Marina Hatsopoulos
What does a math and music major from Brown do when her first jobs out of college (on Wall Street and in mergers and acquisitions), leave her feeling as though “something is missing”? If you’re Marina Hatsopoulos you go back to school — in Marina’s case, to get a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT.
What was missing that prompted this career shift? According to Marina, “I felt like I wasn’t creating anything.”
Ready to start creating something in earnest after graduating from MIT, Ms. Hatsopoulos came across an exciting new technology that appealed to her hands-on sensibility while researching potential business opportunities in MIT’s Technology Licensing Office: 3-D printing. Having had some experience of her own doing CAD design work and fabricating three-dimensional models, she “understood the value of a physical model for the architectural application, and could imagine the same to be true for the design market,” says Marina.
Putting together her previous experience on Wall Street with her engineering savvy, Marina licensed the technology, boot-strapped a startup with two other MIT grads, and successfully commercialized the MIT research and turned it into a company that today makes the world’s fastest 3-d printers — used by Fortune 500 companies and manufacturers around the world to produce physical prototypes efficiently and inexpensively from computer-aided design (“CAD”) data.
George Hatsopoulos at MIT
Thalia Assuras at MIT
An enthusiastic crowd of ambitious business majors, budding scientists, engineering grad students and MIT professors braved a stormy November night to sit in on the high energy conversation with the CBS News White House correspondent (and Initiative board member) Thalia Assuras and two generations of the high-tech Hatsopoulos family — Marina Hatsopoulos and her father George Hatsopoulos, the Next Generation Initiative’s very first Master Class leader — at MIT’s 300-seat Wong Auditorium. The audience was rewarded with a rousing introduction former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, who arrived (by public transportation) from teaching his own class at Northeastern University.
At MIT’s Wong Auditorium
Hosted by the Hellenic Student Association of MIT, Next Generation students converged on Cambridge from schools all over the Boston area — including Boston College, Boston University Harvard, Northeastern, Tufts and Wellesley — for a unique chance to meet the legendary Hatsopoulos family, Ms. Assuras and Gov. Dukakis at a special reception before the Conversation with Marina Hatspoulos.
A Master Class with
Marina Hatsopoulos
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA
You can see excerpts from the video of this special Master Class online — including comments by Marina Hatsopoulos, Dr. George Hatsopoulos, and the introduction by Gov. Michael Dukakis.
George and Marina and Daphne Hatsopoulos with Michael Dukakis and Thalia Assuras at MIT
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