Poornima Apte

Kevin Tong ’22 was understandably delighted as his team prepared for the March launch of the lunar lander Blue Ghost. Just a few years out of Princeton and now working for Firefly Aerospace, he was one of two propulsion systems engineers at Cape Canaveral in Florida who completed the final checks on the lunar lander. “It was pretty cool that I was one of the last people to touch it before it went to space,” he says.

Photo credit: Firefly

I wrote about the architecture of a new agent-driven AI revenue ops platform for Salesforce.

Picture the daily operations in a large warehouse. Robotic systems work here in several different ways. When a truck backs up into a loading dock, an autonomous mobile robot (AMR) might unload packages onto a conveyor belt to route them to specific shelving locations. If the boxes have to be unpacked and sorted immediately, they might move to processing stations where people and robotic systems can cut them open, and pick, sort, and package products for delivery out of the warehouse.

Feature story about fire engineering for Johns Hopkins Engineering magazine
By better understanding heat transfer, Thomas Gernay is making structures SAFIR.
by Poornima Apte

Copywriting for a premium post for ServiceNow about agentic AI. Content was heavily designed.

I reported on the restoration of a Texas habitat for the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The assistant professor in applied economics researches, among other topics, ways to make the benefits of large electrification projects more transparent.
It’s a chicken and egg situation: Should renewable energy projects launch first hoping that transmission lines to pipe generated power to distant places will follow on their heels? Or should the transmission lines be stood up first as a way to attract investments in renewable energy projects? Which comes before the other?

Student profile for MIT Nuclear Science and Engineering

In medical practice, monitoring muscle activity is one of the methods to gauge health. Tracking the thickness of the diaphragm, for example, helps evaluate pulmonary function. The traditional approach to monitoring muscle activity, electromyography (EMG), involves attaching metal electrodes to the body and studying resultant electrical signals. The stability and strength of the signals with such an approach is a challenge. It is also difficult to isolate activity from specific muscles because...

Article and resources for teens and their educators to shape a career in robotics.

Thought leadership piece for consulting company about AI predictions for 2025.

Event coverage. Local business leaders gleaned inspiration from experts in an event sponsored by Eastern Bank.
When SharkNinja launched in a small brick building in West Newton in 1994, even CEO Mark Barrocas could not have predicted its incredible success over the next three decades. The company netted close to $5 billion in revenue in 2023 and boasts a meteoric annual revenue growth rate of 20 percent.
Keeping Boston as home base — SharkNinja is headquartered in Needham — has helped sustain growth. “I thin...

Picture a tree. It needs sun, water, nitrogen and phosphorus to survive. Eliminate even one of the four and it flounders. Efforts to withstand climate change aren’t much different. To be successful, they, too, have a list of boxes that must be checked — things like biodiversity, disaster preparedness, sea-level rise and renewable energy.
So argues data scientist and ecologist Eric Berlow. Visualizing the “critical needs” of climate change mitigation will help highlight areas that need more fi...

Thought leadership piece for executive on how AI can augment software development.

People with severe loss of motor control or motor disorders—from spinal cord injuries or neuromuscular disorders such as muscle weakness or paralysis—require a therapist to support and direct them as they perform their exercises. Exoskeletons promise to let patients recover independently at their own pace, either in the clinic or at home.
These devices, known as rehabilitation exoskeletons (RE), are designed to attach to patients’ bodies and run on electric motors with their own power source....