The ECE Alumni Council comprises a group of highly accomplished alumni of ECE who meet approximately twice per year to discuss ECE's educational, research and outreach activities. The Council provides input and insight regarding ECE's programs and strategic goals. The council members also engage with ECE students and faculty members in various programs helping to provide opportunities to expand, improve, and diversify the interactions of all our activities.
Dr. Nikhil Balram is President and CEO of Ricoh Innovations, Inc. (rii.ricoh.com), a Silicon Valley company that develops innovative technologies and new business opportunities for Ricoh Company Ltd. With over 20 years of experience, Dr. Balram is widely hailed throughout the industry and academia as an expert and innovator in video and display technologies across multiple platforms. He was recently honored with a Gold Stevie® Award for Executive of the Year in the Electronics category in The 9th Annual International Business Awards, a 2012 Fellow Award by the Society for Information Display (SID) and the 2011 Alumni Achievement Award by Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Balram is an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, visiting professor of vision science at the University of California, Berkeley, a guest professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Gandhinagar, India, and serves on the Industry Advisory Board (IAB) at the School of Engineering at Santa Clara University. He has more than 30 technical publications, and over 40 US patents granted or pending. He received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Ray Betler is the Chief Operating Officer for the Wabtec Corporation. The Wabtec Corporation provides a unique and broad portfolio of products and services for freight and passenger rolling stock. Wabtec’s highly engineered products range from braking equipment to electronics to heat exchangers to doors and can be found on virtually every locomotive, freight car, transit car and bus in North America and in more than 100 countries around the world.
Starting his career as a design engineer for Westinghouse, Ray became the youngest President and CEO in the 120-year history of the company. He served with the same company under different ownership and corporate structures for almost 30 years. The company evolved from Westinghouse to AEG Transportation, ABB Daimler-Benz Transportation, Adtranz North America, and finally Bombardier Transportation. Ray not only led the worldwide Total Transit Systems business, headquartered in Pittsburgh, he also lived and worked for two years in the United Kingdom to lead Bombardier’s London Underground Division, a $7.5 Billion business, and the largest transportation industry public private partnership effort in the world.
A native of Pittsburgh, Ray holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering as well as a second B.S. degree in Economics and Administration/Management Science, both from Carnegie Mellon University. He has attended graduate classes at Katz Business School at the University of Pittsburgh. He has certificates from the Executive Development Program at IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland and the Finance for Executives Program at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.
Dr. Kevin Kettler currently manages several start-up businesses in the Austin area.
Prior to his current role, Dr. Kettler retired from Dell in 2009 after 13 years of employment. While at Dell he served in the role of Chief Technology Officer. He was responsible for the design, development, and performance analysis of core architectures for the Dell’s complete product portfolio. He also had responsibility defining and driving Dell's strategic technology initiatives and solutions. Dr. Kettler also had responsibility for Dell’s technical positions for domestic and international regulatory and government policy and often served as the spokesperson for Dell on innovation and technology.
Prior to joining Dell in January of1996, Dr. Kettler worked at IBM Corporation for 12 years, holding various positions supporting or developing personal computer systems.
In addition to his position at Dell, he was an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas. Dr. Kettler has published papers on real-time/multimedia systems and has served on the engineering advisory councils at the University of Texas College of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Carnegie Mellon University’s school of engineering. He has served on several company boards. Dr. Kettler holds several patents.
Dr. Kettler is also active in local charities and helped found Charity Partners of Austin (CPA) in 2005. CPA is a nonprofit organization that raises money through family-friendly, informal music and art events. The proceeds go to local Austin charities, particularly those that help families and kids in need. Dr. Kettler is also currently active in his community coaching youth soccer and basketball teams.
Dr. Kettler received his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.
Oleg Khaykin has been President and Chief Executive Officer of International Rectifier (NYSE: IRF), a world leader in power management technology, since March 2008.
From 2003 to February 2008, Mr. Khaykin was Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer with Amkor Technology (NASDAQ: AMKR), a leading provider of semiconductor assembly and test services. As COO, he was responsible for all aspects of sales, marketing, R&D and manufacturing operations.
From 1999 to 2003, Mr. Khaykin was with Conexant Systems/Mindspeed Technologies, where he served as Vice President of Strategy & Business Development. His responsibilities included defining Conexant’s strategy and managing business development activities, including M&A, divestitures/spin-offs, equity investments and strategic alliances.
Prior to Conexant, Mr. Khaykin spent eight years with The Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with leading European and North American companies in the high tech, bio-technology, automotive, and aerospace industries. Before that, he was a systems engineer with Motorola’s wireless infrastructure group.
Mr. Khaykin holds an MBA from Northwestern University’s J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management and a Bachelor of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering (BSECE) with High University Honors from Carnegie-Mellon.
Mr. Khaykin also currently serves on the Board of Directors of Newport Corporation (NASDAQ: NEWP) in Irvine, CA.
Garrett Long has worked in the semiconductor industry for nearly 20 years. He has held leadership positions in marketing, applications and engineering, and is currently focused on new business segment creation at SanDisk. His experience base comes from both Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, where he has had the opportunity to see many sides of his industry. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS in Electrical Engineering. While not at work, Garrett enjoys spending time with his family in Danville, CA.
Kimon Michaels, Ph.D., a co-founder of PDF Solutions, Inc., has served as Vice President, Products and Solutions since July 2010. Mr. Michaels served as Vice President, Design for Manufacturability from June 2007 through June 2010. Prior to that, Dr. Michaels served as Vice President, Field Operations for Manufacturing Process Solutions from January 2006 through May 2007, and has been a Director since November 1995. From March 1993 through December 2005, he served in various vice presidential capacities. He also served as Chief Financial Officer from November 1995 to July 1998. Dr. Michaels received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, an M.S. E.C.E. and a Ph.D. E.C.E. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Drew Perkins is the CEO of Cohere Networks, a company that is changing the game for cable operators. As a serial entrepreneur, Drew has been at the forefront of Internet technology innovation for nearly three decades. While a computer engineering student at Carnegie-Mellon University, Mr. Perkins was the lead author of the Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP), a technology that provided for the use of the Internet via the circuit-switched telephone system, and enabled the early growth of the Internet. During the mid-1990s, Mr. Perkins served in various senior engineering and management roles at FORE Systems, an innovator in packet-switched Internet technology. In 1998, Mr. Perkins was co-founder of Lightera Networks, a developer of optical switching systems for telecom networks that was acquired in 1999 by Ciena Corporation for more than $500 million. In 2000, Mr. Perkins co-founded metropolitan telecommunications service provider OnFiber Communications, later acquired by Qwest for more than $100 million. In 2001, Mr. Perkins co-founded Infinera Corporation, a vertically integrated optical networking startup that developed the world’s first large-scale photonic integrated circuits (PICs) and a family of optical networking system products implementing a digital optical architecture based on the capabilities of Infinera’s PICs. Infinera has been traded on Nasdaq since their 2007 IPO. Mr. Perkins has also held various roles in industry standards bodies and research organizations including the IETF, IEEE, OIF, ATM Forum and Internet2.
Mr. Perkins holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University, where he has also endowed a professorship, the Drew D. Perkins Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Mark Re earned his Ph.D. in ECE’s Data Storage Systems Center in 1987, and has spent the past 26 years working on cutting-edge research in the hard drive industry. He began his career as a researcher at IBM's Watson Research Center, but soon moved into a management position and was director of head development when he left IBM to serve as Read-Rite’s senior vice president of research and development. Re joined Seagate Technology, one of the world’s leading hard drive and data storage solution companies, in 2003, and currently serves as senior vice president of research and technology development for recording media and head research.
Re holds more than 10 patents and has contributed to more than 40 scientific and engineering publications. While at IBM, he was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer — an honor granted only to IBM technical staffers who demonstrate the highest levels of technical leadership, innovation and vision. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board for the Data Storage Institute in Singapore, the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and the Advanced Storage Technology Consortium.
Roger Rosner is the Vice President of Productivity Applications at Apple. Rosner majored in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon, graduating in 1987. After serving as an officer in the US Air Force, he founded several software companies developing applications for productivity and collaboration, including Lighthouse Design, which became the largest independent software company in the NeXT market and was acquired by Sun. His last company was acquired by Apple in 2001. At Apple he founded and leads the organization that created the iWork productivity suite--Pages, Numbers, and Keynote--used by millions of customers on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Most recently his team built iBooks Author, a groundbreaking application for creating interactive multi-media textbooks for the iPad.
Archana Sathaye started her career at Digital Equipment Corporation, where she worked on Performance and Reliability modeling of Computer Systems for seven years. She has spent several years in industry and in academia. She has taught at the University of Pittsburgh, spent four years as a faculty member at the Computer Science Department at San Jose State University, and also was an adjunct professor in the Business School at Santa Clara University. She has published in performance and availability modeling, data mining, and discrete event dynamic systems. She has served as Local Chair for SIGKDD conference, Session Co-Chair for American Control Conference, reviewer for IEEE Transactions on Reliability, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Database Textbooks by Addison Wesley Publishing, and several conferences.
More recently, she has been involved in fundraising for nonprofits and has been a technology consultant in Data Analysis and Mathematical Modeling. As part of her work in non-profit organizations, she is a Board Member of Air Systems Foundation Scholarship Board, an Advisory Board Member of The Harker School, an Advisory Board Member of Sunday Friends Foundation, and an Advisory Member of Foothill College for the Computer Science and Sustainability Certification Program. She has also been The Harker School Fashion Show 2007 Event Chair, 2003-2007 Sponsorship Chair, and Executive Committee Member of The Harker School Capital Campaign.
Archana has a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a Masters in Applied Mathematics from Virginia Tech, and a Masters in Pure Mathematics from Bombay University.
Shirish Sathaye joined Khosla Ventures as a General Partner after a decade of investment experience at Matrix Partners, and a long operating career at several technology companies. He was part of two tech companies—FORE Systems and Alteon Websystems—when they were still nascent, and led the design and development of their core products. Both companies pioneered important new product categories and had very successful IPOs.
Shirish has Ph.D in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, an MSEE from Virginia Tech, and a Bachelors Degree in Electronics Engineering from IT-BHU, Varanasi, India. He started his career at Digital Equipment Corporation first in the Semiconductor group, and then in the Network Architecture Group, spending a total of eight years at Digital Equipment Corporation. Shirish moved on to FORE Systems, where he ran Engineering for the ATM switch group. In 1997 he noticed a fundamental shift: Ethernet connections were gaining speed, eclipsing ATM. He left FORE to join Alteon Websystems, a young Ethernet switch maker backed by Matrix Partners, as its vice president of engineering and later, its chief technology officer. As the promise of the Web unfolded, Alteon began to load-balance Web servers for Internet companies. Alteon went public in 1999 and the next year sold to Nortel for $7.8 billion.
As a venture capitalist, Shirish works closely with entrepreneurs to assist them with developing and refining concepts and strategies and putting together strong teams. In some cases, Shirish will get involved very early, before the idea for the company has been fully formed. His current areas of investment focus are Wireless and Wireline Networking, CleanTech, and Cloud-based Software, Storage and Systems.
Han-Ping D. Shieh received his BS degree from National Taiwan University in 1975 and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, U.S.A. in 1987. He joined National Chiao Tung University (NCTU) in Hsinchu, Taiwan as a professor at Institute of Opto-Electronic Engineering and Microelectronics and Information Research Center (MIRC) in 1992 after as a Research Staff Member at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA since 1988. He was an Associate Director, MIRC, NCTU. He founded and served as the Founding Director, Display Institute at NCTU in 2003, the first such kind of graduate academic institute in the world dedicated for display education and research. He was appointed as a co-PI of “Display Science and Technology Large-Scale Project” in 2004, a national project to drive Taiwan display into new era. He served as the Dean, College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NCTU 2006 -2010 and AU Optronics Chair Professor. He is the fellow of IEEE, OSA and SID. He is a Chang Jiang Scholar and a Chair Professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China since 2010. He is now an NCTU Chair Professor and Senior Vice President, National Chiao Tung University.
His current research interests are in display, optical MEMS, nano-optical components, and solar energy. He has served as a Director, SID, and as program chair, committee member, organized conferences in major data storage (ISOM, MORIS, Intermag, ODS, APDSC) and display (SID, IDRC, IDMC, ASID, FPD Expo, etc.). He has published more than 160 journal papers and has more 60 patents to his credit. He is an Assoc. Editor of IEEE/OSA J. of Display Technology and J. of Society for Information Display.
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