Polytechnic Institute of New York University - Notable Alumni

Notable Alumni

Polytechnic Institute of New York University has more than 44,000 alumni throughout the United States and in 55 countries around the world. NYU-Poly's alumni include inventors, scientists, business leaders, entrepreneurs, politicians, country presidents, university presidents and academic leaders among others. The Institute counts 5 Nobel Prize winners (2 Nobel Prize in Physics, 2 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), 3 Putnam Mathematical Competition winners, 2 Wolf Prize in Physics winners, (1 Russ Prize, 3 Gordon Prize, 1 Draper Prize)(also known as Nobel Prizes of Engineering) winners, 2 Turing Award(also known as Nobel Prize of Nobel Prize of computing) winners, 2 W. Wallace McDowell Award( also known as Nobel Prize of Information Technology and Computer Engineering) winners, 2 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees, multiple Technology & Engineering Emmy Award winners, 3 Israel Prize winners and many Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Awards winners (including 2 IEEE Edison Medal winners and 1 IEEE Medal of Honor winner). Multiple current and former presidents of major professional societies, including the American Chemical Society, American Society of Civil Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), are alumni.

Many former and current leaders of Fortune 500 companies and Fortune Global 500 companies are NYU-Poly alumni, including Fred Amoroso(Chairman)Yahoo!, (President and CEO) Rovi Corporation, Israel Izzy Borovich(Chairman)El Al Israel Airlines Ltd., John Elmer McKeen(President)Pfizer, Tsuneo Nakahara (Vice- President)Sumitomo Group, Leon Awerbuch(Vice-President)Bechtel, Peter Rust(President)Consolidated Edison, Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr.(President)General Motors, Herbert L. Henkel(Chairman and Chief Executive Officer) Ingersoll-Rand, Jean-Claude Sureau(President and CEO )Radiant Systems, John M. Trani (President and CEO )Stanley Works(Vice- President)General Electric, Virginia P. Ruesterholz(President)Verizon, Arthur Martinez(CEO)Sears., William C. W. Mow(Chairman and CEO)Bugle Boy., Robert Prieto((Vice President)Fluor Corporation,(Chairman) Parsons Brinckerhoff), Charlie Hinkaty(Vice President)Citibank, Frank Robert Azzi(Vice-president)Agilent Technologies., William L. Friend(Vice President)Bechtel, Edward T. Wolynic(Vice President) Engelhard, Ralph C. Alexander(Chairman )Riverstone Holdings, Curtis Brunson (Vice President) L-3 Communications, Craig G. Matthews(Vice Chairman)Keyspan,Mark Ronald(President and CEO)BAE Systems, James M. Smith,(Chairman, President & CEO)EDO Corporation, Robert J. Stevens(Chairman and Chief Executive Officer)Lockheed Martin, Ursula Burns(Chairman and CEO) Xerox, Jason Hsuan(Chairman and CEO)TPV Technology, Stewart G. Nagler(vice chairman and CFO, MetLife), Steven Vitale(Vice President and Chief Engineer at National Grid), Robert D. Dalziel(President at AT&T), Katherine Boden(Vice President at Consolidated Edison), Robert J. Giorgio(President at CDI Corporation), John Dionisio(Chairman and CEO)AECOM, Mamadou Ndiaye(country general manager at IBM), Charles R. Kalmanek (Vice President at AT&T ), Zhi Zhong Qiu (Director, Suntech Power), John W. Murphy (Chairman and CEO, Atlantic Management Company), Cliff Friedman( Vice President at Universal Studios, Vice President at NBC), John Catsimatidis(chairman and CEO of the Red Apple Group subsidiary United Refining Company.), David L. Sobin(CEO of BAMnet. A 24-year AT&T/Lucent Executive, Mr. Sobin led the team which created the first DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) product in the early 1980s and deployed it nationwide. He left AT&T/Lucent in 1996 to found his own DSL company, which was subsequently sold for approximately $50M in 1998.), Michael Horodniceanu(Metropolitan Transportation Authority president and chief engineer), Tom Ryan (President and CEO of Alpine Data Labs, President and CEO of Fanfare Software, President and CEO of Actional), Mark Podob(President and co-owner of Metlab and Metlab-Potero), Hugh John Casey(Chief engineer of army, chairman of the New York City Transit Authority)

More than 200 Polytechnic graduates are CEOs as of 2009. Top executives and engineers from all of the Fortune 500 companies and 499 of the Fortune Global 500 companies have been Polytechnic alumni as of 2012.

Current and former presidents of major professional societies, including the American Chemical Society, American Society of Civil Engineers and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), are alumni. Peter Staeker, the current Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) president-elect, is an NYU-Poly alumnus. Andrew Herrmann, the current president of the American Society of Civil Engineers(ASCE) is an NYU-Poly alumnus. Former alumni presidents include Joel Snyder (IEEE President 2001, Founder of Snyder Associates), Eli Pearce (President, American Chemical Society)

Founders of companies such as IBM, Jacobs Engineering, Fairchild Semiconductor, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Symbol Technologies, Burndy, NetJets, Sasken Communication Technologies, Religare, EDO Corporation, Tellabs, Haskins and Sells, H&Q Asia Pacific, Twitter, Red Apple Group,Berkeley Models, Glasgow Products, Inc, Nestar Systems and Network General, Matrix Partners are Polytechnic alumni.

Several engineers who graduated from NYU-Poly contributed to USA's infrastructure. These include James Wood(fabricated the steel cables for the Brooklyn Bridge. Also invented internal combustion engine for Submarine), Henry Goldmark(co-engineered the development of the Panama Canal lock system), Konstantinos "Gus" Maimis (project executive for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum) Bancroft Gherardi, Jr.(developed the early telephone systems in the United States), David L. Sobin(CEO of BAMnet. A 24-year AT&T/Lucent Executive, Mr. Sobin led the team which created the first DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) product in the early 1980s and deployed it nationwide. He left AT&T/Lucent in 1996 to found his own DSL company, which was subsequently sold for approximately $50M in 1998.), Michael Horodniceanu(Metropolitan Transportation Authority president and chief engineer), Hugh John Casey(Chief engineer of army, chairman of the New York City Transit Authority)

Several NYU-Poly graduates have played a part in the U.S. space program: Jay Greene(former Chief Engineer of NASA Johnson Space Center), Charles Camarda(NASA scientist and mission specialist on the Return to Flight voyage of the shuttle Discovery), Paolo A. Nespoli(Italian astronaut, mission specialist at STS-120 Space Shuttle mission), Thomas J. Kelly (aerospace engineer)(scientist, father of lunar module)

Political figures who graduated from NYU-Poly included Gennaro A. Jerry Marino(former Mayor of Kutztown), Chi Mui(First Asian-American Mayor of San Gabriel, CA.), Sang Whang(Korean American community leader and politician in Florida), Frank Padavan(Republican New York state senator), Carl Gatto(Republican member of the Alaska House of Representatives), Franklin Bartlett(U.S. Representative from New York.), Ephraim Katzir(fourth President of Israel, Chief scientist of the Israel Defense Department. Set up the Weizmann Institute with NYU-Poly's help), George W. Melville(Engineer in Chief of the Navy), Robert Michael White(military aircraft test pilot and a major general in the United States Air Force. White broke a number of records with the North American X-15 experimental aircraft during the 1960s, and supervised the design and development of several modern military aircraft.),Admiral Charles F. Stokes(Dr. Charles Stokes was a member of the first Board of Regents of the American College of Surgeons, Surgeon General of the United States Navy, and President Theodore Roosevelt's personal physician), Don Torrieri(research engineer and Fellow of the US Army Research Laboratory.), Steve Wallach(consultant to the United States Department of Energy Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC) program at Los Alamos National Laboratory.), DARPA director Jack Ruina

Many Polytechnic people have made important inventions, including Paul Peter Ewald(inventor of X-ray diffraction method), Gordon Gould(inventor of the laser), Leonard Bergstein(invented Camera Zoom Lens), Ernst Weber(Invented Microwave), Mario Cardullo(invented Radio-frequency identification (RFID)), Maurice Karnaugh(inventor of Karnaugh Maps, or K-Maps), Francis Crick(Co-discoverer of DNA structure), Samuel Morse(co-inventor of the Morse code), William B. Kouwenhoven (inventor closed-chest cardiac defibrillator), Buddy Ratner (one of the founding fathers of modern bioengineering), Herman Francis Mark (Father of Modern Polymer Science), Jasper Kane(discovered method to mass produce penicillin), Gerald Goertzel(creator of the Goertzel algorithm), Jerome Lemelson(contributed to innovations like cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, and camcorders), John Gilbert (inventor of non-stick coating as an application of Teflon), Joseph Owades(inventor of Lite beer), Rober G. Brown(designed and developed the first telephone system in Paris, France. Among his other innovations were the "French Telephone"), Bern Dibner(Inventor of the first solderless electrical connector), Avery Fisher(inventor of the first stereo radio-phonograph), Martin Hellman(invented Diffie–Hellman key exchange), David Harker(discoverer of the Donnay-Harker law and Harker-Kasper inequalities), K. Mani Chandy(invented BCMP network), Stephen P. Morse(architect of the Intel 8086 chip), Seymour Shapiro(discovered Phenformin), Pat Villani(creator of FreeDOS operating system), Jacob Bekenstein(contributed to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics. The Bekenstein bound in General Relativity), Lawrence J. Fogel(father of Evolutionary computation and Evolutionary programming), Ali Akansu(contributed to the theory and applications of sub-band and wavelet transforms), Bishnu S. Atal(contributed to linear predictive coding), Norman Gaylord(invented permeable contact lens which allows oxygen to reach the wearer's eye), Erol Gelenbe(invented G-network and Random neural network), David J. Thomson(invented Multitaper), Ronald Silverman(contributed to Ultrasound), Ronald R. Yager (invented ordered weighted averaging aggregation operators and contributed to fuzzy sets), Leopold B. Felsen(fundamental contributions to electromagnetic field analysis), Nathan Marcuvitz(contributed in the fields of microwave and electromagnetic theory), Hung-Chang Lin(holds 61 U.S. patents. Among his inventions is the quasi-complementary (transistor) amplifier circuit, which has been used in many commercial audio amplifiers. Another of his inventions is the lateral transistor which is used in linear integrated circuits and T2L digital integrated circuits. He also invented the wireless microphone.), Denis Blackmore(physicist who has contributed to the foundation of black hole thermodynamics and to other aspects of the connections between information and gravitation.), Barouh Berkovits(invented the cardiac defibrillator and artificial cardiac pacemaker), Jerome Swartz(invented hand-held barcode laser scanner and hand-held, scanner-integrated wireless computer and the first spread spectrum wireless LAN (WiFi)), Richard J. Orford( contributed to the invention of Touch Screen ATM), Elmer L. Gaden(father of Biomedical Engineering ),Martin Graham(Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and the designer of the Rice Institute Computer), Ephraim Katzir(developed a method for binding enzymes, which helped lay the groundwork for what is now called enzyme engineering.), Leonard Greene (invented the Aircraft Stall Warning device, which warns pilots when a deadly aerodynamic stall is imminent.), Robert Michael White(supervised the design and development of several modern military aircraft), James Wood((fabricated the steel cables for the Brooklyn Bridge. Also invented internal combustion engine for Submarine), Henry Goldmark(co-engineered the development of the Panama Canal lock system), Konstantinos "Gus" Maimis (project executive for the National September 11 Memorial and Museum) Bancroft Gherardi, Jr.(developed the early telephone systems in the United States), David L. Sobin( A 24-year AT&T/Lucent Executive, Mr. Sobin led the team which created the first DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) product in the early 1980s and deployed it nationwide.), Frances Hugle(Microscopic and integrated circuitry pioneer; inventor of Tape automated bonding), Ami Miron(He developed and patented the first Picture In Picture (PIP) for Philips Electronics. Miron also worked to solve the problem of ghost images on television and led the development of the first high-definition television (HDTV) system in the U.S.)

Prominent institutions of higher education have been led by NYU-Poly alumni, included Norman Lamm(Former president and current Chancellor of Yeshiva University), Hermann Viets(President, Milwaukee School of Engineering. He was Professor of Engineering at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He was a professor and Associate Dean for Research at West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia. the Dean of Engineering at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston, Rhode Island.), John P. Schaefer(President, The University of Arizona), K. Mani Chandy(Deputy chair of engineering and applied sciences at the California Institute of Technology ), Josef Singer(President of Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, also founded Technion’s Faculty of Aerospace Engineering and also won the Israel Prize in 2000 for his lifetime achievement in the field of aeronautical engineering), Yehuda (Leo) Levi(Previous Rector at the Jerusalem College of Technology; author of several books on optics, and on science and Judaism.), Eleanor Baum(Cooper Union Engineering School Dean), John G. Truxal(Dean of engineering and applied sciences at Stony Brook University), Bruno A. Boley(Dean of Engineering at Northwestern University), Dean of Engineering at Middle East Technical University Jack Baskin(Founder of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz), David J. Palmer(Head of the Department of Engineering at the United States Merchant Marine Academy), Richard E. Sorensen( Dean of Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech), Harold S. Goldberg( Associate Dean of Tufts University School of Engineering), Ephraim Katzir(Set up the Weizmann Institute with NYU-Poly's help), Russell K. Hotzler(president of New York City College of Technology of The City University of New York, President at Queens College)

People related to the film industry who graduated from NYU-Poly included Marvin Davis(chairman of Davis Petroleum and at one time owned 20th Century Fox, the Pebble Beach Corporation, the Beverly Hills Hotel, and the Aspen Skiing Company. Former CEO of Paramount Pictures), David Bergstein(American entrepreneur and film producer, chairman of THINKFilm and Capitol Films), Robert H. Lieberman(novelist, film director, and a long-time member of the Physics faculty at Cornell University.) Edward Everett Horton, a well-known character actor, also attended Brooklyn Poly.

Writers who graduated from NYU-Poly included James Truslow Adams(coined the term "American Dream"), Robert Anton Wilson(American author of 35 influential books), Charles Battell Loomis, Tudor Jenks(American author, poet, artist and editor, as well as a journalist and lawyer.), Hugh Seidman( American poet, who also taught at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, Columbia University, the College of William and Mary, The New School.), Clayton Hamilton(American drama critic. Professor at Columbia University)

Notable award winners include Gertrude B. Elion(1988 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine), Martin Lewis Perl(won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1995 for his discovery of the tau lepton, also awarded 1982 Wolf Prize in physics), Rudolph A. Marcus(1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry), Ju Chin Chu(Member of Academia Sinica. Won Noble Prize in physics.), Francis Crick(Co-discoverer of DNA structure; awarded Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine), Jacob Bekenstein(won Israel Prize in Physics (2005), Wolf Prize in physics (2012), Member of Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities), Judea Pearl(2011 winner of the ACM Turing Award), Martin Hellman(In 2011, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.), Elmer L. Gaden (Russ Prize winner), Harold S. Goldberg (Gordon Prize winner, Clive L. Dym (Gordon Prize winner), Jerome E. Levy (Gordon Prize winner), John B. MacChesney(Charles Stark Draper Prize winner), Amir Pnueli(Israel Prize and Turing Award winner), Shmuel Winograd(W. Wallace McDowell Award) winner, Krishna Palem(W. Wallace McDowell Award winner), William B. Kouwenhoven(IEEE Edison Medal) winner, Bancroft Gherardi, Jr.(IEEE Edison Medal) winner, Lloyd Espenschied(IEEE Medal of Honor), William L. "Bill" Effinger, Jr(Founded Berkeley Models. He was elected to the Academy of Model Aeronautics Hall of Fame in 1986.), Leonard Greene(He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He was an American inventor and aerodynamics engineer who held more than 200 patents, many of which are aviation-related), Ephraim Katzir(Israel Prize winner), Josef Singer(Israel Prize winner), Ami Miron(He received two Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards)