The Garrabrant Family Endowed Scholarship
Samantha Garrabrant (she/her) is a strategic, global leader with broad, cross-functional experience leading teams at various levels within an organization, and has also held several leadership roles within SWE and her company’s Employee Resource Groups (ERGs).
Samantha is currently a Director, Business Integrator at Becton Dickinson & Company (BD), a global MedTech organization, where she leads manufacturing business integration for specimen acquisition products, and develops
inclusive, high-performing teams to drive strategy across four global sites. Prior to this, Samantha held a variety of roles in quality and manufacturing, at BD and Integra LifeSciences. Samantha has a B.S in Biomedical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and a M.S.E in Interdisciplinary Industrial Engineering from Purdue University.
Samantha is a passionate advocate for women in engineering and operations/manufacturing. She has been involved with SWE since her freshman year of college at RPI, where she held multiple section level executive board positions. She joined the SWE New Jersey section after college, and was part of the revitalization of the section, holding a variety of leadership roles including Section President. She went on to become a member of the Leadership Coaching Committee (LCC), acting as a leadership coach for college and professional sections, as well as global affiliate. Samantha is the Global Co-Lead for BD’s Women’s ERG, where she empowers and elevates BD’s global community of 7000+ women and allies across 50+ chapters, with a focus in STEM and manufacturing.
Samantha was the recipient of the Meredith Thoms scholarship as an undergrad, and knew that when the time was right, she wanted to give back by endowing a scholarship herself. The Garrabrant Family Scholarship is endowed by Samantha and her husband, Jeff Merola, who is also an RPI graduate, and software engineer atAudible, Inc. The scholarship is in Samantha’s family name, in honor of her parents, Rose and Peter Garrabrant, for all they’ve done to support her engineering career. Peter is also an RPI graduate, and retired software engineer.
