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Showing posts with the label Chemical Engineering Department

ELIZABETH HOLMES: The Most Notorious Stanford Student?

Here is a table showing those schools most successful in business .  A unicorn founder is someone who formed a startup company that reached a valuation of $1 billion. Business Insider wrote about the 26 most famous and successful Stanford University students of all time.  Included were people like:  John F. Kennedy, Mitt Romney, Steve Ballmer ( Microsoft guy ), Shri Mukesh Ambani ( runs the largest company in India ), Larry Page ( cofounded Google ), Sergey Brin ( co-founded Google ), Reese Witherspoon and Tiger Woods.  I mention these particular individuals because they all left Stanford without a degree.   Some remain on leave, perhaps to return someday to finish what they started.  Clearly, all have done well.  Of course, there is me.  I started and earned a B.S. degree in chemical engineering, from Stanford, graduating in 1962.  I think I have been successful, but certainly not famous.  However, I'm now 86 and live a fabulous retire...

HARRY TOUPS: My Friend and Colleague

  Above,  Harry Toups  today.  Sure, it's unfair, for that's what he looks like now, and here I am fifty years ago in my research lab at LSU.  The last time I saw him was 14 years ago when my wife Pearl and I went to the 2008 Sugar Bowl game.  The day after we were supposed to rent a car and drive to the LSU campus to meet with Harry and his wife Margaret.  However, it was so foggy that I cancelled that trip.  Instead, they met us in New Orleans, and we talked all day. Harry worked along side me when I earned my PhD in chemical engineering, as I suffered through a  dissertation program  that involved getting industrial funds to pay for the equipment, build a tunable later ( before one could be purchased ), then construct a micro reactor to break DNA/RNA bonds of  E. coli , not long after Watson and Crick found them.  No one in his right mind trying to get a PhD actually tries to invent his own plan to do something never done be...