Stories

Long before Aysa worked for Loureiro, she had (and still has!) a love for reading and writing - a passion for diving into language and crafting a good sentence. If you asked her back in the day what career path she was going to pursue, she would have told you something related to English.

“It was a struggle for me,” recalls Aysa. “I had taken a lot of advanced science courses, including a course called ‘Science Research’ where for three years I conducted an independent study. When college applications rolled around, I was interested in both English and Engineering. My teacher and mentor Mrs. Rader encouraged me to pursue the latter, and reminded me of the hard work I had put in and all the paths I could take post-grad. It was the kick I needed. When you’re on a school’s website and you’re in the drop down menu where all the majors are listed, English and Engineering are pretty close to each other on that list. I ended up picking Engineering, and I’m glad I did.”

Aysa graduated from Clarkson University with a Bachelor’s in Environmental Engineering. She found that Clarkson was the right fit for her. It was a smaller school with smaller classes where the professors knew your name, asked how you were doing.

During her time at Clarkson, Aysa participated in two different summer internships that helped cultivate the path she would eventually take to Loureiro. The first internship involved working at Chazy Lake in Dannemora, New York. The lake was infested with milfoil, an invasive species, and the Lake Association was looking for two strong swimmers to go into the lake with a vacuum and weed out the milfoil. Aysa, who was on the swim team at Clarkson, saw this as an opportunity she couldn’t refuse. She lived on the lake for the summer, spending her days on a pontoon boat working a giant suction hose.

“One of us would be in full scuba gear. We’d dive down up to 20 feet and uproot the milfoil from the bottom and suck it up with the hose. The person on the boat would put the milfoil in a garbage can that had holes in them for drainage. I really loved the work. It was an opportunity to clean up an invasive species, be outside, and learn about watershed initiatives.”

During Aysa’s second summer, one of her advisors was running COVID research at the school and Aysa worked as a lab tech doing COVID research on wastewater at different facilities in New York, including colleges.

“We took wastewater from different dorms and isolated it, washed it down to RNA (Ribonucleic acid), put it through a ddPCR (droplet digital polymerase chain reaction) machine, and monitored the trends and the percentage of COVID present in the water,” says Aysa. “Our results would be used to decide what dorms would be tested for COVID. It was a very different internship than the previous year, but I learned a lot of lab processes that helped me when I got to Loureiro.”

At Loureiro, Aysa has found a supportive environment invested in her growth. She notes that the team members in the Portsmouth, New Hampshire office all worked together prior to Loureiro’s acquisition of XDD Environmental, and that the atmosphere she walked into was family-like.

“Everyone in the Environmental Engineering group in our Portsmouth, New Hampshire office used to be XDD,” says Aysa. “I’m the only Loureiro-hired person in this group. Coming into the office was a little intimidating because there were no entry level people. But I wound up with 8 incredible mentors who will drop almost anything to help me learn something. I don’t think I’d get that at any other company.”

Outside of work, you can find Aysa spending a lot of time reading and exercising. She recently ran a half marathon, and is running a full marathon this coming fall.