Milad Girgis: Manufacturing Success
From the time he was in high school, Milad Girgis (’97, Mechanical Engineering; MS ’01, Engineering Management) knew he wanted to be an engineer. He just didn’t know what kind. As a student at CECS in the 1990s, he was team leader for CSUN’s Formula One car in the Society of Automotive Engineers’ Collegiate Design Series competition, and he thought he wanted to work for a car company. When he took part in the Honors Co-Op internship program, he was hoping to land a spot with an aerospace company to gain relevant experience. Instead, his internship was at a small medical device company in Chatsworth—and that detour changed the entire course of his career.
“My concentration was machine design as an undergraduate, and I learned that the medical device industry required machines, so I was able to transfer the processes and gained a love for the industry,” he explains. “It’s a testament to what the university teaches about process thinking.”
Girgis worked at that company, International Remote Imaging Systems (IRIS), for a year while in school, then stayed on as a mechanical engineer another year and a half after graduation.
“When I was at IRIS, some of the best advice I got was from a project manager, who told me to keep going on and get a graduate degree,” he says. He enrolled in a master’s program in mechanical engineering at CSUN, but eventually he realized that he wanted to lead teams, not work strictly as an engineer. He transferred his coursework into the Engineering Management program and received his M.S. degree in 2001.
By then he was working at Medtronic MiniMed, in manufacturing engineering, quickly working his way up from a product support engineer to a supervisor of project engineering to senior manager between 1998 and 2004, overseeing its disposables business. He followed a similar trajectory at his next employer, Advanced Bionics (now a division of Boston Scientific), where he began as a manager and then, as his talent and experience became obvious, was promoted to senior manager, then to director of manufacturing and process engineering.
Today Girgis is putting both his CSUN degrees to work as vice president of operations for Boston Scientific’s neuromodulation products (spinal cord stimulators that address neuropathic pain). He feels strongly that his impressive career arc reflects the quality of his education at CECS, where he now serves on the industry advisory board for Mechanical Engineering.
“What they offer is practical experience,” he says. “You can come out of school, write a report, take an unknown problem and solve it in a practical way. Instead of spending an eternity talking about the theory of why something didn’t work, you can go fix it. It’s a wonderful school.”