When John-Paul Perron, BELM ’10, looks at a Kindle e-reader, he sees much more than words. He sees all the nuances of the display and front-light technology, things that—as a material research and processes engineer for Amazon-Lab 126—he helped make happen.
“I’m highly critical. Because I was working on the display, I can pick out the flaws,” Perron says. “But the first time I walked into a local Best Buy and saw one, I thought ‘I worked on that [Kindle] Paperwhite. This is awesome.’”
Perron, worked at Amazon-Lab 126 from 2011 through last May. Initially, he helped address problems with front-light technology of the first Kindle Paperwhite before its launch, making trips to China to observe the manufacturing process and try to improve any flaws. But he spent the bulk of his time working on the next generation Kindle e-reader— to be launched in 2014—developing the manufacturing processes and doing the materials selection.
“In order to do this, I developed a small clean room lamination lab at our office in Cupertino, California,” he says. “With the ability to build small batches of Kindles in-house, our product design team was able to make faster design changes by seeing what worked and what didn’t.”
Now, Perron works at Euro-Pro in Newton, Mass., as a product R&D engineer, developing new concepts for home appliances. He largely credits his Wentworth experience for making him the engineer he is today. “Wentworth taught me how to think through difficult problems, how to collaborate in big teams, and gave me the confidence to make difficult decisions,” Perron says. “I like to be that MacGyver, figuring out how to solve problems.”
—Deblina Chakraborty
