Thomas Ruggiero.
Tom Ruggiero, 34
Principal at AKF Group
Unlike most people on this list, Tom Ruggiero has largely built his career outside of New York City. The Garden City, N.Y., native graduated from SUNY Binghamton in 2009 with a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and struggled to find work during the Great Recession. He spent the first two years of his career as a project manager at an HVAC contractor, ASM Mechanical, in New York City, before deciding to relocate to Connecticut.
Desperate to start his career as an engineer, he landed at mechanical engineering firm Altieri Sebor Weber in Norwalk, Conn. He worked there for four and a half years, followed by a year-long stint at DTC, an engineering firm in Hamden, Conn., until he landed at AKF Group in 2015.
Working out of the New Haven office, much of his job has focused on Yale University. He has worked as an on-call engineer for the university for many years, handling run-of-the-mill issues with boilers, lab space design and everything in between. He also oversaw the renovation of the university’s Manuscript and Archives Department in the historic Sterling Memorial Library. The challenge, he said, was “trying to install modern infrastructure in buildings that predated air conditioning and making it seem like it was intended to be there.”
In addition, he recently completed the renovation of another historic building on Yale’s campus, the 220,000-square-foot 320 York Street, which is known as the “Humanities Quadrangle” for housing the offices of 15 humanities departments and graduate student meeting spaces.
Ruggiero has also been involved in the redevelopment of the former Winchester Repeating Arms manufacturing campus, which is largely located in a historic district spread across 75 acres in New Haven. He helped pharmaceutical startup Halda Therapeutics build out its new headquarters and lab facility at 115 Munson Street in Science Park, a public-private redevelopment project aimed at turning that former Winchester rifle factory campus into a biotech hub. And at 5 Science Park, he is working on the fit-out of a vivarium — a research lab for animals — for an operator that leases out 250-square-foot spaces to pharmaceutical companies in need of research and lab space.
Now married with two kids, a 4-year-old son and a 6-year-old daughter, in Trumbull, Conn., Ruggiero coaches his son in T-ball and helps manage his daughter’s busy schedule of horseback riding, dance, gymnastics and Girl Scouts.—R.B.R.
