2003 Distinguished Service Award recipients

Erick J. Laine (11K JPG)

Erick Laine's journey to the executive boardroom began 70 years ago as a young child in the former Soviet Union. Laine, born to Finnish parents in Russia in 1933, moved shortly after his birth to Finland, and at the age of five journeyed with his parents to Milwaukee. He attended the city's public schools, graduating from Milwaukee's Washington High School in 1951, and then enrolled at UW-Madison, where he obtained a BS in civil engineering in 1955.

Laine went to work immediately after college for ALCOA, an aluminum manufacturing company. He worked his way up the ranks of the corporation serving as chief production engineer, chief industrial engineer, and operations manager at ALCOA plants in Ohio, Iowa and Pennsylvania. In 1977, he was promoted to president of Alcas Cutlery Corp., a subsidiary of ALCOA that manufactured household knives and other products under the brand name of CUTCO Cutlery.

In 1982, Laine, with three other executives from Alcas, arranged a leveraged buyout of the company from ALCOA. Under Laine's stewardship, Alcas' sales grew from $5 million in 1977 to more than $250 million in 2002. Employment has grown from 180 people to nearly 1,200. Alcas is now the largest kitchen cutlery manufacturer in the United States, and has expanded its sales overseas.

Laine was inducted into the Direct Selling Association Hall of Fame in 2002. It is the highest honor accorded to individuals involved in manufacturing and distributing goods directly to consumers. "His life has been marked by integrity, ethics, compassion, leadership and vision," said Neil Offen, president of the Direct Selling Association.

Laine was awarded the Academy of Marketing Science Distinguished Marketer Award in 1999. He has also earned the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for manufacturing and consumer products, and is a member and chairman of the Direct Selling Education Foundation. He received the foundation's Circle of Honor award in 1999.

He has served as a director of the Greater Olean, New York, Area Chamber of Commerce, the Olean General Hospital, and the American Cutlery Manufacturers Association.

Rajan I. Sheth (20K JPG)

Rajan Sheth makes no small plans. Indeed, he wants to transform the company he has headed since 1994 — Mead & Hunt — into the world's best engineering consulting firm.

Under Sheth's tenure as president and chairman of the board of the Madison-based company, Mead & Hunt has more than doubled its employees, with earnings up more than 300 percent. Annual sales total nearly $30 million. The company, founded in 1900, operates offices in many states, and is ranked among the top 350 architectural and engineering firms in the country. It was recently named one of the 100 fastest growing consulting firms in the country.

This incredible growth aside, Sheth is most proud of Mead & Hunt's reputation as a family-friendly company that is supportive of the personal and professional growth of its employees. The company provides services in the areas of bridges, highways, airports, water resources, flood and industrial facilities, historical preservation, and infrastructure.

Sheth came to the U.S. in 1970 to complete his training as a civil engineer in Madison. Born in Bombay, India, he received his BS in civil engineering from Maharaja Sayajirao University in 1970. He earned his MS in civil and environmental engineering from UW-Madison in 1972.

He was responsible for Mead & Hunt's recognition as one of the top bridge and highway design firms in Wisconsin and has designed more than 200 bridges in his career.

Sheth has earned several awards in his field, including the 1982 Young Engineer of the Year award from the southwest branch of the Wisconsin Society of Professional Engineers. The same organization named him Engineer of the Year in Private Practice in 1983 and Engineer of the Year in 1988. He was also named Outstanding Civil Engineer in 1993 by the Madison branch of the American Society of Civil Engineers.

He has been active in the ASCE, the Wisconsin Society of Professional Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the American Council of Engineering Companies. He assisted the university in establishing an endowed professorship for the CEE department.

David Weininger (18K JPG)

David Weininger has taken his lifelong interest in chemistry and developed a leading-edge company in the emerging field of chemical informatics.

Weininger is co-founder and president of Daylight Chemical Information Systems. He received his PhD in water chemistry from UW-Madison in 1978. Weininger was a research scientist before founding Daylight Chemical Information Systems. The privately held company focuses on chemical informatics — the application of information technology to the investigation of chemistry problems and the analysis of chemical data. The goal of chemical informatics, according to Weininger, is to create systems that can handle not only large amounts of data, but can also organize and evaluate data to provide new insights into chemical research. Daylight is widely regarded as the leading chemical informatics innovator in the life sciences industry. The company has offices in California, New Mexico and England.

In particular, the company has worked with the pharmaceutical industry and other companies that design chemicals with specific chemical properties.

Weininger's doctoral thesis work at the college focused on the accumulation of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in lake trout in Lake Michigan. His work was considered groundbreaking in the developing field of bio-accumulation of organic chemicals in the environment. He then joined the EPA's National Environmental Research Laboratory in Duluth.

In 1983, he began work with the Quantitative Structure Activity Relationships chemical modeling group at Pomona College. His advances in the field led to the development of SMILES (Simplified Molecular Input Line Entry Specification), a simple yet comprehensive chemical nomenclature. It is utilized throughout the pharmaceutical and chemical industries for designing organic chemicals with specific chemical properties. Weininger's role in developing SMILES, and the larger role he has played in fostering the emerging field of informatics, has been chronicled in the book, The Info Mesa (Norton) by writer Ed Regis, which focuses on Santa Fe, New Mexico, home to Daylight's research laboratories.