PEG Magazine - Spring 2016

FOR COUNCIL Natasha Pounder, P.Eng.

Natasha holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical Engineering, awarded by the University of Waterloo in 2009. After her first year, Natasha took on a leadership role mentoring new students. She led teams of five to seven leaders and up to 50 first-year students through competitive engineering challenges. During her last two years of study, Natasha was Sponsorship and Outreach Chair for the

for supplier quality management for the $20-billion baby and feminine care business units. While acting as a Raw Material Leader, Natasha took on an organizational role at the Feminine Care Women’s Leadership Network. She worked to organize the annual conference, bringing together women from P&G’s Latin and North American feminine care plants for mentoring, development, and networking. During both roles at P&G, Natasha acted as the site hazardous chemical owner. She was responsible for ensuring that all hazardous chemical processes met applicable safety standards, including management of change approvals and leading process hazard assessments. In order to advance her working knowledge in hazardous chemical safety protocol, Natasha became a plant volunteer firefighter. She was required to attend monthly, quarterly, and annual training courses and be on call for after-hours fire response. Natasha moved to Alberta to pursue a career opportunity with Cenovus Energy. She is currently working as a Process Engineering Area Leader at their Foster Creek facility. She has been with Cenovus since June 2013, where she worked as a Process Engineer for 16 months prior to her promotion. Since taking on the Area Leader role, Natasha has worked with the business excellence organization to improve the management of change process. She has worked to develop a culture of due diligence and data-driven decisions. In this new system, Cenovus is incorporating evaluation tools that she developed to ensure accuracy and consistency in project economic assessments prior to any spend. Since moving to Alberta, Natasha became involved with APEGA by taking on the Lakeland Branch Chair position after the April 2014 elections. Natasha is on her second consecutive term in this position. Natasha has worked to re-energize the region by increasing volunteer numbers from five to 15 Branch Executive Members. This team has worked together to restart the APEGA Annual Golf Tournament and support the local Scouts organization by helping with STEM camps, and is now working to kick off a FIRST Robotics team made up of students from the various local schools. Outside of volunteering, Natasha works with her spouse on their renewable energies startup company. This company has a solar power energy contract with the Independent Electricity System Operator in Ontario under the feed-in tariff program. They are currently working on expanding their portfolio to include micro hydropower sites via energizing abandoned flood control infrastructure. Natasha currently holds her P.Eng. designation in both Alberta and Ontario.

Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference. It was in this position that Natasha worked with human resources departments and senior executives of innovation drivers (such as Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA) to bring together 600 undergraduate students for a three-day educational conference. She collaborated with sponsors to select keynote speakers, workshops, and seminars on cutting-edge technologies that would inspire future generations. Natasha is currently a full-time student at the UN-supported University of the People where she is working to obtain her Bachelor’s in Computer Science. University of the People is an accredited, U.S.-based institution that delivers distance education in interactive classrooms. Their teaching model promotes diversity by fostering collaboration and peer-to- peer interaction between citizens from across the globe. Prior to moving to Alberta, Natasha worked for global consumer products leader, Procter and Gamble (P&G). In her five-year career at P&G, she worked as a Process Engineer on the development team for the chemical plant producing the Always Infinity material FlexFoam. After commissioning the global-supplying pilot plant and delivering a successful product launch, focus shifted to increasing plant capacity to meet growing market demand. Natasha improved process quality and reliability by automating the batch-making processes and implementing statistical process control for material additions. Natasha spent her last three years at P&G as a Raw Materials Leader for the Latin and North American Always manufacturing facilities. It was her responsibility to work with global counterparts to manage the quality of the supply chain and deliver raw material cost savings through the introduction of new materials or process optimization. In this role, Natasha led a global team of raw material leaders to develop and implement the standard operating procedure

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