Features | Illinois Tech Magazine

Summer 2022

Vinesh Kannan (CS ’19)

A ‘Powerful Way to Open Doors’

In an industry where there aren’t enough internships for everyone—and competition for those that are available is steep—Vinesh Kannan (CS ’19) and his peers realized they could fill a void.

Spring 2022

Ram Ramanujam

An entrepreneur and investor, Ram Ramanujam (Ph.D. ENG ’81) has spent the last 31 years of his career leading a host of technology startups in Silicon Valley. Raised in the South Indian community of Gandhigram—“sort of a utopian village modeled after some of [Mahatma Gandhi’s] teachings and rural education models,” he says—Ramanujam prized education and supporting others from an early age.

Spring 2022

Eric Burger

In 2017 the United States was fighting a common enemy—robocalls from overseas operations that scammed people of their hard-earned savings.

Spring 2022

Steven Babitch

Solving the Right Problem By Steve Hendershot PHOTO BY ADAM B. AUEL S teven Babitch (DSGN ’07) is a practitioner of human-centered design, which means he specializes in cultural translation: He walks into big, complex organizations that are struggling to understand the people they serve—from United Airlines to the Mayo...

Spring 2022

Michael DeAnda

Michael Anthony DeAnda (Ph.D. Technology and Humanities ’19) designs games with the aim of showing the game industry, and society at large, new ways of being.

Spring 2022

Marilyn Barrios

Marilyn Barrios

Designing security into code is a lot like designing security in a house, Marilyn Barrios (ITM, M.S. ITM ’18) says. Each door, window, and any other point of entry must be secured. But these security measures aren’t considered after the house is built. They are embedded in the initial design of the house.

Fall 2021

Lift While You Climb

Sitting in a lounge chair in the corner of his 19th-floor office in Michael Paul Galvin Tower, Raj Echambadi, in the midst of answering a question, pauses and interrupts his own train of thought. Then, without missing a beat, he asks me to follow him into the conference room that connects to his office via a closed door no more than 10 or so feet away.

Fall 2021

Equity By Design

Metra train tracks run at ground level through the Chicago South Side neighborhood of South Shore, where Dawveed Scully (ARCH ’10) spent his early years. An urban designer and associate director at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), and an adjunct instructor in architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology, the 36-year-old Scully recalls the boundary that the tracks created at 71st Street and Ridgeland Avenue, and within the realm of his childhood, a dividing line he opted not to cross.

Fall 2021

Driving Into the Future of the Unknown

YJ Ahn (M.D.M. ’06) seems too warm and approachable to be an agent of radical change. Yet those are the traits that she shares with her signature project, the Waymo Driver: a combination of both hardware and software that, when applied, looks like a sailboat wearing a fedora, but that aspires to make your car drive itself.

Fall 2021

Building the Motor Ahead of Its Time

From their home in Bagasara, India, Piyush Desai (M.S. EE ’04, Ph.D. ’09) grew up helping his father fix household items, ranging from motors to gramophones to old radios that operated using valves and tubes.

Fall 2021

Inquiring Mind

There was a time when Ian Fleming (LAW ’15), just for fun, typed up contracts for his favorite baseball icons—this many dollars for that many years. He’d pick a team and peg every player.

Summer 2021

Learning Through Gaming

Learning Through Gaming

There are moments that, some six years later, still stand out to Elvin Moy. Moy (ME, EMGT, M.Eng. MAE ’18) can recall the first group gaming event, one where students gathered to play video games online together, that he and his Illinois Institute of Technology gaming organization held on campus. Specifically, he recalls how they forgot to tape the master ethernet cable down and that it was pulled out when someone tripped on it, putting a pause to the 50-plus players participating in the event for a full hour. Then there was the time he decided to host a gaming event and only two people showed up—but he had ordered the pizza, a great deal of it, without asking for anyone to RSVP.