Timothy B. Sennott ’09, 34, of Oakland, CA and Cape Cod, MA died unexpectedly on Jan. 21, 2020.
He was the much-loved son of Toni and the late Rob Sennott who died in 2019. He was also much loved by his sister Brooke Lightner, her husband Ryan, and their two children Tatum and Indy. He leaves behind his godfather Michael Sennott and a number of cousins, aunts, and uncles. He will be sorely missed by so many friends, one of whom described him as “an incredible person with an enormous heart, larger-than-life personality, and a passion and curiosity that always kept him moving and those around him enamored.”
Tim had a brilliant mind, a kind and gentle soul, a loving and considerate heart, an insatiable curiosity, and a breadth of creative interests and accomplishments.
Tim was born in New York City and lived there until he moved to Cape Cod in 1994. He attended Barnstable public schools and graduated from Falmouth Academy. He took a gap year to walk the Appalachian Trail and then moved to California.
He graduated magna cum laude with a BS from Santa Clara University in 2009. He was the president of the Green Club and belonged to a number of organizations including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He was also the Chief Engineer on Santa Clara’s entry – Refract House for Team California – into the Solar Decathlon, a US Department of Energy program, in 2009 which won third place overall. He received the Outstanding Mechanical Engineer award and the Senior Design Presentation award at Santa Clara. He was a member of Alpha Sigma Nu, the honor society of Jesuit Universities, and Pi Tau Sigma, an honorary mechanical engineering society.
He subsequently received his Master’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering in 2014 at the University of California, Berkeley where he won a number of fellowships including the Sandia Campus Executive Program Fellowship and The Ernest and Marjory Starkman Memorial Fellowship and where he continued as a graduate student researcher until 2018. He belonged to Berkeley Energy and Resources Collaborative.
While at Berkeley, he adventured into the entrepreneurial world and developed, with his team, a technology which will result in a patent for Recirculating Noble Gas Internal Powers Cycles. He went on to co-found Noble Thermodynamic Systems, Inc., a company working to commercialize the patented technology.
He was most recently employed at DNV GL in Oakland as a Data Scientist. He described himself as a multi-disciplinary engineer turned data scientist, passionate about sustained energy.
He loved building things, from web apps to interrelated computer devices to analog or digital art as well as contributing to open source Python projects. He was a gifted photographer; camping, hiking, and biking; studied astronomy; loved flying his drone; creating cyanotypes; brewing beer and creating amazing pointillism projects which he shared on his website.