Features

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.
Summer 2017
L+A Landscape Architecture

Down to the Earth

When Ron Henderson left the architecture firm where he was working in the early 1990s to study landscape architecture, he told his boss that he wanted to discover what the dirt told him he should build. “I’ve always had that instinct that a bounded project, a building, simply could not engage the world at the scale that I wanted a project to engage,” he says. Since then he has designed landscapes around the world—China, France, and North America—and is a noted expert on Chinese and Japanese gardens.
Summer 2017
Denis Weil

The Practice of Design

Moving from the corporate to the public and social sectors is the most recent step in the dynamic career of ID’s newly appointed dean, Denis Weil (M.Des. ’01). This self-proclaimed “millennial in a boomer body” brings design leadership expertise gained from positions at McDonald’s, IDEO, and Procter & Gamble. From the social sector, he brings the practice of collaborating with multiple stakeholders at Year Up, Sanergy, and Mercy Corps, and the belief that design is uniquely positioned to act as catalyst and facilitator for addressing the world’s big challenges.
Spring 2017
Eunice Santos

Natural Path

It does not require an algorithm to uncover the reasons behind Eunice Santos’s career trajectory and her decision to come to Illinois Tech to chair the computer science department. Now the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair, chair of the Department of Computer Science, and professor of computer science at Illinois Tech, Santos, the daughter of an electrical engineer and a mathematics professor, recognized her innate capacity for STEM disciplines early in life. She graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and math before earning her doctoral degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.