ALUMNI NEWS: We want to hear from you too!
E-mail us at alumni@che.wisc.edu
CAREER ASSISTANCE:
Do you need help? Can you offer help?
 he Wisconsin Alumni Association web site provides a variety of tools for alumni and students to assist both job seekers and employers. Go to www.uwalumni.com/ and click on the “Quick Link” for “Career Tools.” Among many other options, you can visit the Badger Career Network to connect with alumni in a variety of professional fields who can help you explore career options, industries and companies, or you can volunteer to offer career advice yourself. You can search BuckyNet for the latest job postings from employers seeking skilled UW grads, or post a job you seek to fill. You can explore VocationVacations, which offers one-to-three day, hands-on career immersion experiences with expert mentors from across the country, or sign up as a mentor with VocationVacations.
Engineering Career Services also offers many services to College of Engineering alumni; alumni are eligible for the same set of services available to graduating students, with many services available on-line. Visit ecs.engr.wisc.edu/public/student/alumni.php for more information.
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Alum receives
2009 Hilldale Award
for Excellence
 College of Engineering Associate Dean for Research and Grainger Professor of Nuclear Engineering Gerald Kulcinski (BS ‘61, PhD ‘66–Nuclear Engineering) is one of four 2009 UW-Madison Hilldale Award recipients. The awards honor excellence in teaching, research and service.
Since joining the faculty in 1972, Kulcinski’s studies have included energy applications, basic materials research and detailed conceptual design of fusion power plants. Early in his career, Kulcinski performed experiments on radiation damage to materials for the first walls of fusion reactors, which involved innovative research on neutron irradiation to steels and on pulsed-irradiation damage to fusion first-wall materials. He also helped initiate and still leads the UW-Madison
Fusion Technology Institute effort on the conceptual design of fusion power plants.
Kulcinski is a leader in studying the economic and environmental issues of fusion power, including examining the impact of fusion on the energy marketplace. Since 2008, he has served on NASA’s highest-level advisory board, the NASA Advisory Council.
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M2E Power Inc., a startup company headquartered in Boise, Idaho, that focuses on renewable energy design and development has named Eric Apfelbach (BS ‘84) president and chief executive officer. Apfelbach will lead the company through future development stages, including commercializing M2E products. Prior to joining the company, he was president and CEO of UW-Madison spinoff company Virent Energy Systems. News of his new position appeared on reuters.co..
Randy Cortright (PhD ’94) and Virent Energy, the company he helped found to commercialize the catalytic production of fuels and chemicals from agricultural waste, were named as “Tech Pioneers” for 2008 by Time Magazine. Virent plans to open a pilot plant this fall that will produce 10,000 gallons per year of liquid hydrocarbons (gasoline, jet fuel or diesel) by catalytic conversion of sugar.
University of Delaware Gore Professor of Chemical Engineering Abraham Lenhoff (MS ‘79, PhD ‘84) will receive the 2009 American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Separations Science and Technology. He will receive the award at the ACS spring 2009 national meeting and exposition. Bramie’s separations research focuses on protein separation, which has applications in the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries. Bramie currently is principal investigator on a five-year, $10.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study membrane protein production and characterization.
Dalia Mogahed (BS ‘97) is a Senior Analyst and Executive Director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, a nonpartisan research center dedicated to providing data-driven analysis on the views of Muslim populations around the world. With John L. Esposito, she is coauthor of the forthcoming book “Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think.” Dalia’s analysis has appeared in a number of leading publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy Magazine, Harvard International Review, The Journal of Middle East Policy, and many other academic and popular journals.
Hari Nair (BS’92) is a partner at Innosight Ventures, a private equity firm founded by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. Hari joined Innosight in late 2006, where he helped set up the firm’s activities in India, working with several of the nation’s top companies and generating a network of practitioners of “disruptive innovation” across India. An innovation is considered disruptive when it allows a new population of consumers access to a product or service that was historically accessible only to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill. Hari’s understanding of emerging markets helped him co-develop several disruptive innovations for both Innosight and their clients. Since 2008, Hari has been the key driver of Innosight Venture’s socially focused efforts, engineering several scalable micro-enterprises that substantially increase the income levels of the urban and rural poor, while creating services that are more accessible to India’s growing middle class.
Prior to joining Innosight, Hari worked with the global research and development group at Procter & Gamble for 14 years. From P&G’s headquarters in Cincinnati, Hari led numerous product and packaging innovations including the launch of several brands for the North American market. In 2002, Hari moved to Beijing, China where he helped lead P&G’s efforts to serve low-income markets across Asia. He commercialized several new product and value-based innovations in the consumer goods sector for China, Philippines, Vietnam, and India. After his assignment in China, Hari joined Cadbury Schweppes, leading their science and technology group out of Mumbai.
Babatunde Ogunnaike (MS ’81-Statistics, PhD ’81) the William L. Friend Professor of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware, has been awarded the 2008 American Automatic Control Council’s Control Engineering Practice Award. Tunde’s research group focuses on understanding the dynamic behavior of complex systems through mathematical modeling and analysis, and exploiting this understanding for novel designs and improved operation.
Denis O’Sullivan (PhD ’92) wrote in to thank us for the book review that appeared in the last issue, and to say this of his visit to Madison last summer, “One of the things that I was thinking about while there is how surprisingly (unexpectedly!) relevant my grad-school research and courses have been to my real job. I am part of a very small group of what we call ‘Transformation Practitioners’ [at Procter & Gamble in Brussels, Belgium], whose role is to act as consultants on technical problems, mostly focused on scale-up of complex transformations like turbulent emulsification. It’s probably as interesting a technical job as I could imagine outside academia, with lots of challenges and variety, and not much bureaucracy—also not much career growth, but that’s always the trade-off if you want to keep doing technology…’
Dan [Chen (PhD ’92)] (my co-author) and I met up this summer while I was in Madison—he’s based in Minnesota now. We drank beers on the terrace and listened to live music—so many great memories.
Another night Quintin Lai (also PhD ‘92) and I met on the terrace—he’s now working in Milwaukee in finance—and probably questioning the wisdom of that right now, but very happy with a wonderful 2-year-old son whom he’s training to cheer for Alabama and the Packers. I also managed to have a workout in the SERF, go for runs around part of Lake Monona and down to Picnic point, see the Maxwell Street Days on State Street, renew my acquaintance with the good and not-so-good beers available on the Union Terrace and generally stay just about long enough to remind myself what an amazing place Madison is. Especially when winter is over and the sun starts to shine. When I think about the time I spent there, I still feel homesick! But life in Europe isn’t so bad either…”
Christopher Rao (PhD ’00), assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his graduate student Kang Wu have received the CAST Directors’ Award for best poster presentation at the AIChE 2008 annual meeting. Their poster was titled, “The Physical Structure of Intracellular Feedback Loops.”
