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Alumni Spotlights

Claude Shannon

BS EE and Math 1936
Father of Information Theory
David Tarver with co-founders of his company

David Tarver

BSE MSE EE 1975 1976
Returning to campus to receive his ECE Alumni Merit Award, Tarver spoke about the arc of his professional journey from electrical engineer to entrepreneur to community advocate.

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Dale DeJager in the computing class in Kenya

Dale DeJager

BS EE 1973
Dale DeJager helped set up a solar-powered computer lab for students in Kenya.

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Larry Page

BSE CE 1995
Co-founder of Google
Mehdi Hatamian

Mehdi Hatamian

MSE PHD EE 1978 1982
Creating a future where everyone can do a monthly at-home screening for multiple cancers, including the four most common cancers in the world.

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Katie Bouman

Katie Bouman

BSE EE 2011
Key member in the Event Horizon Telescope project that brought us the first-ever image of a black hole.

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Paul Debevec

BSE CE 1992
Maker of Movie Magic
Todd Coleman

Todd Coleman

BSE CE & EE 2000
Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego.

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Mariesa Crow

Mariesa Crow

BSE EE 1985
Fred Finley Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Vice Provost for Research at Missouri S&T.

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Andrew Farah

Andrew Farah

BSE CE 1982; MSE Electrical Science 1984
Chief Engineer of the Volt – the world’s best-selling plug-in hybrid vehicle.

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Tony Fadell

BSE CE 1991
Inventor of the iPod
Founder of Nest Labs
Rhonda Franklin

Rhonda Franklin

MS PhD 1990 1995
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
University of Minnesota.

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Hannah Goldberg

Hannah Goldberg

BSE MSE EE 2003 2004
One of the first employees at Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company.

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Scott Hanson

Scott Hanson

BSE MSE PhD EE 2004 2006 2009
Co-founded Ambiq Micro, which leads the world in energy efficient microcontroller (MCU) design.

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Garlin Gilchrist

BSE CE and CS 2005
Lieutenant Governor
of the State of Michigan
Angelique Johnson

Angelique Johnson

MSE PhD EE 2007 2011
Founder of MEMStim, which uses microfabrication to drastically reduce the cost of one of the most expensive parts of cochlear implants.

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Bill Joy

Bill Joy

BSE CompE 1975
Co-founded Sun Microsystems and designed UNIX and Java.

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Thomas Knoll

BSE Physics 1982; MSE CICE 1984
Inventor of Photoshop
Leo McAfee

Leo McAfee

MS PhD 1967 1970
Prof. Leo McAfee was committed to outreach among minority students throughout his nearly 40 years at U-M.

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Steve McLaughlin

Steve McLaughlin

PhD EE 1992
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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Steve Mollenkopf

Steve Mollenkopf

MSE EE 1993
Former CEO of Qualcomm, the world’s leading developer of mobile computing technology.

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Dr. Willie Hobbs Moore

First African American woman at U-M to earn
a BS and MS in Electrical Engineering (’58 and ’61).

Mitchell Rohde

Mitchell Rohde

BSE EE 1994; MS EE:S 1996; MS PhD BME 1997 2000
Founder of Quantum Signal, which works on projects from self-driving cars to facial recognition for skincare.

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Michael Stonebraker

Michael Stonebraker

MS PhD 1966 1971
Relational database pioneer and Turing Award Winner.

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Richard Wallace

Richard Wallace

BSE EE 1982
President and CEO of semiconductor giant, KLA.

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Babak Parviz

MSE PhD EE ’97 ’01; also MS Physics ’97
Led development of Google Glass
Nick Yang

Nick Yang

BSE EE 1997
Co-founder of KongZhong Corporation and ChinaRen Inc.

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Dawson Yee

Dawson Yee

MSE EE 1987
Architect for the fastest-selling product in consumer electronics history – XBox Kinect.

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Meera Sampath

PhD EE:S 1995
Helped kickstart Xerox’s Indian Innovation Hub
and was an early leader of their work in that country.
Nader Najafi

Nader Najafi

MSE PHD EE 1988 1992
Entrepreneur of daring health devices

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Charles Brush

Charles F. Brush

BSE 1869
Charles Brush had a big influence on household lighting.

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Claude Gauthier

Claude Gauthier

MSE PHD EE 1997 1999
Claude built his career on connections. Now, he’s working to connect our world through next-gen ethernet.

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Lee Boysel

Lee Boysel

BSE MSE EE 1962 1963
Creator of the first single-chip CPU microprocessor.

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Eric Aupperle

Eric Aupperle

BSE EE and Math 1957; Mathematics; MSE Nuclear Eng 1958; MSE Instrumentation Eng 1964
Aupperle was the director and president of a research network that had a hand in developing the Internet.
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Eran Bashan

Eran Bashan

PHD EE:S 2008
Bashan, founder of Hygieia, developed a device to help people with diabetes keep track of insulin use at home.

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