector as well as reduce the travel required of a typical consultant – giving her more time to focus on her 3-year-old twins and infant child.

Alli received a Bachelor’s of Science from MIT, and started her career as an engineer at 3M. However, she wanted a smaller, entrepreneurial environment, so she joined a startup in San Francisco, where she found her interest in business and marketing. To further develop her business skills, she earned her MBA at Kellogg.

Her family keeps her busy, but she’s looking forward to getting back on her bicycle for endurance rides. After business school, she and her husband rode on a 1200-mile, 3-week trip from the coast of Oregon to Montana following the Lewis & Clark trail. While they’re not planning yet another long journey, they participate in an annual 150-mile, 2-day trip to support multiple sclerosis research.

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Mingming FanTsinghua University, Computer Science, Class of 2011

Mingming Fan is passionate about merging information technology into our daily lives. His graduate research at Tsinghua University focuses on human-computer interaction through sensors, such as the accelerometer in a cell phone that allows you to play a racing game by tilting the phone back and forth to control the car.

But what if this same technology could be used to sense an elderly patient slipping and falling in his home, and immediately call his doctor for help? As mobile phones become more ubiquitous, Mingming wants to make our daily lives easier through smart technologies. His research seeks to shield the sensors from background interference (such as noise or irrelevant movements), and find ways to focus it on only the relevant inputs. For example, is the noise coming from the user or a television in the background? Is the person slipping, or just picking up an object from the floor?

Mingming is also researching large-scale touch-screen interactions. Multi-touch tables allow people to collaborate by touching the table surface at the same time. For example, a team could design a website by having multiple people move modules around on the same surface. Currently, these devices are restricted by size, so Mingming’s group is combining several surfaces into one large table to better facilitate team collaboration.

After completing his Master’s degree in Computer Science, Mingming hopes to pursue a Ph.D. program in the United States to continue his research in human-computer interaction. Driven by the motto “think big, do small,” he works on small, focused projects that will have a big impact. His goal is to move research work out of the lab into technology solutions that significantly improve our daily lives.

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Karla BrammerUniversity of California, San Diego, Bioengineering, Class of 2011

Karla Brammer ran her fourth marathon this year, the Chicago Marathon, and she’s well acquainted with the injuries that can result.

To help orthopedics patients regain mobility faster, Karla is redesigning the surface of bone implants, looking at their nanostructures to enhance their integration into the body and accelerate bone growth. Currently, titanium implants – like those used in hip replacements – have a layer of titanium oxide (TiO₂) on the surface which allows the implant and bone to bond better than most other metals.

Karla’s research focuses on improving the topographic structure of this layer to enhance the “osseo-integration” properties (where implants attach directly to the bone), advance healing, and boost implant performance. Others in her field have chosen to incorporate bone mineral-based coatings, attempting to improve integration, however foreign layers tend to delaminate and cause implant failure. By reconstructing the surface of the titanium implant rather than adding a foreign layer, Karla is able to gain precise control on the nanolevel and use microscopic clues to see how the bone will react to the implant. With the resultant accelerated bone growth Karla hopes to obtain, patients would recover from surgery much more quickly and could begin walking after one month, one-third the time it takes currently.

After she completes her Ph.D. in Bioengineering at UC San Diego, Karla hopes to join a local medical device company. She’s fascinated by nanotechnology, also applying her materials science and nanogeometry approach to stem cell therapies, but prefers to be “on the hook” to build actual products for the market.

Karla received her Bachelor’s degree in Materials Science and Engineering from Ohio State University. Born and raised in Ohio, she is a passionate Buckeyes fan and remains actively involved in her alumni association.

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Tony LobayUniversity of California, Berkeley, Computer Science, Class of 2003

On most days you can find Tony Lobay working at pictr.us, a service for sharing photos at events. Originally a graphics and games programmer, Tony has shifted over to building web applications. His latest endeavor, pictr.us, is a photo sharing service and app engine for events like weddings and conferences.

At a wedding, for example, pictr.us replaces disposable cameras out on the tables and lets guests submit photos using either cell phone or digital cameras. To encourage participation, pictr.us requires no login or authentication – all guests can submit and comment, whether they have a flip phone or the latest iPhone. The technology behind pictr.us allows use of MMS/text messaging to submit photos in concert with a non-installed mobile browser application. pictr.us provides a short-lived, micro social network that all attendees of an event can enjoy. This means that on Saturday nights, Tony is often hanging out in a DJ booth screening photos that are going up over a club’s AV system as he and his co-founder are watching a beta test.

Before he’d ever programmed a line of code, Tony was a pre-med student at UC Berkeley. He decided to take an intro to computer science course on a whim. Intrigued by programming and inspired by cutting-edge new graphics in Pixar animated movies (as well as low-tech animations in the South Park TV series), Tony switched his major to computer science. He later pursued a graduate degree in computer graphics at UC Berkeley. After graduation, Tony started at Tippett Studio, working with character animators to create everything from monsters to small, fuzzy animals for Disney in their visual effects department – including helping to develop characters for The Spiderwick Chronicles, Enchanted, and Beverly Hills Chihuahua. His passion for building characters led to a position two years later at Havok, where he worked on the behavior and animation of characters. After a year, Tony left to start his own gaming company, 3d Dog Studios.

The head-first dive into gaming was a thrilling yet humbling experience with far more than just programming and graphics – it was a crash course in game design, marketing, and management of artists. His recent games include Tile Trip, available on the Xbox Live Indie market, and Gopher Go Boom!, on sale in the iTunes App Store. Earlier in the year, he produced a three-dimensional simulation for The Weather Channel: www.intothetornado.com. Despite his primary commitment to pictr.us, 3d Dog Studios is working away on another physics-based game for the iPhone, due out in early January.

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Get to know our featured Scholars. Click the images to learn more.

Katherine Lin

Education & Work

School

MIT CS

Class

2011

Area of Study

Computer Science

Scholar Degree

M.Eng.

Professional Interests & Experience

Bio

Katherine Lin is currently a graduate student in the EECS department at MIT, working with Professor Vincent Chan. Her research focuses on optimizing optical network topology to minimize power consumption.
Katherine has earned B.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT and Management Science at the Sloan School of Management. During her undergraduate years, Katherine was vice president of the Beta Theta Chapter of Eta Kappa Nu and a member of Tau Beta Pi. She also served as vice president of the MIT Student Ambassadors, a group of student volunteers who are dedicated liaisons between current MIT students, alumni, and prospective students. Her previous work experience include internships at Knight Equity Markets as a quantitative strategist in their electronic trading group, Allston Trading as an algorithmic trading intern, and Morgan Stanley as a summer analyst in both its Global Capital Markets convertibles group and in the Technology division. In her spare time, Katherine plays the piano, experiments with Chinese gourmet cooking, and tutors high school students.