Jesse Vaughan, Manager of Design Services
Meet Jesse Vaughan, who recently joined ACDi as Manager of Design Services.
Jesse was born in Clearwater, FL before moving to Northern Virginia where he was raised after relocating at the age of two. An avid sports fan and athlete, Jesse played soccer, baseball, football, and basketball growing up. He excelled in basketball and it quickly became his passion. His position was point guard and he modeled his game after his favorite player, Allen Iverson. He was the captain and leader on a team that had an undefeated season and won the championship!
He soon realized that being vertically challenged at 5’7”, his dreams of playing in the NBA were most likely just beyond his reach, pun intended! So, he decided to go to school to pursue a degree in Construction Management, specializing in the new-home building sector.
After a year it became apparent to him that this was no longer a field that interested him and discontinued his education. Unbeknownst to him, and the rest of the country, the housing market would crash and take the economy into a recession along with it. This was 2008, the same year he was set to graduate and go into the field; looking back he considers this a blessing in disguise.
It was at this fork in the road when he decided to follow in the generations’ footsteps before him and embark on a career in the electronics industry. His grandfather and father are both industry veterans and he grew up in the industry. The running joke in the family is they all “bleed solder mask green”.
Jesse cut his teeth as an Inside Sales Rep at DDi (now TTM-Sterling). He managed a subset of customers internally as well as supported Direct Sales Reps in providing quotes and communicating delivery dates for their customers’ orders. He also was able to work side-by-side with the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) department and assisted in communicating engineering questions for booked orders going through tooling.
Transitioning from there, he went to work at his father’s manufacturing rep firm initially in a business development role for two years before being promoted into the Managing Director role for years three-through-five. His roles consisted mainly of customer retention and driving new business initiatives for U.S.A.-based principals that fabricated high-reliability, PCB technology products.
Jesse had reached a point in his career where he was truly enjoying the electronics manufacturing industry and what he was doing, but wanted to get a more in-depth foundational understanding of electronics and took a job at an electronics contract manufacturer located in Virginia in a electronics manufacturing engineering role while simultaneously taking night classes towards a Bachelor’s degree at ITT-Technical institute, studying Electrical Engineering Technology. It was at this time he also had a son, Julian!
Jesse excelled in the manufacturing engineering role, he was internally promoted where he personally oversaw 100+ unique mil/aero new product introductions (NPI) primarily for his main internal customer assignment, a government prime contractor working on high level defense/aerospace programs.
Jesse is IPC-certified to J-STD-001 and IPC-A-610 and in 2019 was accepted into the IPC Emerging Engineers Program. He is currently in year two of the three-year program and looking forward, has expressed interest in the IPC Emerging Managers Program being developed by IPC, which would be a complementary follow up to his new role in management at ACDi.
Jesse has laid a great foundation for success in the electronics industry and is appreciative of the opportunity offered by ACDi to keep growing and is excited for this next chapter in his career.
In his spare time, you can find Jesse playing Transformers with his now five-year old son, reading a book, or trying to hit it big in the stock market!
Favorite quote: “The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Marcus Aurelius – Meditations, Book 5.20
Jamie Kane, Project Manager
Meet Jamie Kane, ACDi’s newest member of the project management team.
Jamie Kensinger grew up in Indiana, PA with two sisters and a brother. She describes her parents as tough, especially her Dad who was in the U.S. Army and fought in the Korean War as a sharpshooter. He was a member of the Army National Guard and a musician who played in the 28th division Army marching band. He met her mother in Indiana University of Pennsylvania near her hometown. Her mother was a homemaker and still lives in the house where Jamie was raised.
After graduating from high school, Jamie worked in Houston, TX, wiring generators for offshore oil rigs, and where she discovered an aptitude for engineering. She eventually graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering Technology.
After graduating from Penn State, she landed her first job as a drafter at Hekimian Labs in Gaithersburg, MD. At Hekimian, she was given the opportunity to design electronic enclosures for remote test equipment and open enclosures for test access. Both enclosures sold as a system and at the time were installed in about 5,000 central offices in the United States.
She left Hekimian to pursue more personal broadening and technical opportunities at Patapsco Designs located in Frederick, MD, but not before meeting her husband, Greg. At Patapsco, Jamie progressed through the ranks as a Mechanical Engineer, Technical Services Manager and then Program Manager of Engineering Programs. Her most challenging and memorable experience was traveling abroad to England to document a new nylon fiber testing device.
Jamie and her husband have a son who graduated with a master’s degree in Cellular Biology from UNC-Charlotte. While he was in college, Jamie went back to work as the Configuration Control Manager at an electronics manufacturing services provider, where she moved through the ranks to eventually become a Program Manager with customers in the defense industrial base as either government prime or subcontractors. She was tasked with many start-up opportunities and worked closely with customers to set-up electronics manufacturing initial builds, test and complete electronics production operations.
Her most challenging program at the time, was to start up a large private jet wiring harness for an OEM of avionics products. She hired wire and cable harness specialists who had knowledge of complex harness boards and worked very closely with the customer to document and build these avionics wire harnesses along with managing the program and the team.
In 2014 she earned her Program Management Professional Certification (PMP) which she still maintains and is an active member of the Program Management Institute.
Jamie is thrilled to join ACDi as a Project Manager where she brings a wealth of electronics manufacturing experience with her. She has stepped right in to manage some of ACDi’s larger government and defense accounts, leveraging her past experience to provide a high level of customer service.
In her free time, Jamie enjoys going to dinner and movies with friends and family. One of her favorite movies is Forest Gump with some of the most memorable quotes that can inspire you. Her favorite is “I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floatin’ around accidental-like on a breeze. But I, I think maybe it’s both.”