Caltech’s distinguished alumni

Six Caltech graduates who are leaders in science, industry, or academe, have been selected to receive the Institute’s Distinguished Alumni Award. The awards will be presented at a ceremony on Saturday, May 15, during Alumni Reunion Weekend and Seminar Day.

M. Blouke Carus is the chairman of Carus Corporation, a holding company that owns Carus Chemical Company, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of potassium permanganate. Carus graduated from Caltech in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Upon leaving Caltech, Carus continued to study chemistry while pursuing a passion for foreign languages, traveling to Mexico, France, and Germany. He joined Carus Chemical Company in 1951, where he helped modernize the company’s manufacturing processes. He is also the chairman of Carus Publishing Company, a firm with which he has been associated for 30 years. In that time, the company has produced educational materials, most notably a research-based reading and writing program for children in grades K through sixth. The publisher produces a basic reading curriculum that is used extensively in California. In 2002, Carus received the Vanguard Award from the Chemical Educational Foundation and was named Man of the Year for 2001 by the Manufacturing Technology and Management program at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

After graduating from Caltech in 1970 with a master’s degree in aeronautics, Narendra (Naren) Gupta earned his PhD from Stanford University and went on to cofound Integrated Systems Inc. The company later merged with a competitor to form Wind River, which provides embedded software, the technology that underlies many modern electronics. Gupta serves as vice chairman of that company. A graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, he received the President’s Gold Medal for best graduating senior, and a distinguished alumnus award. The American Automatic Control Council has presented him with the Eckman Award for outstanding contributions to control engineering and he was elected to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 1991. Gupta serves on the boards of a number of corporations and organizations, including TIBCO Software, Quick Eagle Networks, and the American India Foundation.

A radio astronomer, Kenneth Kellermann is a senior scientist at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), a research professor at the University of Virginia, and an outside scientific member of the Max Planck Society. He received some of his training at Caltech, where he earned a doctorate in physics in 1963. He spent two years at the CSIRO Radiophysics Laboratory in Australia, and he has been affiliated with NRAO since 1965, serving for a period of time as the observatory’s assistant director. Kellermann’s research interests include radio galaxies and quasars, the history of radio astronomy, and the development of new instrumentation for radio astronomy. His work has been recognized with such awards as the Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society and the Gould Prize of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a memberof the International Astronomical Union, the American Astronomical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The author of the book The Extravagant Universe: Exploding Stars, Dark Energy, and the Accelerating Cosmos, Robert Kirshner has also written more than 200 research papers about super novae, the large-scale distribution of galaxies, and the size and shape of the universe. Kirshner received his doctorate in astronomy from Caltech in 1975 and today is Clowes Professor of Science at Harvard University. After Caltech, Kirshner did postdoctoral work at Kitt Peak National Observatory, joined the faculty at the University of Michigan, where he remained for nine years, and then signed on with Harvard’s astronomy department, where he served as chairman for seven years. He was also associate director for optical and infrared astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics from 1997 to 2003. Kirshner is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and is currently serving as president of the American Astronomical Society.

Gerhard Parker received his bachelor’s degree in engineering in 1965, his master’s in electrical engineering in 1966, and his doctorate, also in electrical engineering, in 1970. Remarkably, he earned all three degrees at Caltech. The end of Parker’s years at the Institute marked the beginning of his years at Intel Corporation, which he joined as a member of the technical staff. In 1977, he was named vice president and director of technology development, and in 1988 became senior vice president in charge of manufacturing, technology development, purchasing, construction, quality, and planning. In this latter position, Parker managed Intel’s worldwide expansion of production capacity in the early 1990s. He served as executive vice president for the new business group beginning in 1998, guiding numerous internal start-ups, until his retirement in 2001.

H. Gerard Schwartz Jr. received his doctorate in civil engineering from Caltech in 1966 and then began a long career with the Sverdrup Corporation, which is now a part of Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. His work was instrumental in developing and expanding Sverdrup into a national leader in construction management. Schwartz’s projects included multibillion-dollar water and wastewater-treatment systems for the cities of San Diego, San Francisco, and Detroit. He also worked as principal-in-charge for large civil-infrastructure projects, such as highways, bridges, dams, and railroads. In 1993, he was named president and chairman of Sverdrup/Jacobs Civil, and he is currently a senior professor of civil and environmental engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He has served as president of the Water Environment Federation and was president of the American Society of Civil Engineers from 2001 to 2002. Schwartz was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997.
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