April 24, 2002
Contact: Amy Hewes
(805) 756-3034
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Cal Poly College of Engineering Honors Outstanding Alumni
As part of Cal Poly's recent annual Open House activities, the College
of Engineering hosted an Alumni Recognition Luncheon to celebrate the
professional accomplishments of its engineering and computer science graduates.
The awards presented included the Outstanding Recent Alumnus or Alumna
Award, which honors graduates who have contributed significantly to
their fields within10 years of graduation, and the Professional
Achievement Award, honoring graduates of 10 years or more who have
attained a high level of distinction in their fields.
The three winners of the 2002 Outstanding Recent Alumnus award include
1994 aerospace engineering graduate Matt Cotton from Sunnyvale, 1992
computer science graduate Steve Jankowski from Mountain View, and 1995
materials engineering graduate Scott Miner from Hayward.
Professional Achievement Award winners were 1971 electronics
engineering graduate William Gerrey from San Francisco, 1986 industrial
engineering graduate Karen Bangs from Lake Forest, and 1979 aerospace
engineering graduate Robert Hladek from Rolling Hills Estates.
Cotton serves as a network engineer and marketing specialist for
LightSand Communications, a high-speed fiber optic communications
company in Silicon Valley. As a student, Cotton received funding from
NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center for his senior project on
"Pilot-Induced Oscillation Investigation." Also while a student, he
worked at a local aerospace company performing engineering tasks for
aircraft under modification. After graduation, Cotton took a job with
TRW in Sunnyvale as one of the company's youngest systems engineers and
technical managers. He received two awards for excellence from TRW as
an associate investigator of independent research projects. Cotton also
earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from Cal Poly.
Jankowski began his career at IBM working on a prototype network
document server for faxes. In 1993, he joined Sun Microsystems'
technical staff and worked on a messaging frame- work for distributed
enterprise applications. In 1995, he became one of five founding
engineers of Active Software, where he designed and developed the
messaging server and led the messaging server team through eight
product releases. The messaging server played a vital role in Active
Software's becoming a leader in the enterprise application integration
market. After Active Software went public and was bought by webMethods,
Jankowski became a senior architect at webMethods in Mountain View. He
has spent the last six months as architect and developer of a new
management server product.
Miner was recently promoted to vice president of operations for March
Metalfab, one of the largest custom metal fabrication plants in the Bay
Area. Miner has also worked as a project engineer at Chlorox Corp. and
has taught courses in welding techniques at Las Positas College. He was
then hired away by March Metalfab, which designs and makes specialized
fixtures and vessels for the nuclear power and aerospace industries and
research and development institutions. At March Metalfab, Miner oversaw
the fabrication of two complex sculptures by Bay Area sculptor Fletcher
Benton -- 30 feet and 72 feet tall respectively and installed in
Cologne, Germany.
Gerrey has been an engineer for the past 30 years at the
Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, which is
world-renowned for research on normal vision, eye diseases and sensory
rehabilitation. Blind himself, Gerrey's research over the years has
produced many successful assistive devices for the blind, including
Talking Signs, a technology that enables portable, hand-held receivers
to communicate with permanently installed transmitters to help blind
people know their locations and orientation on streets, in buildings
and on transportation systems in cities around the world. He also edits
"The Smith-Kettlewell Technical File," a how-to magazine for blind
hobbyists and professionals. One of Gerrey's current projects is a
wheelchair for blind riders.
Bangs is director of manufacturing engineering for Conexant Systems in
Newport Beach, where she is credited with leading ongoing
enterprisewide process improvement efforts and improving factory
automation resource allocation. She has also served director of supply
planning for Conexant and manager for operations planning at Rockwell
Semiconductor Systems.
Hladek's career spans more than 22 years, 17 of which have been with
Boeing Satellite Systems, the world's largest manufacturer of
commercial communications satellites. He has contributed to the
execution of more than a dozen satellite programs. He also has
experience in personnel development, strategic planning, facilities
management and product marketing. His career accomplishments have
encompassed component- to system-level electromechanical design,
analysis and manufacturing in the fields of advanced communications
systems, aerospace technology and satellite production. He currently
serves as the division director of product engineering for operations.
Hladek earned a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Loyola
Marymount University.
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