Our team is growing! We would like to introduce a couple of new faces you will be seeing on the Systems Team at Electronic Drives and Controls (EDC).
“We are very excited to have Tom Frangieh and Anthony Fasolo join the EDC team, both bring unique talents and skillsets which will help our team meet the ever expanding needs of our industrial automation customers,” said Chuck Dillard, vice president of engineering at EDC.
Tom Frangieh
Tom Frangieh recently joined the Systems Team at EDC, and is currently working with Anton Bergmann in the assembly area. Tom is working on projects involving wiring control drives, PLCs and line reactors, and as he says, “all that good stuff.” “I’m really excited to be part of this team,” Tom said. “I feel like I’m learning a lot.”
Before coming to EDC, Tom was the warehouse manager for a technology company in Clifton, NJ. Tom attended Berkeley College in West Patterson, NJ where he received his bachelor’s degree in sports management.
Sports are a passion for Tom, who played goalie for his college soccer team for three years, and soccer, basketball and wrestling throughout high school. “Soccer was my main sport; I had the most fun with that,” he said.
In addition to playing sports, Tom enjoys watching his favorite NFL team, the Dallas Cowboys. Not rooting for the hometown team can be tricky. Tom tells us he tries not to watch football with Giants fan and longtime pal and coworker Eric Dillard due to their friendly team rivalry. When asked how he became a Cowboys fan, Tom quips, “My family are all Cowboys fans. I was born into it!”
Aside from watching football, Tom also stays busy on the weekends working with his family’s Sparta, NJ-based business Fat Stevo’s Cheesesteaks. Although the restaurant has only been open for a couple of years, it has quickly gained a loyal customer following and garnered several awards. Fat Stevo’s was chosen by NJ.com as the #3 best cheesesteak in the state, and was recognized by Yelp as the #7 favorite place to eat around Jefferson.
Anthony Fasolo
Anthony Fasolo is currently the newest member of the EDC team. Anthony is a project engineer and is working with Joe Maloney, Scott Pospishil, Zack Fischer, Joseph “Waldo” DeMartino and Antoinette Latella under the direction of engineering manager Shawn Leichliter. Anthony comes to EDC from Rowan University, where he was pursuing his master’s degree and working at the Rowan University Virtual Reality Center. Anthony had earlier graduated from Rowan with his bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering with a minor in mathematics.
While working at the Rowan University Virtual Reality Center as an undergraduate, Anthony was invited to enroll in graduate school, funded by the Center. In his experience there, he worked with many higher-level computer programming languages such as C and C Sharp, and did a lot with visualization – virtual and augmented reality. Anthony’s favorite project while at the Virtual Reality Center was an application he developed for the Microsoft HoloLens, an augmented reality headset. The HoloLens allows programmers to overlay information on whatever the wearer is viewing in the real world.
“I had a customer come to me and ask for a demo application to show his idea for training surgeons,” said Anthony. “He wanted to display an instructional video in a floating screen on an augmented reality device. The surgeon-in-training wears the device and watches the instructional video while performing a surgery, and controls it by voice commands. Instead of having to leave the operating room and go watch the instructional surgery video on a TV and then come back to the operating room and try to remember it, the surgeon would be able to watch the training video while concurrently performing the surgery. It was a very cool project, and the customer was really pleased in the end.”
After the Virtual Reality Design Center’s student funding ran out, Anthony left the college just a couple of classes shy of achieving his master’s degree. Now at EDC, Anthony has been spending time becoming familiar with the software systems the company uses to program drives and control systems. He says, “I have the knowledge for it, it’s just looking at something new and trying to figure out how it works. I’ve always had hands-on experience with wiring and electronics because I worked as an alarm technician in the past.”
In his spare time, Anthony enjoys building hobby electronics. He also enjoys watching professional football and hockey, and his all-time favorite team is the New Jersey Devils.
Anthony, like Tom, is a longtime friend of Eric Dillard – they all attended high school together! Anthony looks forward to better getting to know the rest of the EDC staff. “It’s been really good these first few days. Everyone has been very helpful working with me and teaching me,” he said. “They are good guys over here; I like it a lot.”
