Using AI in Health Care to Enhance Human Abilities
Andreea Bodnari ’10 is the founder and CEO of ALIGNMT AI, a start-up that provides healthcare companies with automated AI risk monitoring and compliance.
Read StoryMarissa O’Connor Embraces the Science of Winemaking
Every fall, locals gather at Agronomy Farm Vineyard in Oakham, Mass., to help Marissa (Mertzic) O’Connor ’00 and her husband and other farmhands pick red and white grapes. The couple then uses the native fruits to create small batches of craft wine—all from scratch.
It seems quite the pivot from O’Connor’s chemical engineering background, but she doesn’t necessarily see it that way. There is a special science behind wine making and, in fact, the vineyard was named for the science and technology of making food from plants: agronomy.
“I got really into wine as a hobby sometime after college,” she says. “I liked the science and art of the process.”
Bringing people together
O’Connor previously worked as an engineer at Intel for a little over 15 years and has remained in that more conventional technical world on a part-time basis. The Barre, Mass., native works in the process engineering group as a Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt at UMass Memorial Health. While that sounds like a martial arts term, it actually involves lean management, or optimizing processes, efficiency, and quality.
“We work on projects throughout the system to help facilitate and drive improvements,” O’Connor explains.
She works with physicians, nurses, technicians, and other staff to understand their problems and challenges, then helps them develop processes and procedures to overcome them. The goal is to “hopefully help them come up with and implement solutions that will support patients who use UMass Memorial as their healthcare system,” she says.
Still, her true passion is the family business. She and her husband, Corey, who similarly made a career pivot after working as a research scientist for 20 years, initially discussed the idea in 2011 while on their honeymoon in Tahiti. The couple purchased their roughly 45-acre property in Oakham two years later and planted the vineyard on two acres in 2014. Half of their vines are a red local varietal known as Marquette; the other half is the native white varietal Cayuga.
O’Connor explains that she and Corey strive to bring the community into the business. They prune their vines in the spring, grow throughout the summer, then invite people to the farm to help harvest the grapes in the fall.
“I like how it brings people together,” the oenophile says of wine. “I traveled a lot and it was fun to visit different wineries and have an experience there. We make everything on site and we value quality in our winemaking.”
The O’Connors also quickly expanded into the maple syrup business, today making 100% pure syrup from sap collected from hundreds of taps across 33 acres of adjoining forest. It’s a time- and resource-intensive process: Each gallon requires the boiling down of 40 to 50 gallons of sap from sugar maples.
They opened their tasting room in October 2018, where they host cheese and wine tastings, local music acts, weddings, and other events. They sell their wine on site, on their website, and
in stores throughout Massachusetts.
“When you visit, we hope you will have a great experience,” she says. “When you drink a glass of our wine, we hope you share those memories with the people close to you and maybe even bring them back to have a similar experience.”
Continuing a projects-based approach
As a kid, O’Connor loved math and science and intended to go into drug research. This was largely inspired by her parents, who owned a pharmacy.
“I wanted to be involved in finding new drugs to help people,” she says. She found chemical engineering to be both challenging and technical, noting that, “as I got more into it, I realized that being a chemical engineer opened the door to many fields of study.”
Her experiences working on teams through WPI’s project-based curriculum continue to help her today, she explains. Specifically, she honed skills that help her systematically break down big problems to make them less daunting. This helps her both in her career at UMass Memorial and in the day-to-day running of her business. Building a winery requires not only knowledge of winemaking, she notes, but an understanding of marketing, finance, capacity planning, and human resources.
O’Connor continues to give back to her alma mater, first participating in the senior class gift campaign in 2000, and over the years supporting WPI’s Areas of Greatest Need, as well as the university’s scholarship and athletics programs.
“I like that I had to work hard for my degree and that it is respected,” says O’Connor. “WPI taught me a lot about how engineers can help make the world a better place.”
Marissa O’Connor’s journey from chemical engineer to vineyard co-owner is truly inspiring. Her success with Agronomy Farm Vineyard is a testament to the power of education and the diverse paths it can open. The skills she honed at WPI undoubtedly played a pivotal role, not only in her engineering endeavors but also in her entrepreneurial ventures. Her ability to apply problem-solving skills across different fields is proof of the invaluable nature of a solid educational foundation. Moreover, her shift to wine production highlights the importance of embracing new challenges and opportunities. It is delightful to see how diverse knowledge and experiences can lead to successful enterprises, bringing communities together through events and local wines. Thank you, Marissa, for sharing your story and showing us the wonderful blend of education and passion.