The Legacy of Excellence –
alumni enriching the lives of students

Our engineering and science alumni are enriching the learning experiences and broadening the career horizons of our students in an increasing number and variety of ways.

These range from being mentors and role models to providing lectures, case studies and co-op positions to students. Here are a few examples:

• Joseph Colaianni, BEE '56, partner in charge at Patton Boggs, will be on campus in June to provide a lecture to engineering students on the issues of intellectual property in an increasingly global environment. While he's on campus he will also meet with engineering and law faculty to advise them on a possible integrated engineering-law program.
• Dr. Bill Berkowski, BS Chem '74, DDS '78, and Dr. Noreen Rossi, BS Chem '74, are mentors to UDM pre-dentistry and pre-medicine undergraduate students.
• Mark Mikula, BEE '82, special assistant to the Technical Director at the Army's Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in Warren has, in recent years, been personally involved in hiring and mentoring 11 UDM engineering co-op students.
• Dr. Richard Ziemba, BS '56, a physician and former medical missionary, provided a wonderful role model to our students at the 2007 Slide Rule Dinner, where he was honored as the Science Alumnus of the Year.
• Rik Kunnath, CEE '71, president and chief executive at Charles Pankow Builders and Steve Sojda, BEE '72, vice president at Textron, are working with our co-op office to provide a broader array of career paths and locations for our student co-ops from Hawaii to Boston.
• Tianjie Li, MS Computer Science '02, senior application development specialist at Perot Systems Corporation, advises the College on software engineering courses.

In the coming months I will be meeting with many alumni to explore these and other ways that they can help our students to continue the legacy of excellence that has always been a hallmark of our College. We need more mentors for the rapidly increasing number of pre-med and pre-dent students. We are working to identify entrepreneurship case studies that will develop the "entrepreneurship mindset" of our engineering and science students. We are seeking advice to help focus our new graduate curriculum in supply chain logistics/transportation systems.

These are just a few of the many conversations that I hope to have with alumni as we further enrich the educational and life experiences of our students. I hope that you will make yourself available to me and our students if I call you. Or, better yet, give me a call if you would like to contribute your talents and knowledge to help educate scientists and engineers who can, like many of you, profoundly improve our world.

Dr. Leo E. Hanifin '69, '72, '75
Dean, College of Engineering & Science