Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 1 Spring 2018 | Page 31

attend the University of Virginia, then known
for its English program, with the thought that
if she washed out of engineering, she could fall
back on a strong degree in English and then
move on to law school.
“My parents agreed that if after two years
I wanted to switch schools to a more engi-
neering-based university, they would support
that, but UVA was where I wanted to be. I had
made close friends there, the fraternity parties
in the 1980s were great, and I got involved in
undergraduate research in engineering.”
With a senior thesis project to complete
Kasarda realized she didn’t want an esoteric
project. She wanted to do something import-
ant and useful and so by knocking on a door,
she made a contact who would become an
important part of her professional life.
“I knocked on the door of Professor Paul
Allaire and told him I was looking for a thesis
project, and he walked with me down to the
lab,” Kasarda said. “He was very respectful and
he explained things to me, and while he was
doing that I could immediately understand
how the research he was doing improved high
speed rotating machinery like compressors
and steam turbines. Allaire mentored me
through the project and when I graduated I
took a position with Ingersoll-Rand for about
a year where I was one of maybe two women
out of 100 engineers. But the group I worked
in, rotor dynamics, was much smaller and
they were really good about mentoring and
encouraging me, so it was a really good expe-
rience and a nice environment. I knew that in
the shops there were some people who didn’t
immediately take me seriously, but I didn’t
care about their attitude. The people I worked
with daily were really nice to me.”
After spending about a year in industry,
Kasarda went back to Charlottesville to
complete a master’s degree and then formed a
consulting company with a previous doctoral
student there. She helped develop and run
the company for two years before selling out
and taking a job with DuPont. She worked
there for a few years before Dupont created
a program to offer cash incentives for people
to leave the company as they reorganized,
and that inspired her to look for new
opportunities.
“I called Paul [Allaire] and asked if he knew
of anyone who needed a rotor dynamicist and
he suggested I come back to UVA for my PhD.
I kind of laughed but I did the math to see if I
could support both myself and my horse and
realized I could do it, so in my 30s I started a
doctoral program.”
At 36 Kasarda received her PhD and took a
job teaching at Virginia Tech where she has
finally achieved the dream
of connecting two life-long
passions.
"Women have
an extra layer
of social
navigation to
manage..."
“Most of my career has been
working with high-speed
rotating machinery, magnetic
bearings, and later Smart
Buildings. Now, I’m currently
doing image processing work
with the school of veterinary
medicine where we are trying
to take facial recognition
approaches developed for
humans and modify those algorithms to work
with animals, and horses, in particular. We
want to look at automatically detecting pain or
stress in horses using video or camera feeds.
We’re at the very beginning of the research,”
Kasarda said, “but we’ll be contributing to
animal welfare and making a contribution to
the scientific field in image processing; and
I finally found a way to work with horses as
part of my day job.”
MOMENTUM
SPRING 2018
PAGE 31