Engineers

Spring 2017

Dinner with girl geeks

Working for a Portland, Oregon, staffing firm in the late 1990s, Kristin McKinney ’95 helped recruit employees to the city’s burgeoning tech industry. The job unleashed her own geek.

“I found I had a bit of an inner nerd,” says McKinney, who got her degree in business. “I never really knew that.”

Her newfound enthusiasm was tempered by a sobering reality: Women then, like now, accounted for less than 30 percent of the computing and information technology workforce, according to the National Science Foundation.

McKinney, now a recruiter in Nashville, Tennessee, is working to reverse the trend. In 2013, she joined computer application engineer Rachel … » More …

Spring 2015

Schweitzer receives alumni award

Edmund O. Schweitzer III ’77 PhD received the university’s highest alumni honor, the 2014 Regents’ Distinguished Alumnus Award, in a ceremony last November. He earned his doctorate in electrical engineering from WSU, where he also served as a faculty member. In 1982, Schweitzer founded Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories to research and manufacture digital relays and other products to protect electric power systems. He is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He holds 100 patents and the company he founded has been recognized as a global leader in improving the stability and safety of electrical grids.

Fall 2012

Engineers in the Making

Intent on programming a machine to cut a section of sheet metal, six engineering students hunch around a worktable on an upper floor of a factory that designs and builds tooling and automation for the aerospace industry.

The space is bright and warm. A tinkerer’s dream of wires, tubes, tools, fittings, shelves, cords, and hardware surrounds them. The students scrutinize a screen, scribble in their notebooks, and scratch their heads. Determined to arrange a resistor ladder electrical circuit to tell the machine to move a single part before lunch, Josh Sackos frowns at a laptop. “You could just try to run it and see what … » More …