Boonchai Songthumvat, MS EMgt’76, and his food scientist wife, Nuchanart, started Nuboon Co. in 1992 to manufacture fruit and vegetable juices, coffee and tea and was the first of its kind in Thailand to pasteurize fruit juice. They quickly realized that they could support area children with the foods they produced and formed a foundation…

Tamiko Youngblood, MinE’92, MS EMgt’94, PhD EMgt’97, was a woman of many “firsts.” She was the first African American woman to graduate from Missouri S&T’s mining engineering program and she was the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. from S&T. In addition to a bachelor’s degree in mining engineering (1992), she also earned…

The next time you’re watching the Weather Channel, you might want to thank S&T alumnus Harry Smith for equipping today’s weather forecasters with more accurate weather-tracking methods. Smith earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from S&T in 1942. As an engineer at Westinghouse in the 1950s, he worked to improve existing radar techniques to…

After watching a documentary in which survivors of the April 1912 R.M.S. Titanic sinking recalled hearing a loud cracking noise when the ship struck an iceberg, metallurgical engineering Professor H.P. “Phil” Leighly suspected that the noise offered a clue to what caused the “unsinkable” Titanic to sink.  “When steel breaks,” Leighly said, “you expect a…

Sixty million years ago in the steamy prehistoric forests of what is now Colombia, there slithered a 50-foot, 2,500-pound reptile. Its bones were found in an open coal pit in 2006. Carlos Jaramillo thought at first he and his team had found fossils from an ancient crocodile. But no. It was a snake. Jaramillo and…

Gary Havener, a 1962 graduate in mathematics, is the founder of several companies, with business dealings including real estate development and investment, refurbishing corporate jets, warehousing textbooks, designing and manufacturing antenna systems, and handling loans. He has served S&T on the Chancellor’s Leadership Academy, the Dean’s Advisory Council, the Dean’s Board of Visitors and the…

An expert in developing specialty glasses for use in health care, transportation infrastructure and other applications, Delbert Day is known for co-inventing radioactive glass microspheres. Now marketed as TheraSphere, Day’s product is used at over 200 sites worldwide to treat patients with inoperable liver cancer. Work by Day and other Missouri S&T researchers has led…

In the 1950s, AT&T Bell Labs was a hotbed of innovation, a place where engineers and theorists came together to invent the transistor and make major contributions to the field of lasers and cell phones. One reason: the leadership of Bell Labs’ research director Mervin Kelly, a 1914 physics graduate.  Kelly “hired the best researchers…

As co-founder of Water.org, Gary White has helped empower more than 29 million people worldwide with access to safe water and sanitation. A civil engineer with a bachelor’s degree (1985) and a master’s degree (1987) from S&T, he founded WaterPartners in 1990. In 2009, he merged the organization with actor Matt Damon’s non-profit, H2O Africa,…

When Philip Chen joined Xerox Corp. in 1967, only big companies could afford printers and scanners. Now retired and with several patents to his name, Chen developed the Xenon flash lamp printer, which he considers the “steam locomotive” of printers. He also designed an optical disc drive for the Library of Congress to store its…