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Tighe & Bond Project Manager, Jennifer Reynolds, was chosen as a 2025 BusinessWest 40 Under Forty honoree. Read about Jennifer’s passion for her work, and her leadership in volunteer efforts to train the next generation of water industry professionals, in BusinessWest’s article below.

In 2024, Jennifer Reynolds received CT AWWA’s Outstanding Young Professional Award, in recognition of her support of CT AWWA’s work to advance young professionals in the water industry.

Growing up, Jennifer Reynolds was always interested in math and science, particularly their intersection in chemistry. But while studying chemical engineering in college, she struggled with potential career applications of that degree.

“A lot of chemical engineers go into oil and gas or even pharmaceuticals, and none of those felt quite right,” she recalled, but when she started taking classes in environmental engineering and the water and wastewater field, something clicked.

“Those are also chemistry, but applications that felt better to my heart and soul,” Reynolds said. And she never forgot that. After earning degrees at the University of Connecticut and UMass Amherst, she worked in the power industry in Washington, D.C. for a time, but when she and her husband returned to New England, she saw the projects Tighe & Bond was working on and found her true niche with the regional engineering stalwart.

As project manager and team leader of the firm’s Water Business Line, working out of its Westfield headquarters, Reynolds oversees a team of water engineers and manages several multi-disciplinary projects for municipalities and utilities across the Northeast.

Her experiences include design and construction of drinking-water storage tanks, new chemical feed systems for drinking-water treatment, and infrastructure upgrades, with expertise in treatment, distribution, and storage of clean drinking water.

“There’s a lot of variation, which is what I love,” she said. “Working with utilities just gives me so much more appreciation of the fact that water comes out of my faucet and I can drink it, and the lights come on; that’s just amazing to me. People work so hard to improve those systems and make them reliable, and I’m excited to be a part of it.”

Outside of work, Reynolds chairs the committee that organizes the annual Granby Road Race in Connecticut, which raises funds for the YMCA of Greater Hartford.

Meanwhile, as co-chair of the education and program committee for the Connecticut Section of the American Water Works Assoc., she has worked to further educational opportunities for industry professionals, including young people just starting out. The association recognized her as its Rising Star Young Professional in 2024 for efforts to train colleagues and improve their skill sets.

“Also, folks like treatment-plant operators need their coursework to maintain their licenses and make connections, which makes it easier to solve problems,” she said. Because that’s how the clean water flows and the lights stay on.

Article originally published by BusinessWest.