Evening with Industry
Ecoatoms CEO Solange Massa, left, and Engineering Interim Dean Indira Chatterjee at the Evening with Industry event Feb. 26, 2025.
Space research company CEO shares insights
Success comes after failure.
Ecoatoms CEO Solange Massa emphasized this message in her Evening with Industry talk Feb. 26 at the Joe Crowley Student Union on the 夜色视频 campus. Massa, whose Reno-based company develops plug-and-play technology for space research to make it easier for scientists to send their experiments into space, addressed about 220 Engineering students and industry guests at the annual networking event sponsored by the student chapter of Society of Women Engineers.
“I know you are here for the rockets,” Massa said, “but I wanted to tell you the truth.”
Truth is, Massa said, there’s a lot of failure on the way to success.
“Everything is about the learning,” she added.
In Massa’s case, lessons learned have led to significant success: Ecoatoms, the company she started in 2020, was one of three winners of NASA’s TechLeap Prize last summer for its Apparatus for Nominal Integrations with Minimal Adaptations (A.N.I.M.A.) project. This project is designed to integrate payloads (part of a rocket, spacecraft or vehicle that is designed to go into space and carry out a specific mission) more easily into space missions. A.N.I.M.A. consists of an interchangeable adaptor that attaches to a spacecraft; a universal connector that works with different instruments or experiments; and an on-board computer that helps control and connect with the experiment.
Ecoatoms also was recognized in the 2022 Orbital Reef Starter Competition sponsored by aerospace company Blue Origin — a contest encouraging the development of new space-based business ideas.
Massa’s individual achievements are also impressive. In 2016, while still a doctoral student in biomedicine at the Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile, she developed a chip that replicates the inner workings of a human liver, allowing for new drugs to undergo effective toxicity tests. She holds an M.D. from Universidad Austral in Buenos Aires, a Ph.D. from Universidad de los Andes and was a postdoctoral research fellow in biotechnology at Stanford.
In her talk, Massa shared other “learnings” that have led to her accomplishments, including the importance of support systems — “everything I do is possible because I have amazing people around me” — and a willingness think big, even if it also means solving more problems.
“You’re going to have problems anyway,” she told the crowd. “Go for the big stuff.”
‘Evening With Industry’
The University’s student chapter of Society of Women Engineers (SWE) has offered its annual “Evening With Industry” event for the past 31 years. Open to all engineering students, Evening With Industry provides an opportunity to network with engineering professionals. This year’s event was coordinated by SWE chapter leadership Sofia Ahlstedt, president; Heather Zechter, vice president; Kyla Trotter, secretary and media chair; Alison Phillips, treasurer; Chantelle Cabanilla, special events coordinator; and Kirstin Springer, events chair.