Distinguished Alumni > 2004

2004 Distinguished Alumni

The 2004 College of Science Distinguished Alumni Award recipients returned to campus on April 16. They began their day of activities with a campus tour aboard the Boilermaker Special, accompanied by members of the Science Student Ambassadors.

 

Lee C. Atkinson
B.S. 1971; M.S. 1972, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Lee Atkinson is co-founder, President and Principal Hydrogeologist of Hydrologic Consultants, Inc. in Lakewood, Colorado. Hydrologic Consultants provides consulting services to mining and industrial companies, law firms, non-regulatory government agencies, and as a specialist consultant to other consulting firms. Dr. Atkinson’s areas of specialty include mining hydrology, dewatering, groundwater hydrology and flow in fractured rocks. He has more than 25 years of varied experience as a consulting hydrogeologist in the areas of groundwater supply, mine dewatering, and ground water contamination. In addition to his Purdue degrees, he received the PhD in hydrogeology from Memorial University, St. Johns, Newfoundland. Dr. Atkinson served as a member of the College of Science Dean’s Leadership Council from 1998 to 2001.

 

Dean G. Christakis
B.S. in General Science (Physics and Biology)

Dean Christakis is co-founder and executive director of the Academy of Arts and Science Education, which offers hands-on experience in television and film production for high school students. He is also president of Pro Phase Productions, Inc., a privately owned corporation in the greater Chicago area engaged in educational television and film production. He received the M.A.E. in Secondary Education and Biology from Ball State University Teachers College and the Ph.D. in Curriculum Design and Instruction from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also received the C.A.S. degree in Interactive Technology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He began his career as a teacher of biology at Marquette High School in Michigan City, Indiana, and moved on to become Administrator in the Lake Central School Corporation and Director of Forest Ridge Academy. Dr. Christakis is responsible for raising the quality of high school science fairs and other science competitions in Indiana and throughout the nation. During his teaching career at Michigan City’s Marquette High School, his students performed graduate level research in such areas as biomedical engineering, immunology, cancer research, holographic interferometry, alternate energy sources, aerodynamics, and ALS, and led the nation in the number of awards and first-places at the International Science and Engineering Fair. His many awards and honors include the Indiana Outstanding Biology Teacher Award from the National Association of Biology Teachers, the Outstanding Alumnus Award from Ball State University Teachers College, three-time National Outstanding Teacher of the Year from the Thomas Edison Foundation, the Discover Magazine Outstanding Science Teacher Award, and the Schuman Award and Scholarship in Interactive Technology and Educational Television from the Harvard School of Education.

 

Elaine J. Heron
B.S. 1970; Ph.D 1974, Chemistry

Elaine Heron is Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Labcyte Inc., a company that provides instruments and plastic consumables for life science research and development. In July 2001 she joined Picoliter Inc., which merged with Labcyte LLC to form Labcyte Inc. Dr. Heron was previously General Manager of the Molecular Biology Division of Applied Biosystems and a corporate vice president of Applera Corporation (formerly Perkin-Elmer). This division had revenues of $1 billion and was responsible for the systems used to sequence the vast majority of the human genome, as well as products for analyzing gene expression and genetic differences among individuals, identifying criminals based on their DNA, and resequencing HIV to enable understanding of drug resistance. She is also a director of BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. Dr. Heron holds an MBS from the Presidential/Key Executive Program of Pepperdine University. She served as a member of the College of Science Dean’s Leadership Council from 1999 to 2002.

 

Shau-Wai Lam
B.S. 1963; M.S. 1964, Mathematics

Shau-wai Lam is president and CEO of the DCH Auto Group in New Jersey. He joined the Dah Chong Hong Trading Corporation in 1967, working in international trade. In 1977, DCH began to venture into automobile retailing with its first dealership in New Jersey, and Mr. Lam launched DCH’s Western Region in 1979. After his appointment as President of DCH in 1988, Mr. Lam continued to lead the company’s expansion to 25 dealerships in California, New Jersey and New York, with sales exceeding $1 billion. The DCH Auto Group has won numerous awards from its franchsors, as well as 25 J.D. Power and Associates Certified Retailer awards for outstanding sales experience. Mr. Lam received the 2004 Time Magazine Quality Dealer Award for New Jersey. He serves as director of the Toyota-Lexus Minority Dealers Association, the New Jersey Chinese-American Chamber of Commerce, the Hong Kong Association of New York, and the American Friends of Shanghai Museum.

 

Alan J. Levy
Ph.D. 1962, Chemistry

Alan Levy has more than 30 years of experience in the medical device industry. Prior to co-founding Northstar Neuroscience, he served as president and CEO of Heartstream, a company that developed, manufactured, and marketed an innovative automatic external defibrillator that revolutionized the treatment of sudden cardiac arrest. He successfully guided the company through product development, venture financing, U.S. Food and Drug Administration marketing clearance, product launch, manufacturing scale-up, an initial public offering, worldwide sales and distribution, and the sale of the company to Hewlett-Packard. Prior to joining Heartstream, he was president of Heart Technology, which developed, manufactured and marketed devices for removing plaque from coronary arteries. Dr. Levy effectively led Heart Technology through key business and product development miestones. The company was sold to Boston Scientific in 1995. Dr. Levy has served on the boards of the Ethicon division of Johnson & Johnson, as well as Gynecare, a medical device company acquired by Johnson & Johnson. He currently serves on the boards of Intuitive Surgical, a public company, and Proteus.

 

David K. Schrader
Ph.D. 1983, Computer Science

David Schrader is the lead Strategist and one of the Marketing Directors for the Teradata Applications Solutions group, which includes CRM, E-Business, and Profitability Analytics, as well as Financial Management. He focuses on market micro-segmentations, preliminary business plans, briefings for early adopting customers, and identification of new application business opportunities. He has been instrumental in the development of several of Teradata’s offers, and was the marketing liaison for the Teradata-BroadVision relationship to foster Moment-to-Moment Marketing. Dr. Schrader is a frequent speaker at industry and technology conferences, and is also a popular speaker at NCR’s Partners and User Group forums. As one of Teradata’s “thoughtware” leaders, he regularly gives talks on how people could better use technology for customers, and have given invited lectures at MBA programs like Duke, the Wharton School at Penn, USC, and UCLA. He serves on the Board of Councilors for the Integrated Media Systems Center at the University of Southern California and is also on their Scientific Advisory Board, He is a trustee of the Marketing Sciences Institute, and is a board member of TierFleet, a data appliance startup company.

 

Qun Shen
Ph.D. 1987, Physics

Qun Shen is a Senior Staff Scientist at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) and an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Cornell University. He has been responsible for many of the successful projects carried out at CHESS. He invented a method, based on multiple diffraction x-rays, to characterize all the parameters of an elliptically polarized x-ray beam, which has been used extensively in experiments based on magnetic scattering of x-rays. His recent research focuses on an innovative reference-beam diffraction method that allows direct measurements of a large number of Bragg reflection phases in protein crystallography. This work has received independent funding from the National Institutes of Health. He is collaborating on this project with a team of the medical Foundation in Buffalo, led by Nobel laureate Dr. Herbert Hauptman. He has authored more than 80 articles in scientific journals and invited book chapters, and has given more than 60 invited lectures at professional seminars and conferences. He received the S.S. Sidhu Award from the Pittsburgh Diffraction Society for outstanding contributions to the field of diffraction physics.

 

Jozef Teugels
M.S. 1966; Ph.D. 1967, Statistics

Jozef Teugels is Professor of Statistics at the Katholiecke Universiteit of Leuven, Belgium. His large body of distinguished published research focuses on probability, statistics and classical analysis and in different fields of application, ranging from insurance to environmetrics, extreme value theory, risk theory, renewal theory and categorical data analysis. He plays a fundamental role in editorial boards of leading professional journals, and is an associate editor of Extremes; Environmentrics; and Revista de Estatistica, Portugal. He is editor-in-chief of Encyclopedia of Actuarial Sciences and also of Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry. Professor Teugels is president of the National Committee of Mathematics of Belgium, and was vice president of the International Statistical Institute from 2001 to 2003. He was the 1996 Belgian Francqui-chair at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, and a recipient of the 1999 Henri Willem Methorst Medal of the International Statistical Institute. In 2000, he received the Huesped Distinguido of the City of Guanajuato, Mexico.

 

Barbara J. Trask
B.S. 1975; M.S. 1977, Biological Sciences

Barbara Trask is Head of the Human Biology Division of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington, and Professor in the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington. She received an M.S. degree in biology and the Ph.D. in medicine from Leiden University, The Netherlands. She spent seven years as a staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California before joining the Department of Molecular Biotechnology at the University of Washington School of Medicine as a research professor in 1992. She became professor of molecular biotechnology in 1997, served as vice chair of the department during 1998-99 and acting chair in 2000, and became head of the Human Biology Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2000. Dr. Trask is an expert on genome organization and a leader in developing techniques for visualizing chromosomes in cells. Her current research focuses on the organization of olfactory receptor genes, which contain instructions to make the proteins responsible for detecting odorants.