Alumni

Patently Prolific by Marcia Goodrich Two thousand years before the Industrial Revolution, the Greek mathematician Hero came up with the idea for the steam turbine. English engineer Sir Charles Parsons built the first one in 1884, to generate electricity. And for the last twenty years, Steven Burdgick has fiddled, tweaked, and tinkered with steam turbines and their close cousins, gas turbines, ultimately revolutionizing . . .

John Cook earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Tech in 1942. Following graduation, he served as a lieutenant in the Navy. He then went to work for Wright Aeronautical Corporation as a Production Engineer, and Checker Motors and Fisher Body Division, GMC, in the Automotive Body Engineering areas. He became Vice President of Operations for Wolverine Brass Works after working in the Grand Rapids, Michigan, . . .

When Reagan May was nine years old, she went to a bowling alley with her family in her native DePere Wis. What happened next changed the course of her life, and it had nothing to do with strikes and spares. "Someone was there with a go-cart," the fourth-year mechanical engineering student at Michigan Technological University says. "I sat in, and I knew right away that's what I wanted to do." Like a scene from a . . .

Donald G. Wheatley went to work for General Motors in 1963. He worked on the guidance systems doing vibration and fatigue analysis for the Apollo project. Out of the sixty new hires on the project, he was the only one remaining at the end. He also did some work on the main battle tank. Don then accepted an offer from Ford, where he worked on a small team to define the new Ford Maverick. He later led the team that designed . . .