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…
How does a team go from worst to first in a matter of just a few years? Missouri S&T’s Mars Rover Design Team, which won the 2017 University Rover Challenge and finished first in the U.S. in the 2018 competition, focused on testing, testing, testing. “We created a detailed rover test plan including system verification,…
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…
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…
You might think that with the thousands of graduates Missouri S&T has produced over its 150-year history, at least a few would have held an executive office in the state. It didn’t happen until 2015, though, when Nicole Galloway was appointed as state auditor by the governor. Voters elected her to a four-year term in…
Few have shared the ring with Muhammad Ali or been praised by the New York Times as “one of America’s top industrialists,” but Harry Kessler accomplished both. As a teenager, Kessler heard “fabulous stories of mining adventures in far-flung corners of the work world” from his sister’s boyfriend who was an MSM student. The St.…
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…
When the band Spinal Tap sang of Stonehenge as a “magic place … where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face” in the 1984 mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, the original monument had stood for some 1,600 years on the plains of Salisbury, England. But the mystery of those monoliths didn’t just capture the…
The technology used to create Davy Jones from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” and characters from other films was developed with the assistance of Steve Sullivan, a 1989 electrical engineering graduate. In addition to “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, Sullivan contributed to the making of the “Star Wars” prequels and the “Iron Man”…
Before retiring, civil engineering graduate John Mathes headed his own multidisciplinary engineering business that specialized in high-profile contamination projects. In the early 1990s, Mathes was a part of a team that formed Project 2000 to unite the civil engineering department and its alumni in their efforts to enhance the quality of the program. As a…