Wentworth Under 30: Navigating an Adventurous Early-Career Journey

Wentworth Under 30: They are entrepreneurs, innovators, and leaders - and they are just getting started. In this new ongoing series, we highlight exceptional alumni under the age of 30 who are redefining what is possible in their fields. Representing every school at the university, these graduates prove that age is no barrier to making a global impact.

Dionne Ang was born in the Philippines, moved with her family to Australia at the age of 8, and started her college education in California. When the school downgraded her major (a branch of bioengineering) to a minor her sophomore year, she figured the time had come for another change.

While visiting her sister, a student at Boston University, in 2021, Ang googled "bioengineering programs in Boston." Wentworth Institute of Technology's Biomedical Engineeringprogram came up.

Ang eventually transferred to Wentworth to study biomedical engineering. It proved to be a significant adjustment. Wentworth has about a quarter as many undergraduates as her previous school, and "finding her people" as a new sophomore was difficult.

Two things helped turn things around for Ang. First, she made new friends by joining the Wentworth track & field team. Then, she acted on what she called "an unhinged idea" after hearing about 3D printers available for student use in the Accelerate Makerspace.

"I have a friend who really likes ducks, so I figured I'd make her a duck," she said. "Then I thought, 'What if I bombarded her with ducks?' So I 3D-printed over a hundred tiny ducks and had her sister place them throughout their house so my friend would think she was losing her mind. Once I learned about all these random resources on campus, I started to have fun."

Finding a Home in Wentworth Labs

Ang liked many of her courses at Wentworth, but she enjoyed working in labs even more. As an assistant in the Electrical Laboratory, she grew close to Lab Technician Doreen Cialdea. For her first co-op, she served as a biomedical research assistant in Associate Professor Uri Feldman'slab.

"His research interests center on home telemedicine and haptics," Ang said. "He gave me the freedom to work on my own projects in those areas. I also spent time finding research papers on those topics for him."

Her second co-op was at Day Zero Diagnostics, a startup that develops tools to diagnose infectious diseases. As a product engineer, her responsibilities included assisting in prototype conception and development as well as performing bench-top chemical assays focused on testing, iteration, and optimization.

"It's kind of nice that Wentworth requires you to do two co-ops," she said. "I appreciated getting a feel for what it's like to work in an office environment while I was still a student."

Multinational Corporation or Small Startup?

A few months after graduating from Wentworth in 2023, Ang was trying to decide whether to join a multinational biopharmaceutical corporation or Catalog, a small, Boston-based startup in the DNA storage space. She ended up choosing the latter opportunity.

After starting out on the process engineering team, Ang was moved to research and development (R&D). As an R&D engineer, her primary task was to help create a second iteration of the company's DNA writing machine.

"It was a lot of designing different subsystems and experimenting to make sure everything worked," she said. "Eventually, I got involved in building the machine, testing the different subsystems, and verifying they worked the way they were supposed to work."

Ang learned a lot at Catalog and loved working with her colleagues. Unfortunately, the company ran out of funding and closed its doors in late 2025.

Refusing to Be Pigeonholed

Soon after Catalog folded, Ang joined Atlas Data Storage (another startup in the DNA storage space) as a hardware engineer. She had been tempted to go work for a large company-and perhaps have greater stability-but settled on giving the startup world another shot.

"Yes, it's stressful losing your job like I did. But at the same time, I'm still pretty young and unlikely to stay at my next job 10 years anyway," she said. "And with startups, you can do what you want to do and learn the things you want to learn, as opposed to being pigeonholed at a big company."

As for what advice she'd share with current Wentworth students, Ang stressed the importance of developing not just technical skills but also people skills.

"Don't be scared to ask people for help," she recommended. "People are generally nicer than you think they are, but no one's going to want to help you if you're a jerk. So try to be someone who other people like and want to be around. Sometimes that's the way you get ahead."

Read more in the Wentworth Under 30series:

• Leaving the Cubicle to Build a Global Brand