ALUULA Composites

After graduating from Queen's, I moved to the Lower Mainland to join ALUULA Composites as a Materials Developer on the Early Stage R&D team. ALUULA develops lightweight composite textiles for demanding applications across outdoor equipment and other technical products. My role sits at the intersection of material science, testing, manufacturing, and product development, giving me the opportunity to work on problems from the scale of individual material layers through to the performance of a finished product.

Much of my work starts with an open-ended technical problem. A customer may identify a limitation in the field, a new application may require a different balance of weight, durability, or other properties, or a promising material may behave differently as it moves from a small prototype toward larger-scale manufacturing. I work to translate those observations into measurable engineering questions by defining requirements, developing prototype constructions, establishing meaningful benchmarks, and designing the testing needed to understand what is actually driving performance.

My projects have spanned lightweight pack and shelter textiles, circular raw materials, novel composite platforms, welded construction, inflated structures, and every other aspect of ALUULA's work. The work is highly hands-on: I build samples, develop processing methods, investigate failures, coordinate external testing, and use mechanical and environmental characterization to compare materials and guide the next iteration. When existing test methods do not capture the behaviour we and our customers care about, I also design fixtures, experimental methods, and analysis tools to better connect material properties with how a product performs in use. I bring my background in climbing and other outdoor experience to the table, bridging field use with lab testing, and taking prototypes out to see where and how they fail.

One of the parts of the role I enjoy most is seeing material development influence the way a product itself can be designed. ALUULA's construction methods make it possible to reconsider details such as seams, reinforcements, attachment points, stiffness, and load transfer rather than simply substituting one textile for another. Working on these problems has pushed me to think beyond individual material properties and consider how material architecture, manufacturing, geometry, and end-use interact as a system.

As my role has developed, I have taken on more responsibility for coordinating projects and translating technical work across teams. I work with quality and production to make testing and documentation transferable beyond R&D, with suppliers and external labs to fill technical gaps, and with commercial teams and customers to understand requirements and incorporate feedback into development priorities. I have learned to be deliberate about what early results can tell us, what still needs validation, and what evidence is required before a material or process is ready for the next stage.

My time at ALUULA continues to reinforce what I enjoy most about engineering: taking an uncertain real-world problem, understanding it at a fundamental level, building and testing possible solutions, and carrying the result toward something that can actually be manufactured and used. It has also deepened my interest in the space between materials, product design, and field performance, where small decisions can have a significant effect on the finished product.