25 x 25
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: John Huet | Grooming: Lori Greene | Aug. 5, 2016
For our 25th Anniversary issue, we opted to look forward, not backward, and spotlight 25 local talents age 25 and under, from homegrown hotshots to overachievers lured by our stellar schools and sports teams. Get to know them now; this won’t be the last you hear from them.
Xander Bogaerts
This was supposed to be David Ortiz’s season. And while the 40-year-old slugger has launched a farewell tour worthy of a legend, this Red Sox season has also turned into the Year of Youth. Joining Ortiz as starters on this year’s All-Star team were 20-somethings Xander Bogaerts, Mookie Betts and Jackie Bradley Jr. Bogaerts, the 23-year-old shortstop and Aruba native, made his mark as a fresh-faced phenom during the team’s 2013 title run. He’s shown marked improvement each season since, blossoming this year as one of the best players in the American League. He’s part of a wave of young position-player talent that’s taken up residence at Fenway Park, the likes of which arguably haven’t been seen since the ’70s. “It’s a fun time for the organization. When I came up, I was one of the first young ones to come up, and Mookie and [others] followed,” Bogaerts says. The mix of speed and strength that those young players possess has been a major reason the Sox are leading the league in runs scored. Now Bogaerts is hoping that the young foundation’s regular-season statistical success will be followed by a postseason triumph. “We won my first year, and I was like, ‘Wow, is it this easy?’ Because I came up and won right away,” he says. “It’s been kind of hard after that. But you gotta perform year in and year out to be one of the top teams at the end. Second place, nobody remembers that.” The wiry infielder knows that winning won’t come easy, which is why he’s focused on improving his defense and staying physically fit during a season full of long road trips and day games after night games. It’s all part of his effort to avoid even one bad day on the field. “The expectations for the city and the team are so high here. It’s win-win-win-win mode every day. It doesn’t matter if you have an ace on the mound for the other team or if they’re on a 9-game losing streak. It’s fun when you come to the park every day, and you know you have that bit of pressure on yourself.” If all goes well, Ortiz will be passing the mantle to the young Sox this October. And perhaps Bogaerts & Co. will be handing him another World Series ring.
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Brian Babineau
Jaylen Brown
Nineteen-year-old Jaylen Brown—who took a graduate-level class during his freshman year at UC Berkeley—was reportedly labeled “too smart” by one not-too-bright NBA executive earlier this year, and he steers straight into the intellectual label when talking about his transition from playing college basketball to playing professionally for the Boston Celtics: “It’s like going from algebra to calculus.” Brown got his first taste of NBA action during summer exhibition games, and while he came away from that experience asking for patience in his game, he impressed enough onlookers to be named to the All-NBA Summer League second team. It was the latest step in a basketball career that Brown can’t even recall beginning. “I don’t feel like I chose to play basketball, but I feel like basketball kind of chose me,” he says. “I don’t know when I started working early, or when I started waking up in the middle of the night to watch film. It kind of just happened.” The 6-foot-7-inch forward was the Celtics’ highest draft pick in nearly two decades, creating outsized expectations that he could eventually be the superstar playmaker the team has chased since its rebuilding process began in 2013. And the confident Brown isn’t shying away from that label either: “I have to continue to develop, but naturally my playmaking ability is my best attribute.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Callow Lens
Kevin Clark
Kevin Clark is on the move. The 25-year-old Berklee alum is the mind behind Point Motion, a motion-controlled device that translates movement into sound and effects. He created the prototype in the one-bedroom apartment he shared with two roommates; now the product is in the hands of early adopters and ready for release this fall. “Guitar players won’t need to worry about effect pedals, and dancers can orchestrate entire pieces of music with their body,” Clark explains. “We already have DJs in Switzerland using this to control lights and sounds in their live performances, and dancers at Boston Conservatory dancing the music, rather than dancing to it.” He’s also been working with medical institutions to use Point Motion to help people with autism and Alzheimer’s, donating $40,000 worth of Point Motion products to schools, clinics and hospitals across the country. Work to incorporate sign language technology for use at retail checkout stations is ongoing, but Clark says this is just the beginning: “By mid-2017, we will have integrated facial recognition and hand-tracking to have established the most universal and intuitive motion-control system in history.”
Tom Coburn
“College dropout” is far from synonymous with failure in the startup scene, and Tom Coburn joined the ranks of Gates, Jobs and Zuckerberg when he abandoned Boston College—and plans for med school—to found digital marketing platform Jebbit. The idea came when he was waiting for a flight and opened Hulu on his laptop; an ad started playing, and he automatically opened Facebook in another tab while he waited for it to end. “But instead of scrolling through my newsfeed, I realized, a brand had spent money to show me something, and I couldn’t even think of the company, let alone the product,” the now 25-year-old says. “I wanted to create the most efficient way for a company or organization to understand, educate and influence its audience on a one-to-one basis.” Coburn and his team had to pitch their product to more than 500 businesses before securing their first deal; now they count Dunkin’ Donuts, CBS and Honda among their clients and have unveiled a new mobile product that’s a finalist for MassTLC’s mobile innovation of the year. And while he’s got his eye firmly on the future, Coburn credits a past mentor for some of his success. “My eighth-grade science teacher told me, ‘Life is full of experiences; a full life is taking advantage of them,’ ” he says. “That stuck with me.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Evan Schneider
Grace Connor
For Grace Connor, 16 was sweet indeed. The Milton Academy student spent that milestone year founding little g ice cream co., a line of small-batch ice cream packed with homemade baked goods like brownies and cookies. The young entrepreneur—who also plays the viola, the harp and varsity squash—started out running a bakery out of her home as a preteen, making treats for friends and family and even catering weddings. But she wanted a business with more flexibility, since baked goods have a short shelf life—until they’re packed in ice cream. So she went for it. “I was confident in the quality and creativity of my creations, and I had confidence that others would love them too.” That confidence was well-founded: She now operates her business out of Dorchester’s CommonWealth Kitchen, and Formaggio Kitchen Cambridge, Siena Farms and Brookline Grown have all scooped up her product. But Connor has even bigger plans. “I want little g to be a household name, the next Ben & Jerry’s,” the 17-year-old says. “I want little g ice cream to be on the shelves of grocery stores all across America.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Mariah Tauger
Johnny Fayad and Ali Kothari
Running late paid off for New Grounds Food founders Johnny Fayad, 22, and Ali Kothari, 21, who dreamed up their CoffeeBar—an energy bar packed with a cup of fair-trade joe—as busy freshman business students at Northeastern. “We started this partly as a joke, just running late to our morning classes and wondering why we couldn’t just eat our coffee and get the day going quicker,” Fayad explains. They cooked up early prototypes in their dorm’s shared kitchen and entered Northeastern’s Spring 2013 Husky Startup Challenge; a Kickstarter campaign the next year reached its goal in just 15 hours. Now their CoffeeBars can be found in 400 retail locations across the U.S., including local Shaw’s and Star Markets, and they hope to reach 10,000 stores by 2018. The pair’s recipe for success? “Northeastern has been a huge resource for us,” says Kothari, who notes that they received two grants from the university and plenty of support from peers: Student-run design studio Scout helped create the packaging, a campus legal group lent a hand with trademark paperwork, and New Grounds Food is one of 180 ventures enrolled in the student-led accelerator IDEA. In turn, they’ve sought to support fellow students and entrepreneurs, donating a percentage of proceeds to help fund a new school in Nicaragua, a microloan program for entrepreneurs in Guatemala and the after-school program buildOn—a cause they also supported with a Boston Marathon run, fueling their training, naturally, with CoffeeBars. Not that the two coffee connoisseurs have sworn off their beloved pour-overs. As Fayad says, “We try not to eat through too much of our revenue.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Amber Marie Chavez
Sage Humphries
Ballerina Sage Humphries makes triple threats look like underachievers. The 18-year-old of many talents recently recorded her original songs with a producer who’s worked with the likes of Aerosmith and the Fray; she also acts and models, having walked New York Fashion Week runways and posed for photographer Michel Comte for a shoot for Vogue Italia, during which her dance background came in handy. “In both cases, you must be able to take criticism well and be adaptable,” says Humphries, who, after landing multiple school and company scholarships and winning the Youth America Grand Prix regionals last year, just joined Boston Ballet II. Humphries has her sights set on one day becoming a principal dancer. Until then, she has at least one skill she’s looking to improve upon: “I truly wish I had better handwriting.”
Emma Johnson
Boston University sophomore Emma Johnson hit the jackpot early with her jewelry and accessories line Em John, scoring a feature in O, The Oprah Magazine. “That’s when I knew Em John wasn’t simply a little hobby with teenage friends,” the 19-year-old says. “This was, and is, a real business.” Her designs may be all about fun—think colorful emoji keychains, tassel necklaces and glittery charm bracelets—but the business has serious benefits: Johnson is on track to graduate without debt. It’s a goal she set while she was still in high school. “Too often we think we have to wait for the perfect moment, or we assume we don’t know enough to possibly make it work,” she says. “But sometimes just having the idea and the hustle is good enough.”
Jennifer Maria and Xavier Savage
Keeping up with a college course load and a full-time job is only the half of it for Jennifer Maria, 24, and Xavier Savage, 20. The Dorchester natives are both enrolled at UMass Boston—and they both report to City Hall’s head honcho. Previously a liaison for the Latino community, Maria now travels by Mayor Walsh’s side as a special assistant. “A typical day for me would be attending all kinds of events with the mayor and responding to any requests or concerns from constituents,” says the sociology major. And as the advance person for the mayor, Savage is charged with putting together his brief book, the no-walk-in-the-park task of finding parking for foreign diplomats and the all-important job of keeping Walsh on time. As Savage—who also volunteers as a youth leader at his church and works with the All Dorchester Sports League—explains, “My job in its most basic form is to make sure the mayor has everything and knows everything he needs to know to have a smooth day.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez
Casey McQuillen
Andover native Casey McQuillen made it to Hollywood on the 2014 season of American Idol, but her time in the spotlight on the hit show isn’t the 23-year-old’s proudest accomplishment. That distinction goes to the 2016 Berklee grad’s “You Matter” tour, which combines music and motivational speaking to promote an anti-bullying message to middle and high school students across the country. The project got its start when an old teacher invited McQuillen to guest-teach a songwriting class, for which she chose three songs she’d written in middle school that dealt with bullying and self-confidence (the singer/songwriter says she’s long battled anxiety). “I wanted the subject matter to be relevant to the students,” she says. “The students loved the program, and I was invited back to perform for the whole grade, and then the entire school, and then the neighboring middle schools.” Word continued to spread with help from her Idol fame; now McQuillen has brought her program to more than 100 schools, performing for more than 25,000 students. “I want to use my platform to connect with people, share stories and give a voice to those who think they don’t matter,” she says. “That’s the point: You matter!”
Lizzie Milanovich
Emerson alum Lizzie Milanovich’s first professional show after college was the scariest piece she’s worked on, and not because of its mouthful of a title: It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First But It Is Alright Now. “It was a two-and-a-half-hour play, most of which I was on stage by myself, and I had to do the whole thing in a Serbian accent,” the 24-year-old says of Theatre on Fire’s raw drama, which earned her rave reviews. Since then, the actor and writer has seen her own words come to life on stage in Fresh Ink Theatre Company’s December production of It’s Not About My Mother, originally written for her senior thesis, and appeared in Brown Box Theatre Project’s touring production of The Taming of the Shrew. “Brown Box brings theater to people and communities that would normally not have access to theater, and working with them is some of the most rewarding work I’ve ever done.” The rising star also relished her most recent role in From the Sea, To Somewhere Else, a new work that hit the Boston Center for the Arts in July. “I played a mermaid! Which, like, embarrassingly was a dream come true,” Milanovich says. “For me, it was an identity play that sort of ended with the idea that your identity isn’t something that must be stagnant. It can and will be a thing that ebbs and flows as time goes on and you grow up. Which is true for humans, too, I think, not just mermaids.”
Max Opgenoord
Max Opgenoord first heard about Hyperloop the same day that Elon Musk unveiled a white paper on the concept in 2013. The idea is that a pod would travel through a tube, delivering people or goods from point A to point B at speeds of up to 760 mph. When Musk, the SpaceX CEO and Tesla co-founder, announced a competition in 2015 for teams to create a pod for a 1-mile tube track, Opgenoord knew he had to get involved. He joined MIT’s Hyperloop team as part of his work toward a master’s degree; the team won the pod design competition in January and is slated to take part in a test-track run within the next year. “Planes and trains, while exciting themselves, are limited to the infrastructure—for planes, think of runway lengths and airport availability,” Opgenoord says. “With the Hyperloop, nothing is built yet. This means that we can design and optimize the system as a whole—instead of only the pod—using the newest design methodologies and technologies.” Now working on his doctorate at MIT, Opgenoord, 23, won’t be satisfied with simply chasing the Hyperloop concept: “I want to work on high-profile, high-tech engineering projects, which would also allow me to work on something else every few years.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Brian Babineau
David Pastrnak
When first-round draft pick David Pastrnak took to the ice in 2014, the Czech import was the youngest skater in the NHL—and he quickly became the youngest player in Bruins’ history to net a penalty shot and the franchise’s first teenager to score a regular season overtime goal. Pastrnak wrapped up the second half of his rookie campaign as the team’s leading scorer, with 26 points in 41 games, and went on to suit up for five more games in his sophomore year, scoring as many more goals. Says the 20-year-old, “You get smarter every game you play, with or against star players from around the league.” Coming into his third season, the winger brings his lightning speed, his dangerous shot (one that drew notice after making opposing goalie Cam Ward’s water bottle explode) and a newly learned lesson: “Every single game of those 82 is important,” notes Pastrnak, pointing out the team missed out on the playoffs the past two seasons by two points or less. “Every point matters.”
Maxwell Perry
Maxwell Perry, 19, has always had a knack for entrepreneurship—he started a screen-printed T-shirt biz in middle school, then moved on to hawking homemade beef jerky in high school. Now, as a Babson College sophomore, he’s incorporating philanthropy as the founder of Beantown Blankets, a nonprofit that’s partnered with Father Bill’s shelters in Quincy and Brockton to give a blanket to a homeless person for every purchase. “Since launching the first week of June, our organization has provided 125 blankets to the homeless,” Perry says, noting that the Fall River-produced blankets are waterproof on one side and fleece on the other. “We hope to donate well over 1,000 by Christmas.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Tiffany Von Photography
Daniella Pierson
“I love staying updated on trending topics … but was frustrated at the amount of websites I had to check daily to be in the know,” says Daniella Pierson, 21. “I realized that other busy women probably felt the same.” So in her sophomore year at Boston University, Pierson founded The Newsette, a daily “mini-magazine” of aggregated style, entertainment and fashion news. She emailed more than 400 friends, inviting them to subscribe. “Slowly I would see people in the BU Starbucks reading The Newsette who I didn’t recognize,” Pierson recalls. Fewer than two years in, The Newsette has readers in more than 100 countries, from age 14 to 65. “Now that we have an ambassador program with over 200 girls from around the world, we have been able to expand our audience globally.” Pierson wakes up at 6 am every weekday to write the mini-magazine and answer reader emails, balancing her growing business with academic and social obligations—but her hard work is paying off. “The most rewarding experience I’ve had throughout this journey was when I announced I was looking for summer interns … and received over 100 applications in just one day,” she says. “That moment made me realize that I was actually doing something that people believed in.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Ken Rivard
Neil Quigley
Most young Bostonians look forward to their 21st birthdays. But Neil Quigley, who graduated from the UK’s Brewlab at 19, really couldn’t wait. Unable to find a job as a brewer because of his age, the Newton native traveled to Canada when he was 20 to further his beer education, eventually becoming the world’s “unofficial youngest cicerone”—a sort of beer sommelier—at 20 years and 8 months old. Quigley went on to draw accolades behind the bar at the late Ames Street Deli; now he’s at Jody Adams’ buzzy new Back Bay spot Porto. He’s also in charge of flavor development for the Cape Cod-based Farmer Willie’s Alcoholic Ginger Beer. At 21, he’s moved past some of his age-related challenges and is looking forward to a bright future in the beverage industry. “I’ve been laughed at and looked at sideways more than I’ve been complimented for my age, but I think it helped me weed out the unsupportive, close-minded people, and it helped me find mentors that cared and were willing to take a chance on me,” he says. “Being able to work with some of the best people in the industry is what excites me the most. I’m always looking to innovate and learn from others, and my current job is a great opportunity to do just that.”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: David Shadrake
Alexandra Shadrow
Entrepreneurship runs in the blood for Alexandra Shadrow, who spent summers as a child making cold calls at her dad’s metal distribution and recycling company. Now the 23-year-old is the founder of UNItiques, a website where college students can buy and sell gently used furniture and clothing. “I love that UNItiques has given me a way to carry on my family’s legacy of sustainability,” Shadrow says. She founded her company (originally called BUtiques) as a student at BU, after a “super scary Craigslist incident” when a man who responded to her post refused to leave her apartment. So she created a site that required a BU email address to join. “Over 1,000 students joined within the first two months, and students from other colleges were begging me to expand,” she says. Four years later, UNItiques has users on more than 400 campuses and a just-launched platform that allows members to buy and sell nationwide; Shadrow now has a team of three employees and more than 40 interns not much younger than herself. “It pushed me to grow up from a teenager to a CEO quickly,” she says. But Shadrow still maintains plenty of youthful optimism: “What kind of entrepreneur would I be if I didn’t see myself laughing with [Nasty Gal founder] Sophia Amoruso on a yacht in 10 years?”
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: AFH Photography Teens
Jonathan Tejeda
“Seeing something you created in large scale, in public, is huge,” says graphic designer Jonathan Tejeda. At age 18, he’s already seen his work cover outsized canvases, from a Boston Properties commission at 100 Federal St., which had him adorning a garage entrance with a 1935 Buick Y-Job’s curvy contours, to a massive mural for Gillette’s HQ that features images of the Citgo sign and other local landmarks. Tejeda tackled such projects as an apprentice at a local nonprofit that celebrated its own 25th anniversary this year, Artists for Humanity, which provides mentoring and paid employment to under-resourced teens. It’s helped Tejeda fill his portfolio with work for other big-name clients, including Converse, the MBTA, Barnes & Noble and several universities; right now, he’s working on T-shirt designs for Yale—and, he says, looking forward to starting college himself this fall at MassArt, where he hopes to dive into photography and filmmaking as well as design. “I’m just really excited to learn a whole bunch of new art forms.”
Agnes Ugoji
The Louder Than a Bomb Massachusetts Youth Poetry Slam Festival lived up to its name when Agnes Ugoji took the stage this spring. In intense, incantatory tones, the 16-year-old performed an original poem about Boko Haram, the terrorist group that’s devastated her native Nigeria. “They have been destroying so many of my people in my country,” Ugoji explains. “I just had to write about it.” Crowned the fest’s first-ever individual youth poetry slam champion, she went on to represent Massachusetts at the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam Festival in Washington, D.C., in July—but to Ugoji, it’s not about the competition. “I just see it as a community of young writers coming together and showcasing what we’ve written, sharing all these different ideas.” That’s also an apt description of her experience with 826 Boston, a nonprofit that helps students ages 6-18 develop their writing skills. It operates the Writers’ Room and slam team at Roxbury’s John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, where Ugoji is a junior who hopes to attend Princeton and pursue a career in public health. “I don’t think that I want to make poetry my livelihood, but I would definitely like it to be part of my life,” she says, pointing to poets Emi Mahmoud and Crystal Valentine and Nigerian authors Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as writers who inspire her. “Whatever they write always resonates with me. I want to write about things they write about and topics that they may not have fully touched upon.”
Sara Volz
Plenty of teenagers make use of the space underneath their mattresses—usually to stash away a week’s worth of dirty laundry. But that’s where Sara Volz built a laboratory to study algae as a sustainable fuel source. That homegrown project led to her winning the Intel Science Talent Search in 2013 and earned her a shoutout from President Obama at the White House Science Fair. “Even now, three years later, I can still barely believe that happened,” she says. Now, the MIT senior is at work on genome engineering technology CRISPR, and this year, in between her usual load of coursework, extracurricular painting and performing with a capella group the Centrifugues, Volz is set on applying to biochemistry and biophysics grad programs. Says the 21-year-old aspiring professor: “Science isn’t boring or the tedious memorizing of facts; it’s the process of trying to figure out the world around us, asking a testable question and finding more questions.”
Max Wallack
Sure, Max Wallack has all the credentials of a whiz kid. He graduated summa cum laude from Boston University at 18, and the 20-year-old will begin his second year at Harvard Medical School this fall. But his efforts outside the classroom are even more impressive. While helping to care for his great-grandmother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, the Natick native saw how using puzzles could calm dementia patients and provide other mental benefits. So he founded PuzzlesToRemember, which has supplied more than 63,000 puzzles to more than 3,800 nursing facilities around the world. “I found that most available puzzles had too many small pieces to be beneficial,” he says. “That is why I contacted Springbok to produce puzzles with 36 very large-sized, colorful pieces, with memory-provoking themes.” Wallack has also co-authored a book explaining Alzheimer’s disease to children, and he’s volunteered thousands of hours in research in the field. “I learned very early on how devastating this disease is to both patients and their families.” Now, he’s making it his life’s work to eliminate as much of that devastation as possible.
By Improper Staff | Photo Credit: Nicole Anderson
Branick Weix
As a kid, Boston College sophomore Branick Weix would ask for old radios and TVs for his birthday—just so he could take them apart. Once he got to high school, he translated that love for tech into his SkyLink Productions drone business, taking aerial photographs and video for marketing purposes, starting with a nearby golf course. “I spent a lot of my senior year in high school cold-calling potential clients and trying to diversify my work portfolio,” the 19-year-old explains. He soon connected with Minnesota nonprofit Seeds of Change and the Leatherback Trust, which tapped him to bring his drones to Costa Rica to help track female sea turtle nesting without disturbing the natural environment. “In what would take a person three to four hours to accomplish, we finished in less than 11 minutes with the drone,” he recalls. “Some people may look at it as technology encroaching everywhere, but I think that as technology gets cheaper, faster and smaller, we’ll see it being used in new and innovative ways to help preserve and enhance those natural and remote areas.”
Murphy Wonsick
Twenty-four-year-old Murphy Wonsick may be a doctoral student at Northeastern, but she’s still focusing on mastering baby steps—for NASA’s humanoid robot, that is. As part of one of three internships she’s had with the agency, Wonsick is aiding in the development of Valkyrie, a 6-foot-tall robot being designed to help astronauts. “My current research focus is footstep planning. Basically, trying to get Valkyrie to successfully navigate from point A to point B by planning where she can place her feet in order to avoid obstacles and, of course, not fall down,” she explains. “I would love to work on a project that would send my work to space, so, in a way, a part of me would be there.” But her engineering skills have plenty of down-to-earth applications too: Murphy has also been working on an app to improve the tracking of blood samples that could help combat epidemics in developing countries.
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