Stories of Success

Stories of Success is a lecture series featuring alumni and partners of Purdue ECE. The participants talk about their time at Purdue and how their ECE degree has helped them achieve success in their professional lives. The goal is for current students to see the different paths alumni have taken and the impact their time with Purdue ECE has had on their journey.

2023

Kanak Mahadik

Kanak is a Research Scientist at Adobe Research in San Jose. Her research is broadly related to applying machine learning methodologies to build efficient systems. She also works on developing performant ML-based applications by leveraging parallelism and opportunities for communication efficiency. Her research on COGs optimizations has led to significant cost-savings across multiple Adobe products. Kanak earned her Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette in August 2017.

Santokh Badesha

Dr. Santokh Badesha is a Distinguished Professor at Purdue University. Previously, he was Corporate Fellow and Manager of Open Innovation at Xerox, where he was the record holder for U.S patents. He has generated patented technology that is used in nearly all major Xerox printing system families and is internationally recognized for inventing technologies that have ushered in the era of digital printing on demand. He holds 26 issued U.S. Patents and an additional 55 at different stages of the patenting process. Dr. Badesha was elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and National Academy of Inventors (NAI).

Will AI Write All Our Software?

Moderator Saurabh Bagchi leads panel discussion featuring: Dr. Rama Govindaraju, Director of Engineering at Google; Dr. Arindam Mandal, Director, Dialog Services, in Alexa AI-Natural Understanding; Prof. Aravind Machiry; and Prof. David Inouye.

Dr. Mark Shaw

Dr. Mark Shaw, PHD ECE 2015, is a Distinguished Technologist and Strategist at HP. He has a B.Sc. in Graphic Media Studies from the UK, M.Sc. in Color Science from RIT, and a PhD in ECE from Purdue University, specializing in Signal and Image Processing. His work includes video coding, color modelling and reproduction, gamut mapping, color management and image understanding through AI/ML. He is an Adjunct Professor teaching Image processing at Boise State University, and an active member of the Industrial Advisory Boards at Rochester Institute of Technology and at Boise State University. While at work, Mark focuses on driving new technologies to enable an improved customer experience. Mark has also worked with Purdue University for over 15 years, encouraging and mentoring students to work on challenging problems that solve real customer issues.

2022

Pete Bovenzi

Pete Bovenzi graduated with a Master's Degree from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1987. He went on to a 37-year automotive engineering career with General Motors, Delphi Technologies, and, most recently, BorgWarner.

Andy Fiedler

Andy Fiedler, BSEE 1982, is an executive with an extensive and diverse experience base gained over nearly four decades of work in the oil and gas industry. I have deep operations, health/safety/environmental, remediation management, maintenance & reliability, and overall systematic management experience with an ability to lead teams and deliver performance improvements. The principle of strong values and behaviors is core to my leadership.

Ryan Kehr

Ryan Kehr graduated with a BSEE from Purdue University in 1998. Ryan has held various roles in Texas Instruments in System Engineering and Application Engineering starting in the Class-D audio field. He currently manages a team of application engineers solving customer problems in motor drive products. He was elected Member of the Technical Staff in 2003 and holds 2 patents related to motor drive.

Bill Payne

Bill Payne graduated from Purdue with a BS in Electrical Engineering. He is now an executive with excellent record of technology (IP), product, and business development success in the industries of university technology commercialization, mobile broadband wireless communications including 4G/LTE and 5G mobile networks, mobile cloud and network virtualization, mobile advertising and sponsorship, etc. Previously active US Security Clearance.

Marshia Seto

Marshia Seto, best known as Mai, majored in Computer Science at Purdue University tracking in Machine Learning with a minor in Electrical Engineering for her undergraduate studies. Her passion lies in the image processing/machine learning fields. Currently, Mai is working full-time at Qualcomm in the Graphics Research Team, specifically in VR/AR Hardware Architecture working on different ways to optimize graphics pipelines in VR/AR devices.

Subarna Sinha

Subarna Sinha currently leads the data and machine learning engineering teams at 23andMe. Her research topics include electronic design automation and computational biology. She has recently received the Synopsys Inventor of the Year award, IEEE Donald O Pederson Best Paper Award.

David Walker

Dave Walker, BSEET 1982, is the Senior Chief Engineer over the Embedded Software Development Team at JLG Industries.

Jie Weng

Jie Weng, BSEE 1999, is currently the SVP of Product and Engineering at Chowbus - a food marketplace helping diners to experience authentic Asian cuisine and independent restaurants to grow their business. Most recently, Jie was VP and GM at Coupang helping the company to establish R&D offices in Silicon Valley and Seattle.

2021

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

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.

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.

2020

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sean Walsh

Sean, BSEE 1984, has split his 30 plus year career between working in large organizations - IBM, Accenture, Cambridge Technology Partners and Novell – and leading and/or co-founding several venture and private equity backed startups. He has provided solutions to Fortune 500 clients in a diverse set of industries. In addition to general leadership his areas of expertise include Sales, Operations, Lean Six Sigma (green belt), Agile Software Development, Human Centered Design and Service Design.