Aidan Frey
Letters of Recommendation
GEORGE S. ANSELL DEPARTMENT OF
METALLURGICAL AND MATERIALS ENGINEERING
1500 Illinois Street
Golden, Colorado 80401
metallurgy.mines.edu
26 May 2026
Dear Colleagues:
It is my pleasure to highly recommend Aidan Frey for any form of employment that takes advantage of his background in Metallurgical and Materials Engineering, a broad field at the intersection(s) of physics and chemistry along with mechanical and electrical engineering. Aidan’s experience mirrors this breadth, as his coursework focused on classic structure-process-property relationships in materials while his work in my research group included writing code for sensing and process control built around optical absorption, emissivity, and heat transfer. In other words, Aidan is an engineer with a particular interest in materials and a willingness to learn on the job to accomplish the tasks at hand.
While working in my group, Aidan was part of a small team that included undergraduate and graduate students as well as a research associate, with backgrounds from chemistry, materials science, mechanical, and aerospace engineering. Aidan collaborated effectively with the entire group and communicated both technical and non-technical information clearly within and on behalf of the team.
Based on Aidan’s work as part of a team that reported to me, I have full confidence that he can be a valuable contributor to any team in any role that leverages his background and expertise, and I highly recommend that you consider him strongly for a position. Please feel free to contact me with any questions and/or to discuss Aidan’s work in more detail.
Geoff Brennecka
Department Head and George S. Ansell Distinguished Chair
Metallurgical and Materials Department
Colorado School of Mines
303-384-2238
Letter of Recommendation for Aidan Frey
Aidan joined THG Energy as an intern on a three-person data research team (including myself) focused on our demand response business. Upon his joining, he spent approximately 90 minutes with our head of product, our senior applications engineer, and me for an initial onboarding session. We then gave him what was admittedly very open-ended guidance on what we would like him to research for us. We expressed generic frustration regarding ERCOT’s load forecasts, and indicated that it felt like we were hitting a wall with how to iterate and improve our own long-standing forecasting methodology. The THG team had to end the call because of other meetings but established a recurring weekly meeting where we would convene for 30 minutes going forward. I recall ending that first meeting with Aidan and regretting not having more time to put structure into his work. I spoke with the other 2 on the team, and they felt the same way. We all admitted that we needed to do a better job of setting him up for success, so we agreed that our next meeting would be refining things a little more. Effectively zero expectations from Aidan at that point, and we planned to just “reset” things on the following call.
For our 2nd call with Aidan the following week, three of us joined to find Aidan already on the call. He offered to share his screen to share what he had been working on. He had taken a few comments that we had shared during our first call about weather formations during the summer and expanded on them. He came with quantitative data that individually supported or conflicted with some of our brief opinions we shared. He had a list of questions prepared for us, and a short list of action items that he proposed he take based on his findings. We only made minor tweaks to his proposed plan.
As you might infer from our shared last name, Aidan is my cousin, so I came into this with an inherent knowledge of his background. I’m happy to say that it took him no time to win over the rest of our project team. His ability to walk into a new industry and set of problems, self-start, and not only identify the details of a problem, but also take action to solve for it was truly next level. We didn’t even give him any tools to begin with – he leveraged publicly available weather information and was quickly already onto some initial back-testing of some of his proposed changes. He was able to effectively communicate technical items with our team, and when he was getting bogged down with a few industry-specific details, he never hesitated to ask a question on Teams days before our next meeting. He demonstrated excellent technical and communication skills throughout our engagement and ended up staying on for over 2 years in varying capacities.
The skills that Aidan brings to an organization are evergreen. In a landscape where it can be tough to find talent with genuine, foundational capabilities, Aidan is an original. I’m legitimately envious of whichever organization gets to have him as a part of their team.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to me personally with any questions or further information on my experience working with Aidan.
Max C. Frey (Former VP of THG Energy Solutions LLC)
Austin, TX | 918.289.6624
Owner, Live Oak Energy Advisory | max@liveoakenergyadvisory.com