A Recent Alum Shares the Value of a Tandon Education

The latest guest at Dean Katepalli Sreenivasan's roundtable discussions with students and notable alumni was not much older than the students themselves. Joe Landolina, who entered what was then affectionately known as NYU-Poly in September 2010, had broken new ground in bioengineering by his junior year and is now the CEO of a company that produces VETIGEL, a plant polymer-based gel he developed that stops bleeding instantaneously – an invention with particular utility in the surgical suite or on the military battlefield.

Alum Joe Landolina

Landolina discussed with the students the challenges in managing employees much older than himself, the Byzantine process of gaining FDA approval for a new product, and the satisfaction of being part of Brooklyn’s start-up culture.

Asked by Dean Sreenivasan what the school could do to ensure that other students would enjoy similar success, he replied, “Continue to stress internships and industry experience. I receive hundreds of applications every time I post a job opening, and I pay the most attention to the ones that list a solid work background.”

Landolina might have liked to stay longer to chat, but the demands on his time are constant: in the coming days he was off to a NATO gathering, he explained, where he was scheduled to meet with ministers of defense from around the world.