mit-aeronautics
(2)
Jason Andringa
Jason Andringa is the third-generation president and CEO of Vermeer Corporation, the Pella, Iowa manufacturer of industrial and agricultural equipment founded by his grandfather Gary Vermeer in 1948. A mechanical engineer who once worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory before joining the family business in 2005, he took the top job in 2015 and led the roughly 4,400-employee company through a devastating 2018 tornado and the pandemic, growing it stronger while staying, in his words, oriented to the long term.
Ali Merchant
Ali Merchant is the founder and CEO of iQ3Connect, a Woburn, Massachusetts company building a web-based, ultrafast XR platform that lets enterprise teams step into shared 3D spaces for design review and training straight from a browser - no heavy installs, no specialized hardware required. An MIT-trained aeronautical engineer with a Ph.D. in turbomachinery, he spent two decades building high-performance 3D design and simulation software for aerospace before turning a decade-plus of MIT research into a platform that aims to make immersive 3D as easy to build as a slide deck and as collaborative as a video call.