Features

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.
Spring 2018
Carly Coulson

Less is Much More

April high temperatures in Grand Marais, Minnesota, located on the shores of Lake Superior, average in the mid-40°F range, balmy by its January -40°F low that residents take in stride. No matter what weather extreme, however, visitors to the local artist colony or nature lovers seeking a quiet escape will one day have the chance to experience life deep within the area’s boreal forests from a unique perspective. In the Disappear Retreat, a 8x10x9-foot, largely transparent structure, the temperature will never drop below 60°F—and the peak heating load is 100 watts, the same amount of power needed to operate a light bulb.
Spring 2018
Mohammed Faraj

"The Best" at What They Do

Clad in a fresh laboratory coat, Mohammed Faraj (EE ’92) points out glass cases filled with black-and-white headshots of former political leaders, Hollywood celebrities, and sports stars who were loyal customers of the oldest and arguably the most gadget-centric catalog merchandiser in America: Hammacher Schlemmer. While notable figures ranging from United States President John F. Kennedy to baseball luminary Babe Ruth provide a colorful touch to the storied company’s nearly 170 years in existence, Faraj, as director of Hammacher Schlemmer Institute, prides himself on knowing that every customer receives the highest-quality items that the catalog company can offer.
Spring 2018
Scott Zhang

New Horizons

Scott Zhang’s 28-year career at Honeywell hinged on an urgent, radical decision. It was 1990, and Zhang had just wrapped up his master’s degree in mechanical engineering at Illinois Tech. He had completed a three-month internship at Honeywell subsidiary Universal Oil Products in Des Plaines, Illinois, and loved it, but there was a serious problem: In order to pursue a career at UOP, he would need to drop mechanical engineering, the discipline to which he had just devoted six years of study, and instead become a chemical engineer. No problem, Zhang figured. He left the doctoral program he’d enrolled in and earned his Ph.D. in chemical engineering, while also working part-time at UOP. He has never looked back.
Fall 2017
The Fall of a Technology Empire

The Fall of a Technology Empire

The tech bubble of the 1990s had not yet burst when Marie Hicks graduated from Harvard University and began working as a system administrator. There, she made an observation that would eventually become the impetus for her critically acclaimed book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing, published by MIT Press earlier this year. Although most of Hicks’s co-workers were male, all the supervisors were female—and from a different generation.
Fall 2017
In Perpetual Motion

In Perpetual Motion

Growing up in Tabriz, Azerbaijan, Alireza Khaligh (Ph.D. EE ’06) sometimes accompanied his father to his job at the local electric power plant. The sight of the generators, smokestacks, and spinning turbines along with conversations he had with his father made such a profound impact on Khaligh that he turned to constructing circuits and electronic components as an adolescent hobby. With an aptitude for mathematics and physics, Khaligh had scored an academic trifecta by the time he received his doctorate: He ranked first in both his bachelor’s and master’s power engineering programs at Sharif University of Technology, and first in the Ph.D. qualifying examination in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Tech.