Stories of Success - Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering - Purdue University

Jim Anderson

Jim Anderson, MSEE 1972, is Lattice Semiconductor’s President and Chief Executive Officer and serves on the company’s Board of Directors. He joined Lattice in September 2018 and focused the company on its mission as the leader in low power programmable solutions. Since then, the company accelerated its cadence of innovative product introductions and achieved record profitability.

Markell Baldwin

Markell graduated with a BSEE in 2014. While at Purdue, he was involved with NSBE and the Minority Engineering Program where he tutored students in math and physics. He did internships at Marathon, Shell, Toyota, and Chrysler. Additionally, he studied abroad in China, Italy, and Ghana. After graduating, Markell moved to Silicon Valley where he began as an Associate Engineer on the Passive Safety Team at Tesla. He’s now a Staff Engineer on the Sensors Team.

Nikhil Bhogal

Nikhil is the co-founder and CTO at June, where he oversees engineering, product, and design associated with the June Oven. He was previously the lead iOS developer for Path. Before that, Nikhil served as an engineer at Apple, where he worked on the original iPhone through iPhone 5, as well as the iPad through iPad 3. He is credited as an inventor of many of Apple’s camera technology patents, including tap-to-focus, panorama processing, zero shutter lag, and lock screen camera. Nikhil started his career as an engineer at Motorola, focusing on embedded software development for the Razr family of phones. In his spare time, Nikhil enjoys cooking, photography, making espresso, and building stereos. Nikhil received his BS in computer engineering from Purdue University in 2003

Afua Bruce

Afua Bruce, BSCmpE 2005, is the Chief Program Officer at DataKind, a global nonprofit that harnesses the power of data science and AI in the service of humanity. Afua leads DataKind's product offerings, center of excellence, volunteer community, and chapter network to partner with social sector organizations. Afua holds a degree in Computer Engineering from Purdue University, and an MBA from the University of Michigan.

Darby Hadley

Darby Hadley is a driven, hands-on system development leader with a proven track record of cost-efficient, innovative products. He is currently employed as the Vice President of Engineering for Automotive Audio at HARMAN International. He has over thirty years of engineering experience, during which time he has managed and directed engineering initiatives for Ford Motor Company, Visteon, Bose Corporation, Apple and Atieva. He has directly supervised the launch of several top-grade products, and has delivered engineering solutions to many of the world’s top automotive companies.

Rouz Jazayeri

Rouz Jazayeri, BSEE 2002 and MSEE 2004, is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Catapult Ventures. Prior to co-founding Catapult Ventures, Rouz worked at Kleiner Perkins where he started as John Doerr’s Chief of Staff. He then focused on early stage Hard-Tech investing where he worked very closely with over a dozen portfolio companies. He also established and led KP’s business development practice, responsible for building long-term strategic partnerships between Fortune 500 companies and KP’s portfolio companies. Rouz helped support and build several KP portfolio companies: Ring (acquired by Amazon), LuxVue (acquired by Apple), MyFitnessPal (acquired by Under Armour), iControl (acquired by Comcast and alarm.com), Bloom Energy (NYSE: BE), DJI, Ambiq Micro, and Quantumscape.

Kalpana Krishnamurthy and Siddarth Sheth

Siddharth Sheth, MSEE 1997, is an experienced entrepreneur, business builder and accomplished executive in the semiconductor industry. Kalpana Krishnamurthy, MSEE 1997, is a high-tech product management and marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in high growth technology companies.

Sumeet Maniar

Sumeet Maniar received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University in 1992, and also holds an MBA from the University of Chicago. He has been able to apply his academic background to a variety of areas in business and technology. Sumeet has served at large entities like Xerox, Verizon, and Accenture, and has held positions in management and technology consulting. Over the last 15-20 years, Sumeet has been successful in running startups and businesses that are B2C, B2B2C, and B2B and are focused on product management and business development. These have included rich experiences in building the video game industry (especially content-to-payment systems, cloud infrastructure, game chat, pioneering free2play business concepts and freemium models, and massively multiplayer online games). Along with these experiences, Sumeet has worked in diverse areas leveraging blockchain, fintech, mobile gaming, ad optimization, ed tech and digital health.

Ujjwal Singh

Ujjwal Singh, BSEE/BSCS 1994, is currently in charge of Exploring New Products at Facebook. Before that he was a partner at Area 120, a workshop for Google's experimental products. Singh was the CTO at GoFundMe, and led Kids, Music, and Gaming efforts at YouTube. He is an entrepreneur who has founded and worked for four different startups. Singh's last startup, SayNow, was acquired by Google and led to him starting and leading the Hangouts project.