She was an arts kid who excelled at math and thought she would be an engineer. But Laura Dorival Paglione’s creativity — and “super scrappiness” nurtured at Stevens — inspired a career path that wasn’t a straight line.

Paglione ’90 has worked for Fortune 100 companies, nonprofits and, most notably, startups. A common thread: She was always working on something new, whether building an app for a health insights program at Ford Motor Company or building and launching an online platform for the Kauffman Foundation to create a marketplace for universities to advance their research.

Paglione has landed on startups, her love of them absolute.

“There’s something about creating and building something that doesn’t exist yet that I like,” says Paglione, who studied engineering management at Stevens and holds an MBA from MIT and a master’s in computer science from Brown.

Paglione has just launched two new startups: Sans Regrets, which curates and sells non-alcoholic beverages, and VeriMe, which provides secure and privacy-preserving researcher identification verification to enhance trust in academic research.

She has a successful track record to inform her work with VeriMe. Paglione was the founding technical director of ORCID, a not-for-profit that provides researchers a unique identifier that is persistently attached to all of their scholarly activity. The global organization had more than 5 million users in its first six years.

Sans Regrets was inspired during a period when she abstained from alcohol and discovered tasty, not-too-sweet, non-alcoholic drinks. Paglione has connected with distributors and opened pop-up stores. She hopes to open her own shop and supply bars and restaurants.

“I feel the importance of this work is in changing the norms of socialization from the ritual of drinking alcohol to community-building,” she says.

An ardent supporter of fellow entrepreneurs, Paglione is a longtime judge with the Ansary Entrepreneurship Competition at Stevens, with students competing for funding for their startup ideas.

“It’s so great to hear their take on what the future of the world will be,” Paglione says. She volunteers with the Stevens Alumni Association and women’s programs at the university’s Lore-El Center.

Her deep involvement echoes back to her student days, when she performed with the Stevens Dramatic Society, where she met her husband, Tim Paglione ’90, competed with the women’s fencing team and sang with the Glee Club. She’s continuously inspired to give back to the Stevens community that embraced her, she says, and gave her lifelong friends.

– Beth Kissinger