The Engineering Communication Podcast

In the latest episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast I talk with Marie Paretti, Virginia Tech Engineering Education Professor, who brings a rare blend of expertise with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, an M.A. in English, both from Virginia Tech, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She explains how her dual background shapes her view of communication and engineering as parallel systems—each rooted in inputs, processes, and outputs—and also shares what effective interdisciplinary work really requires. Marie also accounts for how she grounds her teaching in workplace practicality by understanding what your audience actually needs (which is very different from what your audience needs when you’re a student). If you're an engineering student who’s nervous about going into the workforce, this is a great episode for you. And if you’re an engineering student who’s NOT nervous about going into the workforce, this is a great episode for you.

A few weeks ago, Amir Lahoud from Virginia Tech’s radio station, WUVT-FM Blacksburg, invited me to record a special episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast for their station with guest Matt Nowinski—and I’m so glad I said yes! Matt brings a wealth of wisdom and great stories from his engineering career. Before joining the faculty at Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering, he spent more than two decades at Boeing as a Software Engineer. His insights, advice, and experiences make this episode a must-listen for engineers at any stage of their careers.And be sure to tune in to Matt’s show, “Dr. Grind’s Office Hours,” airing Thursdays from 1:00–2:30 PM on WUVT!

In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, I sat down with Connor Herron, a Locomotion Controls Engineer at Persona AI, where he develops software and algorithms that bring humanoid robots to life. Connor shares why engineering is, at its core, a form of storytelling, and why engineers must understand the problem they’re solving, who it impacts, and why it matters. We also dig into how to become an adaptable problem solver, a skill Connor refers to as “The Knack.” His perspective on flexibility and iterative thinking is especially valuable for early‑career engineers. Connor also gives well‑deserved shoutouts to his mentors Alexander Leonessa, his graduate advisor and current Department Head of Clemson University Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University, and Benjamin Beiter, Mechanical Engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), for shaping his approach to robotics, leadership, and communication. 

 Laura Moss is a Stability and Radiological Analysis Engineer at GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy. She has a chemical engineering degree from Virginia Tech Department of Chemical Engineering a  master’s from NC State University Nuclear Engineering. We covered some fascinating topics during our conversation—everything from ethics and safety in nuclear engineering to why clear and concise documentation is critical in the field. Laura also shared some great advice for engineering students on how to stand out at job fairs and make a strong impression on potential employers. 

Ever wondered how engineering drawings and a few failures can shape an engineer’s career? In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we sit down with Craig Keys, an alum from Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering and a Senior Engineer at Caterpillar Inc. Craig takes us behind the scenes of designing drivetrain systems for small wheel loaders, shares why GD&T is a game-changer for engineering drawings and global communication, and explains why failure isn’t just inevitable—it’s essential. Beyond his technical expertise, Craig is passionate about giving back to the community. He served on the board of Lifting Minorities and helped lead scholarship efforts like the George L. Paige Award, ensuring future generations have opportunities to succeed. As an added bonus, tune in to hear his most memorable moments from his time at Tech and how they still influence his work today!

We’re thrilled to welcome Hannah Carroll, P.E. to the next episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast!Hannah brings a fascinating blend of engineering expertise and forensic insight to the conversation. With a bachelor’s degree from Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering and a master's degree from Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech, she’s built a career that bridges biomechanics, mechanical systems, and the legal world. Currently a Mechanical/Biomechanics Engineer at S-E-A, Hannah reconstructs accident scenarios and analyzes injury mechanisms using physics, lab testing, and simulation. Her work supports forensic investigations and safety evaluations in high-stakes environments.

What happens when engineering meets health equity? In our latest episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we sit down with Ashley Taylor, Ph.D., MPH, a powerhouse in interdisciplinary research and inclusive education.Ashley brings a unique blend of expertise—holding degrees from Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering, Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, and Virginia Tech Engineering Education—and is currently a Collegiate Assistant Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Mechanics at Virginia Tech. Her work centers on community-based partnerships that aim to reduce educational and health disparities, and she’s passionate about amplifying the voices and lived experiences of marginalized communities.Tune in to hear how Ashley is reshaping engineering education and global health through equity-driven research, and why centering community voices is essential for meaningful innovation.#EngineeringCommunication #HealthEquity #InclusiveEducation #STEM #Podcast #VirginiaTech #BiomedicalEngineering #GlobalHealth #CommunityEngagement

Ever wondered how an octopus or a snake could inspire the future of robotics? In our latest episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, I sit down with Noel Naughton, Assistant Professor in Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering department, to explore his fascinating research in soft robotics—designed for hard-to-access environments.We dive into: 🔹 How nature’s movers (like octopuses and snakes) are shaping robotic design🔹 Why data visualization isn’t just pretty—it’s powerful (shoutout to University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign!)🔹 And the most important section of a research paper (spoiler: it’s not the conclusion 👀).Whether you're into engineering, communication, or just love a good interdisciplinary convo, this episode is packed with insight and inspiration.

In this season's final episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, Aleem Ahmed talks with Eszter Anna Varga, a graduate of both Kevin T. Crofton Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering at Virginia Tech and Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering. She's currently an Aerospace System Safety Engineer at Honeywell. This episode has it all: working as an Aerospace Engineer in Europe (an uncommon field in Hungary); dealing with success, rejection, and failure as an engineer; and the importance of writing in engineering. Bonus feature: hear her behind-the-scenes story about her recent Ted Talk (hosted by TEDxDebrecen)!

We have another episode ready for you! In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Jim Hess. Jim has an impressive resume, holding management and leadership positions at companies like Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., and Saft. He now spends his time as an Instructor for Engineering Capstone Programs in the Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering department. If you're interested in how to be an effective mentor over the course of your engineering career, you'll want to listen to this episode.

We're back with another episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast! In this episode we talk with Yedhartha Sai Chinnasani, E.I.T, a Rolling Stock Engineer at Mott MacDonald. Tune in to learn more about effective documentation skills and the benefits of volunteering for FIRST Robotics Canada!

In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Walter Lee, an Associate Professor in the Virginia Tech Engineering Education Department. Dr. Lee is also the Director for Research in the Virginia Tech Center for the Enhancement of Engineering Diversity and serves as the Interim Associate Dean of Inclusive Excellence in the Virginia Tech College of Engineering. If you're looking for great research, publication, and writing tips (especially about professional correspondence and grant writing endeavors), this is the episode for you!

In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Gurbinder Kaur, PhD, a Senior R&D Engineer at Mitra Chem. Dr. Kaur earned her doctorate at Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology and was a post-doctoral fellow in the Virginia Tech Materials Science and Engineering department. A prolific writer, Dr. Kaur has published numerous journal articles and three books (and edited four more!). Join us to learn more about the differences between short-form and long-form STEM publications, particularly when it comes to framing your argument. And, as an added bonus, you’ll get to hear us geek out over the importance of writing outlines.

In the Season 3 premiere of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Durgesh Chandel, Ph.D., a Software Research Engineer/Scientist at Intel Corporation. Join us to learn more about Durgesh's career path that led her from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur to NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration to Massachusetts Institute of Technology to becoming the founder of WeLEAP Aerospace - Global, a nonprofit that supports women in Aerospace Engineering. Along the way, we learn not only about her engineering research but also the communication required in each position.

In our final podcast of the season, Johan J. interviews Dr. Jonathan Boreyko, a graduate from Trinity College-Hartford and Duke University, is an Associate Professor in Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering. Tune in to learn all about the innovative research he and his grad assistants are conducting in his Nature-Inspired Fluids and Interfaces Lab at Virginia Tech and how they translate their lab work into published journal articles (teaser: it involves intensive writing workshops!).  Thank you to everyone who supports this podcast! We’ve received a lot of great accolades from you all, and we have a great line up of guests for our upcoming episodes. We’re going on a summer hiatus, but we’ll return for our next season of The Engineering Communication Podcast in September 2024, so stay tuned!

In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Jared Wicker. Jared is a graduate of Clemson University and currently works at X-energy as an Environmental Licensing Engineer. If you’re an engineer who needs to write for a variety of audiences, this is an episode you don’t want to miss! 

The Engineering Communication Podcast is continuing its Start-up Series for this episode with David Alsippi, a Penn State University and University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and founder and owner of ScanTek Solutions, a company that provides precision 3D inspection, reverse engineering, engineering design, and training services to maximize efficiencies across business manufacturing. Tune in to learn all about how Dave grew a very successful business based largely on his interest in a portable Coordinate Measure Machine (CMM) arm!

In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Caitlin Chamberlain. Caitlin has an Engineering degree from James Madison University and now works as a Junior Systems Engineer at Leidos. We cover everything from senior design projects to #technical #documentation (which Caitlin has to do a lot of!). This is a great episode for your morning commute.

As part of our new #AI series, this week’s episode talks with Dr. Dylan Losey, former post-doc at Stanford University and current assistant professor in the Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering department. Dylan runs the Collaborative Robotics Lab (Collab) at Virginia Tech where he focuses on human/robot interactions by creating learning and control algorithms for robots to help them interact better with their human counterparts. This episode covers everything from the ethics of AI to effective #datavisualization to the importance of approaching #technicalwriting writing as a #storytelling endeavor. 

As part of our Start-up Series, we talk with David Mackanic, a graduate from both Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering and Stanford University and founder and owner of Anthro, a start-up that specializes in flexible batteries.

In this episode, we talk with Emma Walker, a graduate of Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering department and current graduate student in Virginia Tech Civil and Environmental Engineering department. Emma is working on an impressive research project right now that studies what new ideas look like in the brain to determine how people can increase their performance. This episode is filled with invaluable insights into civil engineering and neuroscience, communication, and mathematics (the latter of which Emma cleverly describes as “poeticism”).

For this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we thought we’d introduce you to Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering student and Technical Communication Program undergraduate assistant, Johan Jallah. Johan is a senior in mechanical engineering, where he is focusing his interests on renewable energy. This episode offers a glimpse into what it’s like to be an engineering undergraduate student, so if you know of anyone looking for college and major options, you’ll definitely want to check out this episode. 

The Engineering Communication Podcast is continuing its Start-up Series for this episode with Michael Fleming, graduate of the Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering program and founder and former CEO of Torc Robotics (purchased by Mercedes Benz Daimler in 2019). If you’re looking for management and leadership advice or want to learn more about self-driving technology, look no further. Michael covers all of that and more in this episode.

In this round-table episode, Kelly sits down with three first-generation mechanical engineering students to learn more about their college experiences and why they chose Virginia Tech's Mechanical Engineering Program.

In this episode of The Engineering Podcast, we talk with Dwight Jones, who graduated from Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering program in 2023 and is now a Product Design Engineer at Amazon. This episode is filled with a ton of advice about job applications, public speaking, and writing, because Dwight has had to do it ALL between his internship at Trane, his work with Virginia Tech’s  Center for Vehicle Systems and Safety, his role at Virginia Tech’s Chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers | NSBE Professionals, and his time spent at the Summer Venture in Management Program at Harvard Business School. This is one episode you don’t want to skip.

In our first episode of Season 2 of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Laura Demetrion, who offers a lot of insights into writing for your audience. Formerly a Lead Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, Laura now works as an Operations Lead at Carbon A List (although she hadn't yet started her new job when we recorded the podcast episode). She has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to helping engineers communicate their research to various audiences, so this is one episode you won’t want to miss.

In this episode of The Engineering Podcast, we talk with Megan Bennett, a Virginia Tech Bradley Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering graduate who is now a Space Frontier Foundation Board Member and an Advanced Electrical Engineer at Platform Aerospace. Tune in to learn how her team prepared an aircraft for a flight around the Arctic Circle (spoiler: it required a lot of clear communication and effective writing). Alexander Leonessa and the MIT Media Lab also get a few shout outs in this episode! The Engineering Communication Podcast is going on a summer hiatus, so this will be our last episode until September 2023, so check back then for more conversations about engineering communication.

In this week's episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, Matthew talks with Isaac Pressgrove, a PhD student in Virginia Tech's Mechanical Engineering department. Tune in to hear hear what motivated Isaac to shift from an engineering role at General Motors to a graduate student role at VT (and the communication shift that was required with that change!).

On this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk to Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering alumna Madeline Potts about her work in #engineering #sales at Trane. Sales and engineering may seem like unrelated fields, but they're closer than we might think (and both require A LOT of communication)! To hear how she got from one field to the other, and why she loves her position as a Systems Account Manager, give this episode a listen.

In the second episode of our start-up series, David Henry, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder of Card Isle, joins us to talk about his path from engineering to entrepreneurship, the benefits of starting out small when it comes to a new business, and how his company started because he was "just chasing an interesting problem." This episode was a hard one to edit because of the great advice that David offers--be sure to carve out some time for this one.

This episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast is the first of a two-part series on engineering start-ups. Our guest today is Scott Gong, who, by day, is a Project Design Engineer at ExxonMobil, and, by night, is owner and founder of Scott Gong Tutoring, a tutoring company that provides mentorship to engineering students at all levels of their education. If you’re an engineer and interested in start-up, tutoring, or are just really curious about how Scott juggles everything, this is the episode for you!

In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, we talk with Dr. David Gray, a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Assistant Department Head for Undergraduate Programs in Virginia Tech's Engineering Education program (those are some titles!). Dr. Gray talks about industry, graduate school, and interdisciplinary work in this episode, and, as a fun fact, he was referred to us by several of his mentees, which is a sure sign that this episode is worth a listen!

This isn’t your typical Engineering Communication Podcast episode! Rather, this is a brief announcement or pitch about the Commonwealth Cyber Initiative in Southwest Virginia and the amazing work they’re doing in interdisciplinary research and community outreach.

We’re back and we have a great episode to start off the new semester! In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, Darrell Roberts talks to us about all things nuclear, or at least as it pertains to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. You won’t want to miss this episode—it’s chock full of advice for both engineering students and professionals who are, or will be, navigating the career field. You’ll also learn how Darrell planned to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Michael Jackson’s Thriller!

In Episode 4 of The Engineering Communication Podcast, Matthew Wood interviews Dr. Pinar Acar, an Assistant Professor in Virginia Tech’s Mechanical Engineering Department, who was the recipient of the 2021 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Award (congratulations, Dr. Acar!). Dr. Acar offers graduate school advice, discusses aerospace materials and structure, and presents tips for preparing engineering content for a public audience—this episode covers a lot of ground that you won’t want to miss!

In this episode of The Engineering Communication Podcast, Matt Jamieson talks about all things government! From Bechtel to Booz Allen Hamilton to KeyLogic Systems to the National Energy Technology Laboratory, we gain insights into the collaborative nature of engineering work and how your communication requirements shift when you go from consultant to federal employee.

In this episode, David Gonzales, a Collegiate Associate Professor in Virginia Tech's Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering department, talks about his vast experience in industry at GE Aerospace and MIT Lincoln Laboratory and how the communication aspects of being an engineer changed throughout his career in industry and again as he transitioned to a career in academia.

In this episode, Kelly Scarff explains the purpose and goals of The Engineering Communication Podcast, and Matthew Wood conducts a brief interview with Kelly to better understand her area of expertise when it comes to Engineering Communication.