Features

Spring 2019
Changing the Culture

Changing the Culture

As a high school student, Susan Blessing (PHYS ’82) was enthralled with physics and the way it could explain exactly how the universe worked. “Physics is everything,” she says. But at the same time, after she enrolled at Illinois Tech, she realized that physics wasn’t everything—it wasn’t gender equal. From the time she began studying physics, she was surrounded by men. “There were very few women,” she says. “I knew I had to get used to it because that is what the future would hold.”
Spring 2019
Paige Mass

With Her Heart and Mind

From her laboratory within the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation at Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., Paige Mass (BME ’17) can see the SkyBear medical helicopter delivering critical patients, from infants to teenagers. While Mass is not likely to meet any one of them in person, she could conceivably change the lives of some of those patients through her design of a cardiac device specific to their individual needs. In a telephone interview from Children’s National, Mass, an R&D development operations engineer, recalls being allowed to observe a surgery in which one of her 3D-printed models was being tested.
Fall 2018
Built by Barcode

Built by Barcode

It’s 90 degrees on a late June day as Edward L. “Ed” Kaplan (ME ’65) bounds into IIT Tower dressed in navy walking shorts, a navy plaid polo shirt, and fluorescent yellow athletic shoes. While his chronological age may be 75, his spirit and enthusiasm appear to be no less diminished than when he was a 26-year-old entrepreneur who, along with the late Gerhard “Gary” Cless, began to fabricate the machines and processes that would eventually form Zebra Technologies Corporation, a pioneering asset-identification company that earned $3.72 billion in revenue during fiscal year 2017.
Fall 2018
Apoorva Shenoy

The I’s Have It

Through her design of a custom-fit athletic shoe, Apoorva Shenoy (M.Des. ’18) says that she is “bringing back a more human way of running.” That Shenoy chooses to emphasize the human aspect of her startup idea is no surprise considering her educational pedigree: Illinois Tech’s Institute of Design (ID). Now housed in the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, ID—founded as the New Bauhaus in 1937 under visionary László Moholy-Nagy—is recognized as a leading institution for its methods-based, human-centered approach to global challenges, inspiring students to place people first, and sometimes even feet first, as in the example of Shenoy.
Fall 2018
Howard Tullman

All In

The phrase “rock-star hire” seems tailor-made for Howard Tullman’s arrival at Illinois Tech, where he serves as executive director of the university’s new Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship. Tullman, 73, has the credentials: he’s a veteran entrepreneur, investor, and academic administrator who spent the last five years leading Chicago tech hub 1871, which in February was named the world’s top business incubator. He also brings plenty of rock-star vibe, gliding around campus in a black Mercedes with a “Howie T” vanity plate and casting a bold vision for the Kaplan Institute’s future. We asked him what drew him to Illinois Tech and about his plans for the Kaplan Institute.
Fall 2018
What Makes an Angel Investor’s Wings Flap?

In Their Words:

An ongoing explosion in entrepreneurial activity has been taking place on college campuses, especially related to tech startups. The recent study How Technology-Based Start-Ups Support U.S. Economic Growth (J. John Wu and Robert D. Atkinson, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, 2017) calculates that the number of technology-based startups in the United States grew 47 percent in the last decade, and that these new firms have been making an outsized contribution to economic growth.
Spring 2018
Miwa Aki

Into the Sky

By most any company’s standards, erecting the world’s tallest tower—the TOKYO SKYTREE®, at a height of 2,080 feet—would be an insurmountable architectural feat. But for the Obayashi Corporation, it was merely a warm-up. In 2012 the global construction, civil engineering, and real estate development conglomerate announced that it had begun research so that it could assemble a 96,000-kilometer (59,652-mile) carbon nanotube cable that will extend from Earth into the cosmos to support a space elevator. Akihisa “Aki” Miwa (M.S. OR ’83), general manager of Obayashi’s Technical Division, says that the company, where he has been employed since 1974, has always had one eye just beyond the horizon.