Engineer Alexandra Hubenko to Manage RESCUE @UCSD
10.04.04 - The UCSD division recently increased the strength of its technical staff by hiring Alexandra Hubenko as program manager. She will manage the UCSD portion of RESCUE, a joint UCSD-UCI project seeking to radically transform the ability of responding organizations to gather, manage, use, and disseminate information within emergency response networks and to the general public.
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She has similar responsibility for the UCSD portion of ResponSphere, an additional grant supplying infrastructure and equipment to RESCUE. She will work with researchers, faculty, industry, and community partners to coordinate the tasks within RESCUE and ensure that project objectives are met and deliverables are completed and deployed on time.
"This position is a great opportunity to combine my backgrounds in engineering with managing complex projects," says Hubenko, who has a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from Cornell, and spent a year studying in the Department of Materials at Imperial College in London.
"After studying in London, I joined Motorola on a rotational engineering program," she says. "I worked in product marketing, electronic package design, wafer processing, and manufacturing process development. It was great exposure to the broad scope of the semiconductor industry."
Then Hubenko joined the sensor products division where she worked as a project engineer, performing materials characterization for chemical sensor products. After that, she moved to the pressure sensor group where she worked as a product engineer-mostly on automotive and industrial pressure sensors-sustaining existing product lines and working with international automotive suppliers to introduce new products to the market.
To complement this engineering experience, she took a leave of absence to get her MBA with a concentration in technology policy at Thunderbird's Garvin School of International Management. The Thunderbird experience included a six-month internship for Motorola in Germany. "There my job was to learn about tapping into funding programs provided by the EU and federal, regional, and local governments to enable Motorola to partner in R&D with German research institutes," recalls Hubenko, who is fluent in Ukrainian and has a working knowledge of German and French.
Then Hubenko moved to San Diego to work at WIDCOMM as program manager on communications software products. "I worked with PC original equipment manufacturers to introduce new products and integrate Bluetooth software into laptops and PDAs like the IBM Thinkpad and Compaq iPAQ," she says.
"I've always enjoyed the university environment as an incubator for new ideas," she says. "Compared to industry where a lot of development is conducted in the context of revenue and profit, a university has fewer boundaries and offers more opportunities to think outside the box."