women-in-engineering
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Maria Bennett Kept One Graduate-School Idea Alive for 28 Years. Then Came a $650 Million Exit.
A wheelchair project, a thesis, two acquired companies and one stubbornly durable question shaped Maria Bennett's route from an Indiana marching band to a Cleveland medtech exit.
Jennifer Aspell
Jennifer Aspell is the CEO of BrightView Technologies, a Durham, North Carolina optics company that engineers micro lens array films to shape and manage light for displays, AR/VR, automotive, LiDAR, sensing and LED lighting. An electrical engineer trained at Rensselaer, UC Berkeley and Purdue, she started out at Bell Laboratories building technology for long-haul optical networks before moving through Lucent, JDS Uniphase and Tyco Electronics. She took the helm of BrightView in 2010 after the recession gutted its original rear-projection-TV market, and rebuilt it into a global supplier serving more than 200 customers, capped by a $7M Series B in 2025 led by Forvia Hella and Technology Venture Partners.