Alumni Spotlight

New York Tech graduates are going places. Find out how your fellow Bears are doing, making, innovating, healing, and reinventing the future.

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT

New York Tech graduates are going places. Find out how your fellow Bears are doing, making, innovating, healing, and reinventing the future.

ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT

New York Tech graduates are going places. Find out how your fellow Bears are doing, making, innovating, healing, and reinventing the future.

Pictured from left: Sal Diana, Chris Czenszak, Marissa Marzullo, Don Booth, Jesse Curreri, Nick Haralambidis, and Spiros Dandouras

Alumni Return to Their Roots

Alumni from the School of Architecture and Design and the College of Engineering and Computing Sciences, among others, represent some of the many professionals coming together to help develop the first major construction project on the Long Island campus in decades.

The Biomedical Research, Innovation, and Imaging Center (BRIIC) is the state-of-the-art facility currently being constructed in the former 500 Building to provide researchers with new opportunities to advance discoveries and potential treatments for pressing health conditions and biomedical challenges. The facility is anticipated to expand New York Tech’s research footprint and further its strategy to become a Carnegie-classified Research 2 university by 2028.

Drew Hughes (M.S. ’13)

As a child, Drew Hughes wanted to be a detective. And in a sense, that’s exactly what he has become—a “cyber defender,” as he calls himself. He’s the chief information security officer at URBN, which includes brands such as Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and others. He also served 13 years in the Army National Guard, starting during his days at New York Institute of Technology.

Learn how earning a master’s degree in cybersecurity at New York Tech helped propel him to where he is today.

PHOTO: KRISTA INFANTE, PHOTOGRAPHER AT URBN

Rob Brown Jr. (B.S. ’02)

Just six weeks after graduating from the physician assistant studies (PA) program, Rob Brown Jr. responded to the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers.

“I was home watching everything on TV,” says Brown. “I had been an active firefighter for five years but realized I could help more in a medical capacity rather than putting out fires. So I went to the firehouse with all my medical equipment.”

After seeing the massive loss of life during the attacks, Brown, who retired as a lieutenant with the New York City Fire Department (FDNY) in 2021, says he just couldn’t stay at his job assisting a private practice doctor with plastic surgeries.

Roxana (B.Arch. ’00) and John Kariyannis (B.Arch. ’01)

Roxana and John Kariyannis have been a remarkable duo ever since their days at New York Institute of Technology. It has only gotten better in the 18 years they have been married and raising their son and niece.

“We met in the Fundies class (Design Fundamentals) with Professor David Diamond,” says Roxana. “John was president of AIAS (American Institute of Architecture Students), and I was vice president. We were an amazing team running the student architecture club. We worked well together; we were a force.”

Roxana became interested in architecture because of her love of art.

Caroline Varlotta (D.O. ’20) and Gerard Varlotta (D.O. ’83)

Caroline Varlotta didn’t intend to follow her father’s footsteps into a medical career. But that’s where she landed, and Gerard “Rusty” Varlotta couldn’t be happier.

“One of the proudest days of my life was the White Coat Ceremony when I put the coat on Caroline,” says Gerard, a physical medicine and rehabilitation physician at White Plains Hospital in Westchester, N.Y., who was misty-eyed as he remembered the moment. Equally touching was her graduation from the College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYITCOM). She is now a fourth-year resident at Mount Sinai Health System and will graduate in June.