Dartmouth Engineer

LOOK MA! The Gyrobike wheel, invented at Thayer School, is for sale at thegyrobike.com. Photograph courtesy of Gyrobike.

The Gyrobike is rolling off the production line — six years after a team of students in ENGS 21 tackled the eternal problem of learning to ride a bike. “This will really be the fun part: to finally get to see children out there riding the bike,” says co-creator Debbie Sperling ’06 Th’07, who is in medical school at the University of Michigan. “I have a lot of friends and family who are eager to finally give the Gyrobike a spin.” The stabilizing bike — heralded with a Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics in 2006 — was created by Sperling, Hannah Murnen ’06 Th’07, Nathan Sigworth ’07, and Augusta Niles ’07 in 2004.

Gyrowheel. Photograph courtesy of thegyrobike.com.

“I think the Gyrobike’s success as a classroom-to-market project is really the success of the Thayer/Tuck entrepreneurship potential,” says Niles, pointing to the collaboration between the Gyrobike team and Errik Anderson ’00 Tu’07 and his venture capital firm, Seven West Ventures. “He was pivotal in bringing crucial media attention to the product and found Daniella Reichstetter Tu’07 to be the startup’s CEO in April 2007.” Reichstetter drew on her previous start-up and consumer-products experience with Method Home and Jetboil to lead the design through two years of product development. The original design used a disk to spin independently inside the wheel; modifications have revved up the speed of the disk, enabling it to create enough force — gyroscopic precession — to help stabilize a bike at a low speed. “The design improvements have been significant, and I think we are all quite proud of the product that is now available to buy,” says Murnen, who now focuses on the self assembly of biomimetic polymers as a grad student in the chemical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley. The final product, which easily replaces the front wheel of standard kids’ bikes, comes with an enclosed, motorized disk and is available for $100 at thegyrobike.com. “Seeing children use the bike has always been the most satisfying part about this project,” says Niles, a modeling and simulation engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass. “But it is also great to know that all the team’s work on the product design and business proofing will all be worth it.

­­A few days after setting one streamliner motorcycle speed record at the Bonneville Salt Flats world finals last October with a 382-mph run, Charles Nearburg ’72 Th’74 pushed it even harder, averaging 394.1 mph and exiting the track at 402.9 mph. With this, the Spirit of Rett — named after Nearburg’s son, who died of cancer in 2005 — set a 392-mph record at Bonneville and became the first single-engine, normally aspirated car to go over 400 mph. Nearburg plans to return to Utah’s salt flats this summer with a new supercharged, 2,000-horsepower V-8 engine and break a 19-year-old 409-mph world speed record for wheel-driven cars. “Rett and I did a lot of gearhead stuff together — we rode dirt bikes and sport bikes together and built up a hot-rod Mustang,” says Nearburg. “His death was partly the catalyst that got me to think about what in life I hadn’t done. Every run I make, I feel him there with me.”
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Photograph courtesy of Thierry A Blanchet.

Thierry A. Blanchet Th’88, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the highest elected grade of membership in ASME. Fellowship is conferred upon a member with at least 10 years of active engineering practice and who has made significant contributions to the profession. Blanchet is noted for his contributions in the area of materials tribology, particularly self-replenishing solid lubrication. His models of vapor phase lubrication have been adapted to DLC coatings and MEMS environmental tribology. He has chaired the ASME/Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers’ International Joint Tribology Conference, serves as associate editor for the Journal of Tribology and Tribology Transactions, and has earned the National Science Foundation’s Young Investigator Award.

OLYMPIAN: Ben Koons made New Zealand’s Nordic skiing Olympic team. Photograph by Phil Walter/Getty Images.

Ben Koons ’08 is a powerhouse on the slopes — when he’s not bringing a different kind of power to Africa. Koons, who appeared in the Winter 2009 issue of Dartmouth Engineer in a story about his efforts to bring hydro-power to the rural village of Banda, Rwanda, became the first male cross-country skier to represent New Zealand at the Winter Olympics. Ben, who was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, and moved with his family to Maine eight years ago, captained Dartmouth’s cross-county ski team while studying mechanical engineering at Thayer. After graduation, he and brother Nils Koons ’11, also a Dartmouth skier, embarked on some “altitude training” — a two-month cycling trek across Tibet.

Hypertherm, a top manufacturer of plasma cutting tools with almost 900 employees working in Hanover and Lebanon, has been feeling the international slowdown in the production of heavy equipment. Shipbuilders, auto manufacturers, the construction industry — any field that would use Hypertherm products to cut flat steel — have slowed production in the last year, and orders for the cutting systems are down 50 percent. But, as National Public Radio highlighted in November, the company is sticking to its no-layoff policy. It has put employees to work doing other things: ground maintenance, training, on a team to rejigger the production line. The goal is to emerge from recession in a better position to compete. “Once you have a highly skilled workforce, the last thing you want to do is lay them off,” says Dick Couch ’64 Th’65, the company’s founder and CEO and a Thayer School Overseer. “This isn’t altruism. It’s good business.” It’s probably also a reason why Business New Hampshire magazine recently named the firm the Best Large Company to Work for in New Hampshire.

John Ballard ’55 Th’56 has earned a Dartmouth Alumni Award for his extensive volunteer service to Dartmouth. In addition to leading his class as vice president and on its executive committee, the Los Altos Hills, Calif., resident has served on the Thayer Board of Overseers since 1989 and chaired it from 1998 to 2007. While chair, Ballard joined with fellow Thayer Overseers and a former chair of the Medical School Board of Overseers to form Angeli Parvi (little angels), a group of industry leaders who mentor aspiring Dartmouth entrepreneurs by guiding development of business plans and strategies. So far, the group has helped found, co-found, fund, or advise 10 companies, earning $1 million for Thayer in the process. “The real pay-off came as a pleasant surprise,” he says. “Most of these enterprises are largely run by recent Dartmouth graduates. They generally ask for guidance when they feel the need, generally accept the guidance, and then execute with amazing energy and skill. We really do produce graduates who can change how health science, energy storage, signal processing, and environmental issues are addressed, and all very much for the better.” Ballard’s advice for fellow alumni interested in giving back: “Try and help students and alumni in ways that require some hands-on time. You’ll be rewarded.”

Start-up SustainX Energy Solutions is trying to find better ways to compress and store air to help utilities take full advantage of intermittent sources of energy such as wind and solar power. As Ph.D. students, Dax Kepshire Th’06, ’09 and Ben Bollinger ’04 Th’04, ’08, with previous grad Troy McBride Th’01, began engineering and entrepreneurial work on SustainX, joining with Professor and Dean Emeritus Charles Hutchinson to launch the company.

THE SUSTAINX SOLUTION: Start-up company SustainX has developed a new way to store wind and solar energy as compressed air — and then turn it into electricity. Image courtesy of SustainX.

“The initial vision was for an inexpensive, reliable, clean energy storage system to pair with wind and solar to allow these renewables to perform as reliable, totally clean non-intermittent energy generation technologies,” says McBride. Existing small- and moderate-scale energy storage technologies tend to be expensive, short-lived, and use toxic or rare materials. By using air, off-the-shelf industrial components, and core thermodynamic innovations, SustainX can cut costs and offer a long lifetime. SustainX’s novel approach allows higher efficiency and pressures, so air can be stored in off-the-shelf tanks rather than in underground caverns (the traditional method). To store energy, the SustainX system uses an electric motor driven hydraulic conversion system to isothermally compress and store air. To make electricity, the process is repeated in reverse; the air is released and run through the SustainX conversion system, turning an electric generator to make electricity. The team is aiming to pack a megawatt-hour worth of stored energy in a 40-foot-long container, says Kepshire. The company received $4 million in funding from Polaris Venture Partners and Rockport Capital last summer and $5.39 million from the U.S. Department of Energy in November to develop its technology and eventually deploy a full-scale demonstration of its method. The company spun out of Dartmouth last year and now employs 10 people at its site in West Lebanon, N.H. Says Bollinger, “Starting SustainX feels like having stepped aboard a roller coaster that keeps on going.”

For more photos, visit our Alumni Projects and Alumni People and Events sets on Flickr.

EASY RIDER: Alex Streeter ’03 Th’05 has engineered medical devices for the Mayo Clinic. Photograph courtesy of Alex Streeter.

As a Mayo Clinic engineer, Alex Streeter ’03 Th’05 tackled doctors’ and patients’ requests as he did the ENGS 190/290/390 sequence: Define the problem, develop several ideas to address it, then prototype and test one or more solutions until the problem is solved. Streeter was one of more than 50 engineers at Mayo who work on inventions to make doctors’ jobs easier and patients’ lives better. Some of his designs have included life-sized models of pediatric scoliotic spines for presurgical planning; a physical therapy chair/bench for a set of conjoined twin infants; a “knee-walker” for a 7-foot-8-inch, 600-pound patient with a bad foot; a wheelchair attachment for a mother to use to hold her infant; high-speed videography of breaking bones; and a horizontal mill for grinding out the inside of a femoral head to harvest bone graft material. “Some of our work has a high impact on patient care at the clinic, sometimes for just a single patient. Some of our work seeks to enable the kind of medical and technological research and development that will bring about the next revolution in medicine, and will have a high impact beyond the clinic,” he says. Streeter will be bringing that revolutionary approach to DEKA Research as he returns to New Hampshire for his wife’s medical residency.

Husband and wife team Mark ’80 and Paula Ness Speers ’80 first combined their R&D and consulting talents 18 years ago to found Health Advances, LLC. They’ve built their 60-person firm with offices in San Francisco and Boston into the go-to consultants for advice on commercializing new medical technologies, guiding decisions on which applications, diseases, and conditions to target, optimizing pricing, sizing sales forces, and negotiating channels of distribution. With his engineering training, Mark focuses on the medical-technical and diagnostics clients, and is currently developing a medical device to reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia. “I find that my familiarity with materials science and manufacturing processes gains me instant credibility with new clients and often leads to brainstorming sessions that create new product ideas,” he says. Paula, who served in the Peace Corps as a tuberculosis worker in South Korea after graduating from Dartmouth with a degree in international relations, continues to work in the developing world. She’s currently working on a new diagnostic platform to enable infectious disease diagnostics. “Once in a while we work together,” says Mark. “We fondly recall one of our first successes: the development of the Acticoat antimicrobial wound dressing. The product has become the best-selling burn dressing in the world and has saved hundreds of patients’ lives.”

Rick Greenwald Th’88 is turning his wide range of engineering and manufacturing expertise to the problems of personal injury among elite athletes, soldiers, and the elderly. As founder and president of Simbex in Lebanon, N.H., he is currently working on ActiveStep technology to train people to recover from a fall. With the system — highlighted on “Good Morning America” in a May segment titled “A Smart Way to Fall? New Technology Prevents Tragedy” — a therapist uses a body harness, treadmill, and sensors to analyze patients’ movements and retrain their responses to tripping or slipping. The therapy can be life-saving, as one in three adults over 65 fall every year. Such falls annually cause 300,000 hip fractures, one-fifth of which lead to death. “Simbex stands for Simply Better Exercise and is the realization of a dream to solve important large-scale health problems related to personal injury with appropriate cost-effective technology,” says Greenwald. It’s an approach Time magazine recognized in its “Best Inventions of 2007” issue, highlighting the group’s Head Impact Telemetry system (a head-impact monitoring system designed to prevent mild traumatic brain injury) and PowerFoot One (a robotic foot and ankle prosthetic).

HUMAN ENGINEERING: Plastic surgeon Jason Altman ’97 (center) performs corrective surgery on kids all over the world. Photograph courtesy of Jason Altman.

Plastic surgeon Jason Altman ’97 has spent the last year traveling the world — Ecuador, Peru, China, India, Vietnam, and Zambia — performing plastic and reconstructive surgery on children in need as a Jerome P. Webster Fellow for the global health organization Interplast. “Usually I am traveling with a team of doctors and nurses; however, on occasion I will also go by myself to work with and teach a local surgeon in some more remote areas,” says Altman. His surgeries include cleft lip and palate repair, congenital hand deformities, congenital facial deformities, and burn and trauma reconstruction. “Plastic surgery is the practice of human engineering!” he says.

After 10 years as an audiologist — most recently as the director of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia cochlear implant program — Kevin Franck ’92 is providing clinical strategy to Cochlear Ltd. “I’ve been drawn to this field because I grew up with deafness in my family (my sister),” says Franck, who trained as a biomedical engineer at Dartmouth. “The cochlear implant is truly amazing. Deaf babies can grow up listening and talking, and adults who lose their hearing can once again communicate with their spouses and colleagues with phones and all that stuff we take for granted.” He is now involved in the global marketing of Cochlear’s implantable hearing devices, which are used to replace damaged parts of the cochlea. (Hearing aids, on the other hand, attempt to get the damaged parts to work better, and are usually appropriate for those with mild or moderate hearing loss.) Franck says the cost — about $30,000 in the United States, plus the cost of surgery and rehabilitation — is covered by most insurance companies, due to the high cost efficacy.

Kevin Franck ’92 provides clinical strategy for Cochlear Ltd.’s Nucleus® Freedom™ cochlear implant system, which consists of an external sound processor (A) and coil (B) and an internal implant (C). Image Courtesy of Cochlear Ltd.

Dr. Andrew Mannes Th’83 believes that killing the messenger — pain-responsive neurons in the sensory ganglia — can be a practical way to manage intractable pain. Mannes, who works in the department of anesthesia and surgical services for the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., is testing a new pain-relieving drug called resiniferatoxin, a single-shot dose of analgesic that lasts forever. The experimental drug targets sensory neurons that convey pain to the spinal cord. Interrupting this one specific class of pain-sensing neurons will eliminate the connection and some types of pain, including that seen with advanced cancer. In animal studies — including treating dogs for refractory end-of-life pain and goats for severe arthritis — the drug has shown remarkable improvement or elimination of pain symptoms, he says. The FDA has approved clinical trials, and Mannes and colleagues are now looking for cancer patients who are experiencing severe pain that is unresponsive to conventional therapy. Under this treatment, the patient is placed under general anesthesia for an hour or so while Mannes injects the resiniferatoxin into the cerebrospinal fluid space around the spinal cord, where it eliminates the pain neurons. If the treatment is successful, he says, patients should be able to discontinue their medications, including high doses of morphine or other opioids to control pain. Unlike other pain medications, his treatment appears to have no side effects (such as sedation or hallucinations) and no addictive potential.

An ailing dog feels no pain while on resiniferatoxin. Video courtesy of Dr. Andrew Mannes Th’83. (1:41)

Terry McGuire Th’82, co-founder of Boston-based Polaris Venture Partners and chairman of Thayer’s Board of Overseers, is the new chair of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). “Although the NVCA has long been an advocate for public policies that encourage innovation and economic growth, our work today is as important as ever,” he said. “It is critical that the government and the venture capital industry continue working together to support risk-taking and long-term investment so that we as investors can continue to create new jobs and bring breakthrough technologies to market.” Prior to forming Polaris Venture Partners, he spent seven years at Burr, Egan, Deleage & Co. investing in early-stage medical and information technology companies. McGuire has co-founded three companies: Inspire Pharmaceuticals, Advanced Inhalation Research Inc. (AIR), and MicroCHIPS.

The sky’s the limit for Jim Zierick ’78 TT’80, who brings 25 years in building technology companies to “cloud storage” platform provider Nirvanix. In his new role as president and CEO of the San Diego-based firm, he’s using his business acumen to grow the company’s global cluster of storage nodes. He presented the company’s strategies during the spring Red Herring Conference, where he accepted a Red Herring 100 Award, given to the top 100 U.S. tech companies based upon their technological innovation, management strength, and market size.

Dartmouth javelin-throw record holder Sean Furey ’04 qualified for the International Association of Athletics Federations World Track & Field Championships held in Berlin in August after placing third at the USA Track & Field Championships in Oregon in June. “This is something that I’ve been dreaming of and working towards for so many years,” says the former engineering major.

Energy-capture expert Brian S. Hendrickson ’06 Th’07 has been named to the advisory board of alternative energy technology developer Octillion Corp. An engineer with Veryst Engineering, LLC, in Needham, Mass., Hendrickson is credited with various innovations in the capture of wasted energy for generating electricity. The September 2008 issue of Mechanical Engineering Magazine, in an article titled “Harvest of Motion,” highlighted his development of a small-scale device that uses human motion to generate five-times greater power output (per volume) than conventional energy harvesting systems.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Projects and Engineering in Medicine sets on Flickr.

Chris Crowley Th’75 is a research engineer by vocation and a wildlife photographer by avocation. During his 31 years managing research projects for Hanover-based Creare he also logged 1,000 scuba dives in locations such as Indonesia, the Galápagos Islands, Fiji, and the Caribbean. After earning his M.E. at Thayer, Crowley worked on nuclear reactor safety, gas and oil transport in pipelines, ocean mining, thermodynamic power cycles, and spacecraft system development projects. Recently retired from Creare, he sees connections between engineering and photography. “Wildlife photography is like running an engineering project. You have an objective: to photograph a certain animal or animals. You have to develop a work plan to get the shots. You have a limited budget. And the wildlife ‘clients’ are often only slightly less cooperative than business clients!” His images and articles have been published in magazines, textbooks, and a Nature Conservancy poster.

Chris Yule ’70 points to Thayer students’ work as an example of how cars can solve the energy crisis in a recent Boston Globe opinion piece. “Students in Dartmouth’s Thayer School Formula Hybrid program are having a great time building hybrid race cars,” he writes. “Imagine if the torpid design studios in Detroit suddenly came abuzz with exciting futuristic designs that treated the world’s precious hydrocarbons like newspapers or beer cans. They would create exciting new jobs in a field that has worldwide appeal. And maybe, just maybe, we could save the planet while we’re at it.” Yule has been saving the planet one parcel at a time as president of Yule Development Co., a real estate development firm in Newton Center, Mass., that specializes in designing energy-efficient solutions for “distressed” buildings and sites.

Veteran Wall Street analyst Brian E. Wong Th’00 is the new director of research at AMI Research, a leading provider of issuer-paid research coverage and independent stock reports. Wong will direct the production of independent analyst research reports for AMI, based in Key Largo, Fla. Wong previously conducted sell-side equity research with Broadpoint Capital and First Albany Capital, where he was a member of the Wall Street Journal’s Top Five Equity Analyst Team in 2002 and 2003. With a background in medical technology and health care, Wong provided investment research reports on companies in the diabetes, orthopedic, neurotechnology, plastics, and general surgery sectors.

There’s a hot new install-it-yourself solar water-heating system on the market. Called Hot2O, it’s a lightweight polymer system developed by Freeman Ford ’63, president and CEO of FAFCO, the nation’s oldest and largest solar thermal panel manufacturer. A closed-loop design allows it to serve up hot water even during winter cold. The system is compact enough to be shipped in a small box to homeowners, who can easily add it to their existing water heaters.

For years Tom Brady ’66 Th’68, founder of Plastic Technologies Inc., has been at the forefront of the polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle industry. Now he is developing and commercializing a PET recycling technology to deal with all the empties. The technology, he says, “will have huge implications for reducing waste and decreasing the carbon footprint for PET packaging.” A pilot line is running in Bowling Green, Ohio, with installation of the first production line scheduled for early 2009. Brady plans to license the system worldwide and expects to have 25 operations running within three years — for a total processing of some 200 million pounds of PET annually. “The breakthrough was our patent, which recognizes that reducing particle size allows the decontamination and purification to proceed exponentially faster as a function of particle size,” he says. “One engineering challenge we faced was using a powder instead of a pellet, which is the industry standard. We solved that by agglomerating the powder into a pellet form that dries and heats like a powder but handles like a pellet for shipping and processing. A second engineering challenge was that we no longer melt-filtered the plastic to remove solid contamination. We solved that by demonstrating that when hard contaminants are reduced in size, they no longer present an issue for secondary processing and reuse.”

Zoe Courville Th’03, ’07 digs snow — specifically in Antarctica on a recent three-month expedition to drill through two miles of snow to collect atmospheric data from the past 140,000 years. “From the ice core you can actually tell a whole bunch about past climate and temperature,” Courville recently told the New Hampshire Union Leader. The self-proclaimed “snow freak” earned her Thayer Ph.D. in materials science and engineering, doing research on the impact of snow accumulation in Greenland and East Antarctica. Now a research mechanical engineer at the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, she works with mentor and adjunct Thayer professor Mary Albert Th’84 on the effect of climate change on the polar ice caps.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Flickr page.

LIVE WIRE: John McNeill ’83, left, gets raves from his students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Photo courtesy of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

Electrical engineering professor John McNeill ’83 is charging up his students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “He’s unbelievable in terms of not only bringing the practical, but also making it so that you can understand the material,” senior Charles Gammal told the ­­Worcester Telegram & Gazette this spring. Under McNeill’s guidance, Gammal and fellow students are designing a low-power integrated circuit for handheld biomedical applications such as portable ultrasounds. The project placed in the top five out of 47 teams in a design contest sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corp. and will be presented at an industry conference in Austin, Tex., this fall. Another of his student teams recently demonstrated a design modification to standard wall adapters — dubbed “wall warts” — which have losses in the transformer magnetics, regardless of whether they are powering anything. “Put ten or 20 of these in a house and this can add up to a significant fraction of total power usage,” says McNeill. His students developed a modification that detects when there is no device attached to the wart and disconnects the adapter from AC power to avoid transformer losses. “In addition to the technical problem,” he says, “the students also researched the social and economic implications to determine how much of a problem there is from power losses in the existing design (significant!), what additional cost would be feasible in the market, brainstormed several approaches, then chose one and designed a solution that worked-and beat the target cost.”

Scott Sabol ’88 Th’88, a Vermont Technical College professor and chair of the architectural and building technology department, received the school’s Henry G. Wirtz Master Teacher Award in May. The honor recognizes him as a role model for other faculty and as an exceptional teacher.

Three Thayer alums are finding greener transportation solutions throughout the Upper Valley — and beyond. “Our work is focused on transportation solutions that reduce the amount of driving, energy consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions by shifting travel to walking, biking, transit, and shorter car trips,” says Norm Marshall Th’82, a principal along with Lucy Gibson Th’88 and engineer Sandy Beauregard Th’07 of Smart Mobility in Norwich, Vt. The company recently developed a new transportation plan for Burlington, Vt., and is now helping Chicago consider multimodal transportation networks and strategies, helping Austin and Baltimore develop more efficient land use and transportation, and aiding citizens groups and townships in several states as they face highway expansion proposals. “Our practice focuses on activities that promote sustainable transportation alternatives — we do not work on building new highways or construction of new big box stores,” says Gibson.

“America’s biggest drinking problem isn’t alcohol, it’s lawn watering,” according to Amy Vickers Th’86. Vickers is an Amherst, Mass.-based water conservation consultant, author of the water efficiency requirements for plumbing fixtures adopted under the U.S. Energy Policy Act of 1992, and author of the Handbook of Water Use and Conservation: Homes, Landscapes, Businesses, Industries, Farms. She made her case for water conservation in a Boston Globe opinion piece last summer. “The extent to which our culture’s irrigation-fueled lawn watering binge is acting like a wrecking ball in our rivers, streams, and lakes is a specific challenge to the security of our water supplies, even here in ‘water rich’ New England,” she writes. She advocates two immediate actions: limiting the number of watering days allowed per week and enforcing watering rules no matter the water source — public supplies or private wells. “If Massachusetts and other New England states act soon, we need not be fated to the long-term water shortages and chronic droughts now predicted for much of the nation.” Read the full article.

TRAFFIC STOPPER: Jonathan Kling ’04 Th’04 steers Din and Tonic in the Red Bull soapbox derby. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Kling ’04 Th’04

The Din & Tonic racer barreled down Freemont Avenue in Seattle, Wash., last fall with driver Jonathan “Kling-a-Ling-a-Ding-Dong” Kling ’04 Th’04 at the wheel. While the soapbox racer never crossed the finish line — it crashed into hay bales lining the half-mile race course after losing all four of its wheelchair tires — its bells and whistles were one of the highlights of the 2007 Red Bull Soapbox Race. Kling, who rallied coworkers to assemble the soapbox car, was one of 36 contestants in the human-powered race. “As employees of Synapse Product Design in Seattle, these teammates are used to creating buzz in the world of medical devices and consumer products with their design solutions, and now they’re ready to just create some buzz…literally…with noisemakers,” according to the race website. Inspired by kinetic pieces displayed in the Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland, which he saw last summer on a biking trip across Europe with Bing Knight ’05 Th’06, Jeff Hebert ’04 Th’06, and Joe Horrell ’04 Th’06, Kling designed a gravity-powered racer that drove a bass drum, a stuffed gorilla banging cymbals, and two air-raid sirens that peaked at 120 decibels as the car reached top speed, all while the co-pilot was banging out a tune on blocks, cowbells, and Kling’s helmet! While his building philosophy may be a bit offbeat, Kling knows what it takes to construct a quality car — his racing résumé includes assembling a few Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) race cars while at Dartmouth. Although Kling and his team lament the use of non-pneumatic tires, they still placed 14th, ahead of many cars that did finish the course, because of high marks in showmanship and creativity. RedBull moves the city of the SoapBox race every year, but there’s rumor of a RedBull Flugtag (a race of human-powered flying craft) in Portland, which Kling and Synapse have already been invited to enter.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Flickr page.

William B. Conway ’52 Th’54, P.E., received the John A. Roebling Medal for lifetime achievement at the International Bridge Conference in Pittsburgh, Pa., last June. He is the chairman of Modjeski and Masters Inc., a structural engineering firm in St. Louis, Mo., that specializes in bridge engineering for federal, state, and local agencies, railroads, and port authorities. His works include the first Newburgh-Beacon Bridge across the Hudson River, the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati, the Teddy Roosevelt Bridge over the Potomac, and the Iowa-Illinois Memorial Bridge and seven other bridges across the Mississippi. He recently served as principal-in-charge on the seismic retrofit of the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge in San Francisco and the vessel collision vulnerability study assessment of bridges on the lower Mississippi.

LIFESPAN: Roebling honoree Conway’s I-130 Mississippi River Bridge at Luling, La., was the nation’s longest cable-stayed bridge. Photo courtesy of William Conway

Heinz Kluetmeier ’65, whose career as a photojournalist for Sports Illustrated spans nearly four decades, was honored in October for outstanding achievement in sports photography with a Lucie Award, an international photography award. Kluetmeier, who was already shooting pictures for the Associated Press at age 15, majored in engineering and worked as an engineer for a steel company until 1969, when he joined Time Inc. as a photographer for Sports Illustrated and Life. He has since shot more than 100 covers for SI, and in 1986 was named the director of photography at the magazine. “Technique and technical stuff is absolutely irrelevant to the picture in terms of what you do as a photographer,” he told PDN Legends Online. “I think the most important thing is to have a vision, to have an emotional feeling, to care about what you’re photographing, and to have something that’s already there in your heart, in your eye.” View his images at pdngallery.com/legends/heinz/.

The American Society of Civil Engineers recognized Philadelphia Inquirer science reporter Tom Avril ’89 with an Excellence in Journalism Award honorable mention for his article about skyscraper construction, “Water to Tame Wind Atop New Skyscraper: Giant Bathtub in the Sky.” His lead was a grabber: “It’s a great big bathtub in the sky, but hold the soap. A 300,000-gallon, double-chambered tank of water is going in near the top of the Comcast Center — a creative solution by engineers to keep Philadelphia’s tallest building from swaying too much in the wind.”

Bert Yankielun Th’92 offers step-by-step instructions on building igloos, spruce traps, bivy bag shelters and drift caves in his new book, How to Build an Igloo and Other Snow Shelters (Norton Press). As a doctoral student at Thayer and then a research engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, Yankielun developed ground penetrating radar systems and other geophysical instrumentation. He is now a consulting engineer in private practice.

Charlie Nearburg ’72 Th’73, ’74 set three new land-speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats World Finals in October. Driving “The Spirit of Rett,” a 35-foot-long streamliner, Nearburg beat two 10-year Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) records with two-way runs averaging 348 mph and 351 mph over a course with five miles for acceleration and two to three miles for shutting down. Three days later he set a Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) record with a two-way average run of 359.5 mph over a course with six miles for acceleration and five miles for shutting down. “In the first FIA run I exited the timed mile at 375 mph. It was pretty awesome,” he says. “This puts me seventh on the all-time fastest list at Bonneville and makes the ‘Spirit of Rett’ the fastest gasoline powered car in history.”

Owner of Nearburg Producing Company and a member of Thayer School’s Board of Overseers, Nearburg has been racing since high school. “I enjoy the engineering of it and the skill,” he says.

The “Spirit of Rett” is named after Nearburg’s late son, Rett. Watch Nearburg in action at rett.org.

ZOOM, ZOOM: Charles Nearburg, third from right, pictured with his crew, hit 375 mph at Bonneville Salt Flats. Photo courtesy of Charles Nearburg.

For more photos, visit our Alumni page on Flickr.

Yi-Heng Percival Zhang Th'02. Photo courtesy of Josh Armstrong/Virginia Tech

Esquire magazine has named Yi-Heng Percival Zhang Th’02 to its Best and Brightest 2006 list. Honored for his “crazy idea of the year: ‘sugar cars’ ” — their phrasing, not ours — Zhang has formulated a chemical process that can turn agricultural waste into cheap ethanol and, according to the magazine, possibly solve the “hydrogen puzzle” — the holy grail of alternative fuel.

The typical process of ethanol production uses corn kernels. Zhang’s approach leaves the kernels for food and instead uses the most abundant agricultural residue in the United States: corn stover (leaves, stalks, and cobs). And, rather than the high-cost, low-yield standard approach — blowing cells up under high pressures and temperatures to unlock the cellulose within the plant cell walls — Zhang thought to use a solvent. He and Thayer professor Lee Lynd Th’84 co-patented a recyclable biochemical pretreatment that generates cellulose that is more easily converted to sugar and doesn’t require special facilities.

An assistant professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech since August 2005, Zhang began his research at Thayer, where he received his Ph.D. and worked as a postdoctoral research associate and research scientist. Zhang is now collaborating with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, using NREL software to analyze the economic costs of various ethanol production strategies and ORNL facilities to test different enzymes and material performance. “We hope to soon establish the first pilot plant in Virginia based on this new technology with switchgrass,” says Zhang.

But the sweet spot for Zhang is hydrogen. His pretreatment process can cleanly deliver the high energy of the gas while avoiding the pollution, costly storage tanks, and infrastructure of standard technologies. He envisions “sugar cars” fueling up at “sugar stations,” which would allow a driver to pump solid sugar into the car’s tank; a converter would extract hydrogen from the sugar, and a fuel cell would convert the hydrogen to electricity. His recipe for making hydrogen from sugar: start with his ethanol-pretreatment process to release sugar from corn stalks, then add water, using the energy stored in those sugars in combination with a novel enzymatic system to divide the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. So far he’s had high yields and modest reaction conditions. “We do not store and distribute gaseous hydrogen anymore. We can do it through solid sugars,” Zhang tells Esquire. “This new technology could change the whole world energy future completely.”

>> Good Dirt Radio in April profiled FrontRange Earth Force, a nonprofit service learning organization led by board president Kit Ambrose ’86 Th’90. “We work with teachers and nearly 2,000 students in the less-privileged areas of Denver, Colo. We teach teachers how to coordinate wonderful and innovative student-led projects that focus on solving community issues of the students’ choice,” says Ambrose, who works for Microsoft and is also on Thayer’s executive committee. “More than anything, my time at Dartmouth and Thayer helped with the desire to make a contribution and effect change as well as the confidence to participate.”

>> Hector J. Motroni ’66 Th’68 has earned a Dartmouth Alumni Award for his career accomplishments as well as extraordinary service to the College and civic organizations. Currently the senior vice president, chief staff officer, and chief ethics officer at Xerox Corp., where he has worked for the past 35 years, Motroni also chairs the Xerox Political Action Committee. He was recently named the National Hispanic Achiever of the Year by National Hispanic Corporate Achievers, Hispanic Trends magazine selected him one of the 25 top Hispanic executives, and Hispanic Engineer & Information Technology magazine included him on its list of “50 Most Important Hispanics in Business and Technology.” He has served Thayer as its representative on the Alumni Council; as secretary, vice president, and president of the Dartmouth Society of Engineers; and as a member of the boards of the Thayer School Dean’s Fund Executive Committee, the Thayer Campaign Executive Committee, and the Thayer Corporate Advisory Board.

>> CNNMoney.com recently asked top venture capital investors — including Amanda Reed ’86 — for great start up ideas. Reed is a partner in Palomar Ventures, a northern California-based VC fund in which she invests in early-stage technology companies with fellow alum Randy Lunn ’73 Tu’75 Th’75, a member of the Thayer Board of Overseers. CNNMoney.com says: “What she wants now: a Web-based platform to make company spreadsheets — for revenue forecasting and other analytical chores — more easily viewed, updated, and shared by managers. Many small-business execs still rely on e-mailing Excel files around the office to share data forecasts. Software apps like NetSuite import data but not the formulas embedded in spreadsheets. What she’ll invest: $5 million for a team of five engineers to create a prototype in less than two years.”

>> “Few can claim that they have revolutionized a sport as much as Judy Geer ’75 Th’83.” So reads the citation marking Geer’s induction last winter into the Choate Rosemary Athletics Hall of Fame. The first captain of the Dartmouth women’s rowing team, Geer spent the next decade pursuing honors. She was on both the national and Olympic teams in 1976, captured the national singles championship in 1979 and 1982, and joined the Olympic teams again in 1980 and 1984. But perhaps her greatest contribution to the sport came after she earned her Thayer degree: She developed software that displays motivational graphics and monitors performance for rowing machine company Concept 2. Now on the company’s marketing team, she and husband (and Concept 2 co-founder) Dick Dreissigacker are raising three children, including Hannah ’09.

For more photos, visit our Alumni page on Flickr.

DuPont recently honored Richard Livingston ’43 Th’44 by naming a new consultation room after him at DuPont Singapore. The capstone of Livingston’s career with DuPont was an innovative manual he published, which details melt nylon properties responding to chemical and mechanical inputs. The manual was a central reference document for DuPont’s mathematical simulations and nylon solid melt processing.

Beginning in 1970, Livingston gathered data for modeling of nylon chemical processes. He presented all of the data with charts, a unique approach that had not been tried before. “This was very early in the computer era,” Livingston says. “We were manufacturing nylon at the plant where I worked, and it was hard to cope with the multiple chemical changes. I attempted to categorize all of the changes.”

He experimented with applying computer power to the engineering technology for the manufacture of nylon. An early assignment was to work out a simple element of the process to demonstrate it could be modeled on computers. He connected relationships between what happened to nylon under increases in temperature and pressure. “I was shocked to find how little we really knew in terms of specifics, absolute relationships,” he says. “It forced me to play around and gather together sources and that went on for several years.”

Livingston and his colleagues were allowed to run tests on DuPont’s IBM machines at night. “More often than not, they wouldn’t work,” he says. Livingston assembled all of the information he collected in a manual titled Polymer Relationships, which is still in use at DuPont. Livingston says the results that he compiled in Polymer Relationships were long-lasting because they were useful in many areas. “What we found turned out to be fundamental truths,” he says. “The chemistry is the same even though the equipment is modified. The relationships are not specific to a certain application.”

While he says he is flattered by DuPont’s recent recognition of his contribution, he has no plans to travel to Singapore to check out the Livingston room in person. He is just as proud that his work is useful more locally. “There are some people who live in Seaford [Delaware] and work at the DuPont plant here,” he says. “They tell me they still use the manual.”

Livingston, one of three students in the first mechanical engineering class at Thayer School, served with the Navy in the South Pacific during World War II and joined DuPont in 1946. He spent seven years in Buffalo, N.Y., at a DuPont rayon plant and then moved to Seaford, where he worked until his retirement in 1982. He stayed with DuPont as a consultant for another 20 years.

—Jennifer Seaton

>> Ariel Dowling ’05 Th’05 received a National Science Foundation grant for three years of graduate study leading to a research-based master’s or doctoral degree. Dowling is working on an M.S./Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Stanford University, focusing on biomechanics with a project on anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries of the knee. She is looking into the mechanism of an ACL injury — as well as how a person’s gait changes before and after ACL reconstruction surgery — in an effort to improve the surgical procedure. This year’s honorable mentions include Erik M. Dambach ’04 Th’05 and Kara K. Podkaminer Th’09.

>> Benton Routh ’86 Th’87 has advanced from his position as chief marketing officer of fuel card provider FleetCor to president of its new division. Routh, a 15-year veteran of the oil and credit card industry, heads FleetSource, which offers products and services customized to independent petroleum marketers. Prior to joining the Atlanta-based FleetCor, Routh was the global manager of the commercial vehicles and card business at Exxon Mobil Fuels Marketing Co.

>> John McNeill ’83, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, received the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ outstanding paper award at its International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco in February, 2006. He is the coauthor of “A Split-ADC Architecture for Deterministic Digital Background Calibration of a 16b 1 MS/s ADC.”

Business Ventures

Frustrations with work drove Seth Smith ’02, Th’03 to look at the chasm between his job and his interests, namely his fondness for Toyota Land Cruisers. “If I’m so passionate, why am I not doing this?” he said.

So Smith decided to use his day job in Los Angeles as a vehicle to do what he really loves. Along with his friend Jason Taylor ’02, Smith launched PVCRUISERS, a company that buys Toyota Land Cruisers and then modifies and resells them.

Seth Smith and Jason Taylor.

Smith and Taylor grew up helping Smith’s dad work on his Toyota FJ40 in his garage and they never grew out of their enthusiasm for tinkering with the engine. The first year of business has been bumpy and Smith has had to shift the focus of the business from parts to vehicles because the margins on parts are so slim.

Still, Smith never expected to start his own business, especially so soon after graduation. “During school, I thought starting a business sounded so painful, it sounded too risky and crazy,” he says.

Since starting PVCRUISERS, Smith has traveled to Australia and the Middle East for the business. He has sent CAD drawings to China to have parts manufactured there. The toughest hurdles, he says, have been defining his niche, fine-tuning his Web site, and figuring out pricing strategy. As Land Cruiser aficionados are do-it-yourselfers who have no problem jumping in and modifying their own engines, PVCRUISERS targets the type of middle-aged folks who want a fun truck to ramble around in on their sprawling vacation properties.

“I love Dartmouth and Thayer but I’ve learned so much more rolling up my sleeves and getting dirty,” Smith says.

Smith says he has learned about the prohibitive cost of holding too much inventory and the tangle of rules and fees that go along with international banking. He scours online bulletin boards and buys old factory manuals to learn about more ways to tweak cars for his customers. “There’s so much to know,” Smith says. “I’m learning about Land Cruisers but at the same time I have to learn about business. I’m out there buying the Dummies books.”

Between evenings and weekends Smith devotes about 20 hours a week to his side business and hopes to eventually quit his day job to focus on PVCRUISERS full-time. In the near future he wants to feature an interactive schematic of a Land Cruiser on his Web site that allows viewers to click on any part of the car to go to a page with information about that specific part.

One of the things that has stuck with Smith since starting his business is Professor John Collier’s comment in ENGS 21 after the students finished crafting financial models. Collier said he didn’t want to see rosy cash-flow scenarios because most new companies don’t start making money in their first year of existence.

“Once you get out here it’s really sink or swim,” Smith says.

Michael Ferchak ’99, Th’00 started Fusion Manufacturing in 2005 after working in product development for digital control circuits for two years in Shanghai, China. While Ferchak was designing circuits he was also involved in the manufacturing process, experience that gave him the confidence and contacts he needed to open his own manufacturing company. Ferchak started studying Chinese during his undergraduate years at Dartmouth and is nearly fluent after living in Shanghai for four years. Fusion Manufacturing is a U.S. company with operations based in Shanghai. The company specializes in manufacturing for electronic assemblies and plastics. Ferchak has relationships with factories in the Shanghai area and outsources manufacturing to them.

Shannon Magari Th’94 recently became a principal owner of Colden Corp., based in East Syracuse, N.Y. Magari joined the company in 2002 as a senior scientist and has served as vice president of health sciences since 2004. In her new position as principal she will continue to serve as vice president of health sciences and co-chair of Colden’s litigation support practice. Colden Corp. is an occupational health, safety and environmental consulting firm.

Christopher McConnell ’75, Th’76 visited campus February 3 to talk to undergraduate and graduate Thayer students about what he thinks it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. He good-naturedly shot down suggestions that tolerance for risk and an innovative idea are crucial. Instead, he emphasized the virtues of honesty and patience and the harsher requirements of connections and cash.

In 1984 McConnell co-founded CFM Technologies Inc., a semiconductor capital equipment company that subsequently went public. He helped found a second company, Mi8 Corp., in 1998. He currently assists Philadelphia-area entrepreneurs through his role as principal of The Founders Group, an organization that helps launch new technology-based ventures with IPO potential.

Recently McConnell co-founded Adondo Corp., a new enterprise that combines voice-over-IP, speech recognition, and artificial intelligence. With Adondo software, PC users can call their computers and access information including e-mail, calendars, and contacts; customer, product, and enterprise data; and information from the Internet, such as traffic reports and sports scores.

Over lunch at Thayer School McConnell emphasized finding places in the market that are not well-served and then having the guts and confidence to create a solution. He said entrepreneurs are masters at creating their own luck.

“Entrepreneurs think about how to invite fortune,” McConnell said. “You don’t necessarily need to have an invention in mind.”

James Paull ’67, Th’68 and Lee Johnson Tu’05 teamed up to found Stellaris Corp., an early-stage sustainable energy company, in 2005. Their goal is to market new technologies that make renewable energy more affordable. The company’s concentrating photovoltaic glazing (CPG) uses passive optics to concentrate light, reducing the amount of photovoltaic material required and, therefore, the cost of photovoltaic modules and building-integrated systems. Paull invented and patented the system, which produces electricity even in cloudy conditions. Stellaris’s CPGs can be incorporated into a standard photovoltaic module, in a building’s curtain wall or spandrel, as sloped glazing or skylights, or made into a shingle in a roofing system. The company’s board of advisors includes Thayer School Professor Elsa Garmire and Gregg Fairbrothers, executive director of the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network.

Jim Paull, left, and Lee Johnson

In The News

Max Rayner ’84 was recently named a winner of CIO magazine’s “Ones to Watch Award,” a global competition to identify rising stars who have the proven record and highest potential to lead the IT industry as CIOs, visionaries, and thought leaders. He joined SurfControl in October 2005 from salesforce.com, where he was responsible for the architecture and service delivery of salesforce.com’s award-winning, on-demand customer relationship management service. Prior to salesforce.com, Raynor headed Sun Microsystems’ global datacenters and infrastructure, Internet engineering, and e-commerce application delivery, where his team was recognized in an independent META Group benchmark for providing IT operations services at 42 percent below market costs with availabilities above 99.99 percent.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Networks collection on Flickr.

Thayer School Overseer Clint Harris ’69, Th’70 received Israel’s top award for a business leader in June. The award was presented by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Harris is a managing partner at Grove Street Advisors, which has invested in Israel since 1999 for client CalPERS, the world’s largest pension fund.

Thayer School Overseer Barry MacLean ’60, Th’61, president and CEO of MacLean-Fogg manufacturing company, has been elected to a two-year term as a director of the Executives’ Club of Chicago, a business forum for thought leadership, education, and best business practices.

Doug Kingsley ’84, Th’85 was featured in an August 8 story in the Boston Globe, in which he weighed in on recent increases in fundraising by venture capital and buyout firms. Kingsley is a managing director for buyout firm Advent International, which raised one of the largest private equity funds this year. He worked for Teradyne in Boston as a sales engineer before earning an M.B.A. at Harvard in 1990. At Advent he has focused on technology investments.

Philip V. Bayly ’86 was recently installed as the first Lilyan and E. Lisle Hughes Professor in Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. Bayly has taught at Washington University since 1993 and holds a joint appointment in the School of Engineering & Applied Science’s departments of mechanical and biomedical engineering. He has also worked as a research engineer for Shriners Hospital, designing prosthetic and orthotic devices for children with limb deficiencies and disabilities, and as a design engineer for Pitney-Bowes Inc. Working with colleagues across the university, Bayly has conducted research on projects ranging from high-speed machining to measuring deformation of the human brain. Bayly was named the School of Engineering & Applied Science Professor of the Year in 2004 and the Advisor of the Year in 2001.

T. Jeffrey Putnam ’86 was promoted to senior vice president of finance at Northwest Airlines and will now provide senior leadership to the finance team. Putnam was formerly vice president of financial planning and analysis for the Minnesota-based airline.

John C. Barpoulis Th’87, Tu’91 has been elected vice president and treasurer of energy company USEC Inc. Barpoulis is responsible for cash management, financial aspects of mergers and acquisitions, financing, risk management, and pension and benefit investments. The company processes used uranium — about half of which comes from old Russian atomic warheads — into enriched uranium, which it then supplies to commercial nuclear power plants. Prior to joining USEC, Barpoulis was vice president and treasurer of National Energy & Gas Transmission Inc. He also held financial positions at U.S. Generating Company and served as a consultant with Berner, Lanphier and Associates, which provides analytical services to the U.S. Department of Defense.

Col. Curtis L. Thalken Th’93 recently assumed command of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New England District. Thalken was previously commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 92nd Engineer Combat Battalion in Afghanistan, a post he took up two months after Sept. 11, 2001. He is the recipient of the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal.

For more photos, visit our Alumni Networks collection on Flickr.

Mike Collins ’86

Forbes magazine recently featured Mike Collins ’86, founder and CEO of The Big Idea Group, a New Hampshire-based company that helps inventors come up with the right idea at the right time for the right market. Sometimes Collins pays inventors an advance and a royalty, then turns their ideas into products he sells. Alternatively, he may license an idea directly to a manufacturer or a retailer, then split advances and royalties equally with the inventor. Collins’ seven-person company also spearheads “idea hunts,” challenging inventors to work on specific projects. “Ultimately, I’d like to have inventors anywhere in the world have a place to take their invention and get a good audience to review it,” Collins told Forbes. Big Idea recently signed licenses for Game Time, an electronic timing device that gives video-game players a daily or weekly time allowance. The company is currently trawling for ideas for bike and power sports accessories.

Mike Adams ’83

Mike Adams ’83, president of Bechtel Civil, an aviation, rail and infrastructure business, is working to make London’s famed subway system a smoother ride for commuters and sightseers. Adams oversees the Bechtel-led team that is designing and building several billion dollars worth of upgrades to the Jubilee, Picadilly, and Northern Lines of the 140-year-old Underground. Adams described the project, which began two years ago, as one of the most complex improvement programs in the world. To minimize disruption to passengers, crews can only work when trains stop running between 1 and 5 a.m. “Already, people are starting to see cleaner stations and trains,” said Adams. “And the new signaling system will shorten journey times and allow trains to run more frequently.”

Burt Keirstead ’76, Th’82

Burt Keirstead ’76, Th’82 leads efforts at BAE Systems to support the Department of Homeland Security’s initiative to protect commercial airliners from missiles. The BAE team was selected last August to build and test prototypes for anti-missile systems to defend U.S. commercial planes against shoulder-fired rockets. The missiles have been increasingly regarded as a serious threat since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As missile defense program manager for BAE Systems in Nashua, N.H., Keirstead is heading a team that is developing a system that will fit into the belly of a jet. He predicts that missile protection systems will be installed on airliners during the next five to 10 years. “I think it’s viable,” Keirstead recently told The Wall Street Journal. “Clearly the technology supports it.”

As chairman and chief executive officer of Network Computer Systems in Ghana, Nii Narku Quaynor ’72, Th’73 has helped several African nations adopt or strengthen Internet infrastructures. He chairs AfriNIC, the Regional Internet Registry for Africa, is African director of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and is a member of the United Nations Secretary General Advisory Group on Information and Communication Technologies. Quaynor also established the computer science department at Ghana’s University of Cape-Coast.

John D. Pavlidis Th’89 was appointed president and chief executive officer of R2 Technology, a medical software company headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif. R2’s Image Checker CT system is used in diagnosing and treating breast cancer. The December announcement followed Pavlidis’ four years as president of the ultrasound division of Siemens Medical Systems.

Thayer School overseer Charles Nearburg ’72, Th’73, ’74 was profiled in the September 2004 issue of Texas Driver Magazine. A road-racing and endurance specialist, Nearburg has raced such speedsters as a Ferrari 333 SP and a Goy Racing Mustang and now often races one of the vintage cars he has collected and restored. Nearburg told Texas Driver that when he was deciding what to take in college, engineering was a natural fit because he wanted to “understand the things affecting a race car.”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spotlighted Eddie Amoakuh ’83, Th’83, ’85 in a December story about Right At Home, Amoakuh’s home-care business for senior citizens. The Atlanta company provides companions for senior citizens who need help with tasks such as bathing and dressing so they can continue to live in their own homes. Right At Home employs more than 100 caregivers. “This is the right fit for me,” Amoakuh told the Journal-Constitution. “My heritage is that in Ghana, our elders are not ‘throwaways.’ When I was a child, everyone was your mother, and your grandmothers vied to take care of you. Day care was never an issue. Nor was it a problem to take care of the elders when that time came. That’s why I like this business so much.”

John Icke ’59, Th’60

The Wisconsin State Journal recently featured John Icke ’59, Th’60, for his work as a volunteer docent at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum. Icke is the retired president of Icke Construction Co. of Madison. Almost a decade ago his company was working near the museum when he strolled in for his first look at the exhibits. “I walked through here and I thought, ‘Wow! This is so awesome,’ ” Icke told the State Journal.

W. Haskins Hobson ’95, Th’96, was elected to represent engineers ages 35 and under on the executive committee of the Missouri Society of Professional Engineers. The statewide engineering association promotes strong licensure laws and engineering ethics. Hobson works at Missouri’s Department of Natural Resources Air Pollution Control Prorgram.

— Jennifer Seaton

For more photos, visit our Alumni Networks collection on Flickr.