An engineering education from the University of Delaware is transformational. Our students graduate with the skills and the passion to tackle some of the society’s biggest challenges. Here are just a few alumni who are changing the world.
- Marjelle Scheffers, EG17, spent Fall 2017 in Africa working with the Ghana Bamboo Bikes Initiative, an organization that builds bicycles out of bamboo to help young people gain employment and escape poverty. Scheffers refined a prototype of a bamboo wheelchair and improved process engineering and quality assessment of bamboo bicycles. The inspiration for this adventure came from Senior Design—a one-semester capstone engineering design program.
- Amira Idris, EG15, is the founder and CEO of TheraV. Its signature product, the Elix, is a drug-free, patent pending vibrating strap that can aid pain management when worn over a limb. She recently started a GoFundMe campaign to provide free devices to veterans with phantom limb pain.
- Sean Hunt, EG11, is co-founder of Solugen Inc., which has developed a scaled, sustainable process to create hydrogen peroxide from plants. He was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30 list in Manufacturing and Industry” in 2017; in the listing, Forbes notes that manufacturing is a capital-intensive enterprise with many barriers to entry, especially for young entrepreneurs.
- Aaron Chockla, EG 07, managing partner for Lucelo Technologies, was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30 in Energy” list in 2015 for his work to provide electrical power in locations where it does not exist by turning everyday plastic, paper, and fabric into micropower grids.
- Vess Bakalov, EG99, co-founded SevOne, an IT performance management company that has, since its beginnings in 2005, garnered accolades from such sources as Deloitte and Inc. magazine.
- Kara Odom Walker, EG99, is the cabinet secretary for Delaware’s Department of Health and Social Services. This agency helps Delawareans access health care, food benefits, disability-related services, and mental health and addiction treatment.
- Wayne Westerman, EG99PhD, along with Prof. John Elias, developed the touch-tracking, sensing, typing and gesture recognition technology that enabled Apple to amaze the world with its state-of-the-art mobile devices.
- Dave DeWalt, EG86, has built one of the world’s preeminent cybersecurity firms, FireEye—a company that has led the investigation of one high-profile hacker attack after another, from Sony Pictures to the recent Equifax breach which potentially exposed the personal information of 143 million people. Every day, in nations around the globe, FireEye’s system of “virtual machines” guards against hackers for firms such as Visa, General Electric, Facebook and even the National Security Agency.
- Rakesh Jain, EG76PhD, is a pioneer in anti-angiogenic therapies, which affect blood vessel formation to treat diseases including cancer. The Director of the E.L. Steele Laboratories for Tumor Biology at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Jain is a Fellow of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors.
- Tom Gutshall, EG60, co-founded Cepheid, a company that has addressed problems that many profit-minded companies would avoid – from inventing anthrax detection equipment in the wake of the 2001 scare, to creating a molecular diagnostic test for the Ebola Zaire virus that enables fast diagnoses in some of the most remote regions in the world.
- Bob Gore, EG59, 10H, discovered a new way of coating electrical wires with Teflon, which would eventually provide a launching pad for establishing his father’s company, W.L. Gore & Associates. A few years later, he found a way of stretching the same material (Teflon) so that it acquired such properties as “breathability” and water resistance. We know it today as Gore-Tex, an essential ingredient in weather-ready clothing and even space suits. Until recently, the company was led by UD Engineering alumna Terri Kelly, EG83, who also serves on UD’s Board of Trustees.