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Trained as an environmental scientist, Brian Reinsch ’06 is also drawn to engineering by “the logic component,” he says. “You dig deep into the curiosity, then apply logic as you seek out the right answer.”

In his current work, it’s the “digging deep” part that initiates Reinsch’s investigations. His work takes him into California’s largest open-pit mine, which produces nearly half the world’s supply of borates for use in hundreds of products, including a classic: 20 Mule Team Borax.

Reinsch runs quality tests to ensure that the mine and its labs near Death Valley operate at their full potential. Much of the chemistry he uses still connects him to the geochemistry lab of Chapman University Professor Christopher Kim, Ph.D.

Brian’s Story »

How do you know when you’ve found your calling in life? For Katie Lamkin ’16, unmistakable signs flashed early in her Chapman University experience.

“After I took Computer Science 101, I couldn’t stop writing code and I couldn’t stop working on side projects like mobile apps,” she says. “I was scraping the Web for anything under the sun that would allow me to learn more about computer science and engineering.”

These days, Lamkin is still finding insights as a software engineer for Human Longevity Inc., a San Diego-based genomics health intelligence company that gives patients the tools to map longer, healthier lives. “They can customize health care to their bodies,” Lamkin says of clients.

Hers is a working life at the cutting edge of preventive care. “Other (companies) focus on the parts (of genomics) we know the most about today,” she says. “We believe in the bigger picture.”

Katie’s Story »

At home with newborn twins and fresh out of work after her job with a mobile-app startup ended, Lindsey Hughes ’10 (M.S. ’13) decided to crack a book.

Her selection was Cracking the Coding Interview: 189 Programming Questions and Solutionsby Gayle Laakmann McDowell, a software engineer with experience at Google, Microsoft and Apple.

Hughes, a former adjunct instructor in computer science at Chapman University, has succeeded in a field where she is sometimes the only woman in the room. Amazon and Boeing already were on her resume, but there was a key door that hadn’t opened.

“I’d been trying to get into Google for a while,” she says. “This time around, I was on maternity leave and decided to go all out and really study for a month straight.”

Lindsey’s Story »

When Reagan Williams was 12, he didn’t have the music-on-the- move luxury of Spotify or MP3 players. So he did what any other overachieving 12-year-old would do. He built his own FM radio station.

No, really, he did. And suddenly he and his friends in rural Nuevo, Calif., could listen to Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Foo Fighters as they traversed every corner of their unincorporated community.

To this day, at the intersection of ambition and audacity, you’ll find Reagan Williams ’06.

Now the head of solution engineering for Google, Williams works with many of the most innovative companies in the world, developing products that help them get the greatest impact from their Google advertising dollars.

Reagan’s Story »