Dartmouth Engineer

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.