SMPS Boston Member Spotlight: Piera Varela
Posted on Jun. 10, 2025 / Member Spotlight / Subscribe 0
Our Member Spotlight Blog serves as a platform to welcome new members to SMPS Boston and highlight our established members within the A/E/C community. This week, we're getting to know Piera Varela, Marketing Assistant at Nitsch Engineering!
Name: Piera Varela
Company: Nitsch Engineering
Title: Marketing Assistant
Years Involved in SMPS: 1
What SMPS committees are you involved with, if any?
None - yet!!
Why did you decide to join SMPS?
My direct supervisor, Virginia Kilbourn, is the treasurer for SMPS Boston, and our manager, Anna Luciano, is a former President and remains very involved. They both love SMPS and encouraged me to attend prospective and new member events, which have been fun and extremely useful! Being in A/E/C marketing is a pretty unique position; we’re doing different things from other marketers, and we’re also doing different things from our colleagues in the office. It’s fun, interesting, and necessary to have connections with other A/E/C marketers who are in the same relatively niche boat.
What led you to working in the A/E/C industry?
I was hired by Nitsch as a receptionist at first; I was looking for just about any job at the time just to stay afloat, but I was drawn to Nitsch as a woman-led civil engineering firm with a specialty in green infrastructure and active interest in complex ecological solutions. I’m not an engineer (obviously!), but I am independently interested in ecology and the environment, and my interests and values align closely with Nitsch’s. When the previous marketing assistant left to go to grad school, she encouraged me to apply for her position, and I ended up loving it!
What do you work toward in your free time?
I love volunteering with my local river org, the Mystic River Watershed Association! Right now we’re counting river herring as they migrate up the river from the ocean to spawn, and a couple weeks ago my girlfriend and I helped re-paint the mural at the Mystic River Dam. I grew up in the woods close to the Eno River in North Carolina which has a fantastic community of people interested in protecting and celebrating it, and it feels good to be involved with the river where I live now. It makes me feel more connected to my community and to the landscape.
What are you currently watching, reading, or listening to?
My household has been watching and loving the new MURDERBOT series based on the book series of the same name by Martha Wells (a fave!!). I’ve been reading A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA by Hanif Abdurraqib, the GREENHOLLOW duology by Emily Tesh, CITY OF LAUGHTER by Temim Fruchter, and Marie Howe’s NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, which I picked up a week or two before it won the Pulitzer for poetry. Oh Marie!!! Recent tunes include the new Lucius album (also called LUCIUS), JOURNAL D’UN LOUP-GAROU by Lou-Adriane Cassidy, THE PAST IS STILL ALIVE by Hurray for the Riff Raff, and ELWAN by Tinariwen.
If you are interested in being featured in an upcoming spotlight or would like to nominate a member, please reach out to Jenn Robertson, SMPS Boston Blog Manager, at [email protected], or Sidney Marcey, SMPS Boston Blog Support, at [email protected].
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