The Art of Engineering

Beth Brock is the Technical Consulting Director at Environmental Resources Management. After spending 27 years at Eli Lilly, Beth has embarked on a new adventure while also looking forward to retirement in the near future.  In this episode, she and Denise McIntosh discuss the value of networking and how to protect your personal time for a work-life balance.

Brittany Lutz is the Senior Research and Development Scientist in Nutraceuticals at Ortho Molecular Products. In this episode, she shares with Denise about how growing up tag-teaming with her dad working on cars lead to a lifelong curiosity about science. She talks about her day-to-day duties working in the nutraceutical industry and being involved in the creation of new products for Ortho and why it's important for young women to pursue a career in science and manufacturing. 

Shannon returns to The Art of Engineering in her new position as the Life Science Leader at The Design Group in St. Louis. Shannon and Denise discuss the book Everybody Matters, and how treating people like a family in the workplace improves culture.

In this episode, Denise is joined by Custom Powder’s Senior Vice President of Products, Scott Heffern, and Sales Executive Austin Hill speaking with Tyler Courtney, Pharmaceutical Account Manager at ChargePoint Technology. They’ll discuss the advances that have been made in powder transfer, important safety issues that have been solved, and how companies are able to scale-up their processes for both efficiency and profit.

Denise visits with Zen Zen Yen, Head of Engineering at Bayer Supply Center in Germany. Denise caught up with Zen Zen at the ISPE Annual Meeting and had a chance to discuss what it was like growing up in Germany, switching from studying medicine to engineering, and the importance of finding a community of peers like ISPE.

At the age of 21, M. Wallace “Wally” Funk was selected to be one of 13 women to train for space flight in 1959. By this time, she had been an experienced pilot for over 5 years. Wally’s love of aeronautics led her to a life-long career in flight training, giving thousands of young pilots their first taste of flight. She worked for the FAA and was the first woman to be a lead investigator at the NTSB. Her dream of space flight finally came true in 2021 when she accompanied Jeff Bezos on the first human flight of Blue Origin. In this wide-ranging interview, Denise talks with Wally about her fascinating life inspiring young women to follow their dreams.  

Ann Rhodes is the founder of People Ink and author of Built on Values: Creating an Enviable Culture that Outperforms the Competition. Ann and Denise discuss how a positive culture and employees who share the same values as a company is the missing piece for most organizations.  Ann shares storeis from her time with Southwest Airlines and JetBlue, and explains the steps needed to form a solid culture to make your company proud and profitable.

Denise introduces us to several of the women who work at Custom Powder Systems. We learn what they do, how they started, and ideas from their point of view on how we can encourage and recruit more women into the industry.

This roundtable discussion was recorded at the Pack Expo International in Chicago as Denise and her guests discuss how to encourage a more diverse workforce, and why that is so vital to business growth. These four experts will share tips on how they are proactively bringing new talent to the table and setting their companies up for success in the future.

Guests: Jill Miller, CEO of Lunum, Derick Jiwan, Innovation and Business Development at WinField, Cimberly Weir, Instructor of Packaging Science at Michigan State University, and Angela Desmond with Aylward-Elmach

Returning to the workforce after an absence doesn’t have to be scary.  Carson Riutta learned that through networking and discovering that she already has more than enough skills and knowledge to jump in provide great value to a company.  In this episode, Denise and Carson discuss why it’s so important to network, ask questions, and stop telling yourself stories about what you can’t do…instead, discover what you CAN.

Guest:  Carson Riutta, Project Engineer with Jacobs Engineering