An engineer with global reach
A Montreal resident born in Haiti and having lived in the Dominican Republic and the United States, Nathanaël Occénad is well on his way to being a quitessentially global engineer with his extensive travels and mastery of French, English, Creole and Spanish.
As a Concordia student representative, Occénad has travelled to St. John’s, Waterloo, Toronto, Sherbrooke and the Outaouais region near Ottawa, and has independently had his passport stamped in France, Spain, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, U.S. and Israel. Even his internship with Montreal-headquartered SNC-Lavalin had an international angle with his involvement in a preliminary feasibility study of a power engineering project in Greenland.
Growing up in Haiti, Occénad attended high school in the Dominican Republican and then Camp Hill High School in Pennsylvania, where he graduated. Then he was on the move again with his family deciding to relocate to Montreal where his mother had been born.
In Concordia’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, he has taken a lively interest in all aspects of student life. A member of Engineers Without Borders, he participated in a successful initiative to make the Montreal borough of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve a fair-trade zone. To obtain such a designation, a municipality or borough must advocate principles supporting fair pricing, respectful labour standards, environmental sustainability and, moreover, raise the awareness of these standards among local citizens. The initiative involved a lot of effort by students and community members, and Occénad is proud to have been a part of it.
Occénad also visited Cegeps and high schools where he discussed water, energy and sustainability issues. His talks were part of the “global engineering” concept espoused by Engineers Without Borders, which seeks to integrate social concerns into curricula and, through public outreach efforts such as Occénad’s, increase awareness of the positive impact that engineers can have in the world.
For his final-year project that had to put much of what he learnt into a practical application, he and four other students worked as a team to design and build a solar surveyor. Installed on a rooftop, the device can estimate how much solar energy can be expected from a given area to determine whether a full-scale solar-panel project would be a good investment. The surveyor gives power, current and voltage readings. The group’s ambitious project received an honourable mention from the department.
Now graduated, Occénad started work at SNC-Lavalin on June 4. Although he plans to stay in Montreal for a while, he will no doubt be chalking up frequent flyer points again soon.
“Will I be working around the world?” he asks. “Definitely.”
Related links:
• Read about more 2012 Great Grads in the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science
• Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science
• Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering