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When Manuel Moreu of SM ’78 was a child, his father was an officer in the Spanish navy, and Moreu himself wanted nothing more than to be an officer. But at the age of five, the side effects of antibiotics made him deaf in one ear, meaning the Navy would never take him. “Instead of operating warships, I [decided to] build them,” he says. Now Moreu runs Seaplace, Spain’s top naval design firm, which designs both military and civilian ships. In his 40-year career, he not only collaborated in the design of ships for the navies of Spain, Norway, and other countries, but also innovated for massive new oil and gas exploration platforms in the North Sea and Brazil. More recently, the firm has moved to clean energy with new designs for offshore wind.
Moreu came to MIT to study Course 13 in Ocean Engineering (merged with mechanical engineering in 2005) and focused on fine element analysis. “I didn’t need coffee at MIT,” she says. “From five in the morning I got the adrenaline I needed for the whole day. My brain was constantly working on solutions.” After graduation, he and SM ’78, Jorge Sendagoorta, founded Seaplace as part of a British company, which eventually became a wholly owned Spanish company under Moreu’s direction. It employs 50 marine engineers and sells $2.4 million. In the 1990s, the firm designed sophisticated drillships and floating production storage and unloading units that combined production and storage on one ship.
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