Imogen O’Brien

Imogen O’Brien decided that she wanted to become a mechanical engineer the day she watched someone take apart a chainsaw.

She had taken a gap year during the COVID-19 pandemic before heading to the University of Vermont (UVM) to study environmental engineering, and she was working full time at a hardware store when a co-worker “ripped apart a chainsaw in front of me.”

“It re-ignited my interest in engines,” says O’Brien, who grew up in Arlington in a family that encouraged her love of sports, cars and internal combustion.

O’Brien, who had been a competitive snowboarder in high school, chose UVM in part because of ski areas nearby. But after two years of study and several snowboarding injuries, she decided to transfer to a university with a broader mechanical engineering program. 

She chose UMass Lowell, even though she knew that she would have to spend an extra semester catching up on prerequisites, including repeating some material she had previously studied.

“Sometimes, I could get frustrated,” she says. “But as a transfer student, it was honestly a good experience. It let me slow down and get to know the school a lot more than if I had jumped into a full, junior-year engineering workload.”

O’Brien used that extra time to explore her options. Right away, she joined the women’s club rugby team. Even though she had never played rugby before, she stepped up to serve as club president over the next two years. 

And one day, while she was sitting in University Crossing, a promotional message for the new sports engineering minor popped up on a video screen. 

When O’Brien looked into it, she realized that she couldn’t complete the minor and graduate on time – but she learned about UMass Lowell’s Baseball Research Center, which tests baseballs, bats and helmets for Major League Baseball and equipment manufacturers.

She emailed Patrick Drane, the lab’s assistant director, and told him she’d love to work for him. He offered her a job, and she quickly rose to become the lead student researcher for baseball projects. 

“Especially as a transfer student, getting involved with research was very important for me,” she says. 

That’s because O’Brien is applying to Ph.D. programs with the goal of becoming a professor and researcher in combustion, energy and fluid mechanics. She’s particularly interested in understanding wildfires and how they spread.

“To me, that’s going to be the best way to use my engineering education to help people,” she says.

“Being a scientist is discovering something new, and being an engineer is taking all those discoveries and doing something practical with them to help people,” she says. “Being a scientist in a university as a mechanical engineer is a beautiful crossroads of those two things.”