Distinguished Alumni

Moshe Arens M.S. '53 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1980. Moshe Arens, president of Cybernetics, Inc., in Savyon, Israel, attained major achievements in the diverse areas of engineering and politics. As vice president of engineering for Israeli Aircraft Industries, he played a dominant role in the development and production of the Gabriel missile, the Westwind executive aircraft, and the Kfir fighter, an outstanding engineering accomplishment. Arens left the company in 1971 to found his own consulting firm and to enter the political arena. In 1973 he was elected to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, and served as chairman of its Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Eventually he achieved the rank of Ministe of Defense and also served as Israel's ambassador to the United States.

Earnest H. Clark B.S. '46 (Mechanical Engineering) M.S. '47 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1981. After receiving his degrees at Caltech, E.H. (Hubie) Clark, Jr. joined Baker Oil Tools in 1947 as a trainee engineer. He became chief research engineer in 1957, vice president and assistant general manager in 1958, president in 1962, and chief executive officer in 1965. Listed among Fortune magazine's 500 largest industrial companies. Baker was chosen by that publication as one of the top ten business triumphs of the 1970s. Clark was past president and a director of the Petroleum Equipment Supplies Association and a member of the boards of the American Petroleum Institute, CBI Industries, Inc., Beckman Instruments, Inc., and the National Energy Foundation. Interested in education, he became a trustee and chairman of the academic affairs committee at Harvey Mudd College.

Francis H. Clauser B.S. '34 (Physics) M.S. '35 (Mechanical Engineering) Ph.D. '37 (Aeronautics) Awarded 1966. Academic Vice Chancellor, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Robert W. Conn M.S. '65 (Mechanical Engineering) Ph.D. '68 (Engineering Science) Awarded 1998. The dean of UC San Diego's school of engineering and the first recipient of the Walter J. Zable Endowed Chair in Engineering, Robert W. Conn is an internationally recognized leader in the field of plasma physics, plasma processing of materials, and fusion energy. Prior to joining UC San Diego in 1994, he served at UCLA as professor of engineering and applied sciences and as founding director of the Institute of Plasma and Fusion Research. He came to UCLA in 1980 after holding the Romnes Faculty Professorial Chair at the University of Wisconsin, where he was on the faculty from 1970 to 1979; he also helped found its program in fusion energy technology, and directed the University of Wisconsin Fusion Technology Center from 1974 to 1979. Editor of the journal Fusion Engineering and Design since 1986, Conn has in his field published more than 200 papers in journals, more than 100 conference papers, and several book chapters. He has also served as a member or as chair on many government and National Academy advisory committees. The recipient of numerous awards, he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1987 and is a fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Nuclear Society. Long involved with industry, he founded Plasma and Materials Technologies (now Trikon Technologies) in 1986, serving as chairman and senior technologist from 1986 until 1993, and remaining on the board of directors until the end of 1994.

Frank W. Davis B.S. '36 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1968. President, Fort Worth Division, General Dynamics Corporation.

Louis G. Dunn B.S. '36 (Aeronautics) M.S. '37 (Mechanical Engineering) M.S. '38 (Aeronautics) Ph.D. '40 (Aeronautics) Awarded 1974. Retired.

Richard G. Folsom B.S. '28 (Mechanical Engineering) M.S. '29 (Mechanical Engineering) Ph.D. '32 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1966; President, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Philip M. Githinji M.S. '61 (Mechanical Engineering) Engineer '63 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1993. Philip Mwangi Githinji was for many years a leading promoter of engineering education and the engineering profession both in Kenya and in Africa at large. At the University of Nairobi he taught thermodynamics, heat transfer, and air-conditioning and refrigeration, among other topics. He earned his PhD there for research into the drying of pyrethrum flowers, a natural insecticide. He eventually rose to become vice-chancellor (president) of Kenyatta University (1987-1992). The president of Kenya decorated him with the award of Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear.

James E. Hall B.S. '57 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 2001. The record of race car designer and constructor James Ellis Hall includes driving Formula I for the Stirling Moss team in 1963, finishing 12th in the Drivers' World Championship. He was US Road Racing champion in 1964 and winner of the Sebring 12 Hour, the Road America 500 and the Canadian Grand Prix, all in 1965. Teams he managed won International Formula 5000 Championships in 1974, '75 and '76; International Can-Am Championships in 1977 and '78; and the USAC and CART National Championship in 1980. His is the only team to have won auto racing's Triple Crown - the Indianapolis, Pocono and Ontario 500-mile races - in a single season (1978). His Team Chaparral won the Indy 500 again in 1980. Hall has appeared on the covers of Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, and numerous motorsports magazines worldwide and has been inducted into the Texas Motorsports Hall of Fame, the Motorsports Hall of Fame, and the International Motorsports Hall of Fame.

Anthony J. Iorillo B.S. '59 (Mechanical Engineering) M.S. '60 (Aeronautics) Awarded 1990. Mr. Iorillo was a senior vice president of Hughes Aircraft Company, and presided over the company's Space and Communications Group, responsible for the development and production of communications satellites and other space vehicles, spacecraft instrumentation, earth terminals, terrestrial communications equipment, and information systems. He also served as Chairman of the Board of American Mobile Satellite Corporation. He was the inventor of the Hughes Gyrostat satellite technique, which has been used in scores of communications satellite missions. For his work he received the 1970 Lawrence A. Hyland Patent Award and the Spaceraft Design Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

W. Morton Jacobs B.S. '28 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1971. President and Executive Officer, Southern California Gas Company.

Jack L. Kerrebrock Ph.D. '56 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1997. Jack L. Kerrebrock is professor emeritus of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Before his retirement in 1996, he was MIT's R. C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and also served as associate and acting dean of engineering and as head of the aeronautics and astronautics department. From 1981 to 1983, he was associate administrator for aeronautics and space technology at NASA. Before joining the MIT faculty in the early 1960s, Kerrebrock worked as a research engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and as an aeronautical research scientist with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in Cleveland, Ohio. He also held research fellowships at Caltech from 1953 to 1956 and from 1958 to 1960. He received his bachelor's degree from Oregon State University and his master's degree from Yale University before pursuing doctoral work at Caltech. Kerrebrock has served on numerous committees and advisory boards, including the presidential National Commission on Space (1984-86); the U. S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board; and the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board of the National Research Council. He is a fellow of the AIAA, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received NASA's Exceptional Service Medal in 1983, and was decorated for exceptional civilian service by the U. S. Air Force in 1981. He returned to Caltech as a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar in 1990-91.

Max V. Mathews B.S. '50 (Electrical Engineering) B.S. '50 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1989. Electronic violins, psychoacoustic perception of musical sounds, and musical uses of real-time computer systems are the subjects of Max V. Mathew's research at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Mathews came to Stanford in 1987 after 23 years at the Acoustical and Behavioral Research Center. Under his direction, the laboratory carried out research in speech communication, visual communication, human memory and learning and physical acoustics. After graduation from Caltech in 1950, he earned a MS in 1952 and a ScD in 1954, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then joined the staff of AT&T Bell Laboratories where his research focused on sound and music synthesis with digital computers. Mathews was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1975, and the National Academy of Engineering in 1979. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Audio Engineering Society.

John R. McMillan B.S. '31 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1980. Chairman of the Board, Reserve Oil and Gas Company, Los Angeles, California, John R. McMillan was a leader in the petroleum industry for many years, a field he entered while still a student at Caltech. He was president and director of Reserve Oil and Gas Company from 1963 to 1980, and managed the merger of that company with Getty Oil. McMillan started out as a draftsman for Barnsdall Oil Co. and eventually became petroleum engineer and production foreman of that firm. He joined Fullerton Oil in 1943, and in 1954, the year the company merged with Monterey Oil, became its president. President of the Monterey Division of Humble Oil in 1961, he went on to become president and director of Monterey Gas Transmission Co. in Houston. While with Monterey he organized, and was the first president of, Transwestern Pipeline Co. In 1963, before joining Reserve, he became a partner in Lacal Petroleum Co. in Los Angeles. McMillan was given the Distinguished Service Award by the Society of Petroleum Engineers in 1971, and in 1974 was named a fellow of the Institute for the Advancement of Engineering.

Duane T. McRuer B.S. '45 (Mechanical Engineering) M.S. '48 (Electrical Engineering) Awarded 1983. President and Technical Director, Systems Technology, Inc., Hawthorne, California, Duane McRuer was president and technical director of Systems Technology, Inc., a company he confounded in 1957 and which grew from a small engineering consulting form to an internationally recognized center for research in automatic and manual vehicular control and human dynamics. Before founding STI, McRuer worked for Northrop Aircraft, Inc., where he pioneered new techniques for the control of high performance aircraft, including stability augmenters and hydraulic and fly-by-wire controls – the forerunners of present day flight control systems. McRuer has written more than 100 technical papers and is co-author of Analysis of Nonlinear Control Systems and Dynamics and Automatic Control. He is a fellow of several professional societies.

Robert L. Noland B.S. '41 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1989. After graduation from Caltech in 1941, Robert Noland developed design criteria for solid propellant rocket motors. He holds several patents in this field. In 1951, he started his own company, which adapted glass-reinforced plastics for use in rockets and missiles, developing some of the first fiberglass-resin honeycomb cores used as structural elements in aircraft. In 1966, he moved to Ametek, Inc., as executive vice president, and was elected president and a member of the board of directors in 1970. Noteworthy research and development projects under his guidance included solid-state pressure transducers, and cadmium telluride-based photovoltaics. At the end of 1988, Ametek split into two companies, and Mr. Noland became president and CEO of the spin-off company, Ketema, Inc., of Glenbrook, Nevada.

Ed Reinecke B.S. '50 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1969. Lieutenant Governor, California.

L. Eugene Root M.S. '33 (Mechanical Engineering) M.S. '34 (Aeronautics) Awarded 1966. President, Lockheed Missiles and Space Company.

Glenn A. Schurman M.S. '47 (Mechanical Engineering) Ph.D. '50 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 1994. Glenn Schurman spent his professional lifetime in the oil industry, where he made significant contributions to oil production, development, and exploration, areas in which he holds close to a dozen patents. Before attending Caltech, he received his BA from Washington State University in 1944 and then served on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (now NASA), performing research on combustion gas turbines. After graduating from Caltech, Schurman joined the Oil Field Research Laboratory of Chevron Oil Company, in La Habra, California, where he undertook numerous projects related to finding, developing and producing petroleum. He left the laboratory in 1963 for an operating assignment in New Orleans, Louisiana, and during the next 10 years he held a number of positions on the Gulf Coast and in Texas and the Rocky Mountain states. In 1975 he moved to London to oversee Chevron's activities in the United Kingdom sector of the North Sea, where he supervised the design and installation of what was then the world's largest oceanic oil-producing platform to develop oil from the Ninian Field, the North Sea's third largest oil field. He returned to the United States in 1981 and was corporate vice president of oil field development and production operations when he retired from Chevron in 1987. A member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Society of Mechanical Engineering, and the Society of Petroleum Engineers, Schurman was named an Honorary Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for his role in developing the North Sea oil fields.

Hsue-Shen Tsien Ph.D. '39 (Aeronautics) Awarded 1979. Hsue-Shen Tsien, the first director of Caltech's Guggenheim Jet Propulsion Center, was later chairman of the Institute of Mechanics of the People's Republic of China's National Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. Born in Shanghai, Tsien received his BS in mechanical engineering from Chiao-Tung University. In 1935 he came to the United States, where he earned his MS from MIT. At Caltech he worked closely with Theodore von Karman on supersonic flight and jet propulsion and was awarded a PhD in aeronautics in 1939. He continued at Caltech as a research fellow, assistant professor, and associate professor, until he moved to MIT as their youngest full professor. During World War II Tsien was again associated with von Karman when he served as consultant on jet propulsion to Aerojet and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Air Forces. After the war the Air Forces commended him for his invaluable contribution to victory. In 1949 the Guggenheim Foundation offered him the directorship at one of their two research centers (at Caltech and Princeton) and in choosing Caltech, he became the Goddard Professor of Jet Propulsion. Tsien returned to China in 1955 and in that year became a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Donald L. Turcotte B.S. '54 (Mechanical Engineering) Ph.D. '58 (Aeronautics) Awarded 1999. After a year as assistant professor of aeronautics at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Donald L. Turcotte joined the faculty of Cornell University. While initially in aerospace engineering, in 1973 he turned to the geological sciences. He is currently Maxwell Upson Professor of Engineering at Cornell, and he was chair of the university's department of geological sciences from 1981 to 1990. The recipient of the Day Medal of the Geological Society of America, the Regents (New York State) Medal of Excellence, the Wegener Medal of the European Union of Geosciences, and the Whitten Medal of the American Geophysical Union, Turcotte is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Sciences. He has been an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow; a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow; a Kloos Scholar at Johns Hopkins University; the William Smith Lecturer of the Geological Society of London; a Christensen Fellow of St. Catherine's College, Oxford; and a Visiting Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His principal contributions to the earth sciences have been in the development of theories of mantle convection and geodynamic problems. Much of this work is set forth in his textbook (with Gerald Schubert) Geodynamics. He has also been a leader in applying the concepts of fractals and chaos to the earth sciences and is author of the textbook Fractals and Chaos in Geology and Geophysics. He is the author or coauthor of some 270 papers.

Wilton W. Webster B.S. '49 (Mechanical Engineering) Awarded 2005. Wilton Webster is senior science advisor at Biosense Webster, as the cardiovascular catheter company he founded in 1969 is now called. Webster was inspired to go into this business after meeting a cardiologist who showed him how to modify existing catheters by adding thermistors and electrodes. Some ten years later, the development of electrophysiology gave rise to a new medical practice: curing patients with heart arrhythmias by radio-frequency ablation using catheters. A young electrophysiologist of Webster's acquaintance convinced him that his products could be further modified for use in this emerging field. Webster's company became very successful, and too large for him to run alone. It merged with another producer of cardiovascular catheters, Cordis Corporation, in 1994, Webster came to his profession by a somewhat circuitous route. After graduating from Caltech, he worked for eight years for CF Braun and Co., a designer and builder of oil refineries and chemical plants. For the subsequent 10 years he sold custom electronic components manufactured by small start-up companies that had formed in response to the space race. Serendipitously, that work led to a hobby built around medical instrumentation and to an interest in cardiology, which in turn introduced him to cardiac catheters.