Learn about what our
Computer Science Alumni are up to now!
Let us know what you are up to (and get your update added to the page) by completing the Alumni Updates form.
Sally Miller Garnaat MS in Computer Science, 1974 I'm retired. My children are University of Arizona graduates (Benjamin Garnaat in 2009) and (Lynn Garnaat in 2012) Charles Schulz BS in Business Administration, 1974 After graduating, I completed my active duty time in the USAF. I was then employed by Bell Labs in Piscataway, NJ, by Exxon Production Research Corp in Houston, TX and then by GTE Comm. Systems Lab in Phoenix, AZ. I stayed with the GTE company as it changed and became a joint venture of GTE and ATT called AG Comm Systems(AGCS). I became VP R&D at AGCS in 1996 and retired from there in 2000. Ed Jennings BS in Mathematics, 1973 Retired since 2013. Worked as a software developer for 37 years in the Seattle area with 10 of those years as the principle of Jennings Consulting. Have done many firmware and application level software projects. Rod Norden BS in Astrophysics, 1976 I retired a few years back, but I have kept busy teaching Computer Science at Cabrillo College, and I'm working as a Public Outreach Astronomer at Lick Observatory. |
DeFrance Clarke MS in Computer Science, 1975 I am fully retired and living in a retirement community. Spent 23 years in the Air Force and 5 years running my own small business managing networks of PCs. Then I spent 20 years working on a mainframe computer for the State of Washington. Allen Brailey MS in Computer Science, 1976 I retired from Raytheon at the end of 2019 after 22 years with them. I had previously been with IBM for 17 years and saw the Rita Road site grow to a large IBM manufacturing and development site and then to the U of Az Tech Park with Raytheon as the largest tenant. Dianne Britton MS in Computer Science, 1975 After getting the PhD I worked for Bell Labs (Holmdel), RCA Sarnoff Research Labs, GE Aerospace and Engineering, and Moorestown Advanced Technology Labs in NJ. In 1992 we moved to SC. There I focused on bringing up the kids and occupied myself for a time as a violin teacher, until 2002 when I joined the Information Technology Department at Columbia International University, from which I retired in 2019. Am now free to visit the kids and grandkids scattered hither and yon. Tim Korb MS in Computer Science, 1975 Retired from the Computer Science Department at Purdue University. |
Michael Houghtaling MS in Computer Science, 1975 After 35 years with IBM, mostly in Tucson, I retired as a senior software engineer in 2014. During that time with the IBM Storage Systems Group my teams collaborated with other academic researchers and commercial developers to enable the deployment of evolving software engineer methodologies and supporting tools, including re-targetable compilers, statistical testing protocols, Markov chain usage models, model-based test oracles, and agent-based complex event monitoring and diagnostic software. David Hanson MS in Computer Science, 1976 I am retired Howie McDonell MS in Computer Science, 1977 Recently retired after a 35 year career with AT&T Bell Laboratories and nine years of Leadership Management Consulting. Currently fully retired and living in Alpharetta, Georgia. Sandy Miller MS in Computer Science, 1979 Retired from 30 years working in the computer field, 20 of them as lab staff in the CS department.
|
Stephen Wampler MS in Computer Science, 1976 Retired in 2019 after 27 years at A.U.R.A (high-level telescope software design and team management on several major telescope projects) and 12 years at NAU (Associate Professor). Scott Dawkins MS in Computer Science, 1985 After graduating, I started at HP working on RISC servers, when RISC CPU architectures were new. I had numerous development and management roles during my 15 years at HP, mostly focusing on firmware and hardware diagnostics. In 2000 I moved to a much smaller company, NetApp, developing network attached storage. I have held several different roles in engineering management, then led NetApp's research group for about 9 years before becoming the product CTO for several years. I switched to a Field CTO role last year to focus on our most important customers and technology partnerships. I met my wife at the UofA! We have two sons, and both attended the UofA also. Our older son in the CSc department. Eric Stouffer MS in Computer Science, 1988 I was working full time for IBM while I completed my degree, even did remote access to UA systems via my PC Junior! I worked 36.5 years for IBM. I was in software and hardware engineering, mostly storage technology. I attained VP of product management for both. I retired in July 2019. Still running and golfing.
|
Kurt Winikka BS in Mathematics, 1981 After more than 35 years of designing and building embedded safety-critical aviation and space flight software for Honeywell, Avidyne, and Draper Laboratory, I’ve recently joined a startup in Boston called Lightmatter. At Lightmatter we’re bringing the world’s first photonic computer to market - an AI accelerator, faster and more energy efficient than anything else available. I am on the systems software team that’s designing this next-generation computing platform purpose-built for artificial intelligence. Ward Sener MS in Computer Science, 1985 I had recently been a program manager for General Dynamics Information Technology managing cybersecurity, communications, and IT engineering, installation, and operations contracts supporting the Department of Defense and Federal agencies. I retired in 2019, but with the pandemic, my wife and I couldn’t travel so I went back to work in 2020. Currently, I’m managing an IT and Audio/Visual engineering and installation contract for NCI in support of the DoD. I live in Arizona wine country, south of Tucson, which I fell in love with when I was first stationed at Fort Huachuca in 1979. I spent most of my career based in the Washington, DC and Atlanta, GA areas, but had the opportunity to return to Southern AZ in 2010, which I jumped at since this is where I always knew I wanted to retire.
|
Lowell Sorenson MS in Computer Science, 1984 Worked 19 years for the Dept of Geosciences, UofA as a computer systems admin. I retired Dec 31, 2006. I'm now volunteering for Saguaro National Park, and Pima County Parks and Natural Resouces, recording and mapping GPS data for Buffelgrass, and removing it from the parks. Laura Darden MS in Computer Science, 1986 AKA Laura Towns. Retired after 38 years with IBM (STSM). 12 patents, corporate award. Living on Table Rock Lake, MO.
|
Stephen Whinston BS in Computer Science, 1991 I am a product manager with Amazon Web Services in Seattle. Clinton Jeffery MS in Computer Science, 1989 I am professor and chair of computer science and engineering at New Mexico Tech. I work on programming languages (see unicon.org), and collaborative virtual environments. I married UACS alumna Susan Wagner. Ted Glenn BS in Computer Science and BA in Judaic Studies,1993 Previously Eastman Kodak, Honeywell, Pasadera Behavioral Network, TEKsystems. Currently with the Clerk of the Arizona Superior Court in Pima County. Commercial-rated pilot. Track and field coach and official. Jeff Miller BS in Computer Science, 1999 Currently the Chief Information Officer for Quantinuum, created by the union of Cambridge Quantum Computing and Honeywell Quantum Solutions to deliver best-in-class software and high-fidelity hardware to accelerate quantum computing. Prior to Quantinuum, spent 10 years leading cybersecurity and physical security for Honeywell Aerospace and Honeywell Quantum Solutions. Retired U.S. Navy Reserve Officer with 25 years of active and reserve assignments in nuclear power, engineering, information technology and intelligence.
|
Mark Schlesinger BS in Computer Science, 1992 I've been married for 26 years with two kids (21 and 17). I'm currently working at a startup in Scottsdale as a technical architect helping them grow their infrastructure and processes. Taggart Gorman BS in Computer Science, 1993 I have worked at 4 different start-ups in the SF Bay Area since graduation. I am currently at Inxeption, a B2B and logistics start-up. Scott Caputo BS in Computer Science, 1997 I am the Game Design Manager for Playstudios where I manage a team of game designers and also design slot games for the MyVegas app Most of my career (17 years) has been focused on creating innovative slot games for Playstudios, IGT, and Silicon Gaming. Besides my day job, I have six published board games and two published books of poetry. So, I have utilized all of my degress including my two Minors in Math and Creative Writing.
|
Rob Thomas BS in Computer Science, 1992 I am currently a Principal at EY (Ernst & Young) in the Technology Consulting side of the business and focus on digital transformation for clients that is usually centered on eCommerce and customer experience. I founded and led a technology consulting company in 2014 and sold it to EY in 2020. That company, Zilker Technology, grew to 375 people before being acquired. I live in Danville, California (Bay Area) with my wife of 29 years (also a Wildcat). Munil Shah MS in Computer Science, 1993 I am SVP of Engineering at UiPath Inc. Head of engineering leading all up Cloud, Core Platform and Infra, from Series C to IPO. Prior to UiPath, held various senior engineering leadership roles at Microsoft on three highly successful products, Windows, Bing and Azure. Ning Zhang BS in Computer Science, 1997 I am currently the director of engineering for developer infrastructure and tools at YouTube. |
Tsz Yeung Ho BS in Computer Science, 2000 Willis Towers Watson as Associate Director Roman Yusufov MS in Computer Science, 2001 I spent 8 years working at IBM, then more recently 9 years working at Amazon. On of the more notable projects I worked on was launching communication functionality on Amazon Alexa. I quit my job a few months ago to work on my own startup. It's a "personal shopper" coaching platform that helps pair clients with coaches based on their needs and personality types. Fanny Surjana BS in Computer Science, 2003 I'm a Fractional CTO serving Startups and SMEs, working remotely from San Diego CA. Steve Kobes BS in Computer Science, 2005 I am a software engineer at Google, contributing to the Chrome browser and the web platform. After nearly 10 years in Silicon Valley, I decided to move to Canada, and am now enjoying a snowier life in Waterloo, Ontario, with my partner Hope and our two cats. Ben Carlson BS in Computer Science, 2005 I am currently completing my PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University |
Shamsu Charania BS in Computer Science, 2002 CEO & Co-founder of The Falcons Group that owns & operates over 90 restaurants along with a number of its real estate spread over seven states. Currently, looking for future strategic acquistions along with diligent development in order to grow the company footprint. Steven Bethard BS in Computer Science, 2002 I'm an Associate Professor at the University of Arizona School of Information, which I joined in August 2016, after three years as an assistant professor in Computer and Information Science at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. I previously worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University's Natural Language Processing group, Johns Hopkins University's Human Language Technology Center of Excellence, KULeuven's Language Intelligence and Information Retrieval group in Belgium, and the University of Colorado's Center for Language and Education Research. Ben Ratzlaff BS in Computer Science, 2003 I am maintaining and developing various digital simulation frameworks in use at Raytheon here in Tucson. I am married with two kids and spend our vacations visiting the grandparents in Dallas, TX. Brad Dux BS in Computer Science and Mathematics, 2005 I'm the technical lead for Site Reliability Engineering for Google Cloud Storage. I'm responsible for making sure the world can reliably use Google Cloud Storage. I'm married to my wonderful wife who is a kindergarten teacher. We have two daughters and a dog and live in Sunnyvale, CA. Allan Smith BS in MIS and Accounting, 2005 Director of Engineering at Procore Technologies based out of Santa Barbara California. Married to fellow UA Alum Dr Erica Camardella. Two children, Beckett (3) and Dominique (7 mo).
|
Heather Lo BS in Computer Science, 2002 I am currently working for the University of Arizona under the Office of the CIO. I started working here a few years after I graduated from the university, and my focus has shifted from being a Java developer to being the lead of a DevOps team. Richard Smith BS in Computer Science, 2002 Presently, the CTO of SentinelOne; a public cyber security firm that IPO-ed in June 2021. Prior to that, scaled Medallia engineering pre- and post-IPO. Held multiple engineering leadership roles at Oracle over a span of 12 years. Presently live in Santa Barbara California with my wife and two kids; my number one focus and accomplishment . Forever grateful to the department for helping me get to where I am today. Daniel Marashlian BS in Computer Science, 2004 I became a tech entrepreneur, and have always taken the first developer and CTO role. Some of the more notable success stories have been TweetPhoto where we jump started the photo craze on Twitter to more than 45 million users. Portfolium, where millions of students had an ePortfolio to showcase their skills and competencies to connect their learnings with an opportunity. Now Drata, a security and compliance automation company in which we became the 10th fastest company of all time to hit the “unicorn” billion dollar valuation club. James Judd MS in Computer Science, 2005 I am living in Marana, Arizona with my wife with our two adult kids nearby. I am a Senior Principal System Engineer and Raytheon Missiles and Defense. When we're not at U of A Women's Basketball games, we love to fly our light sport aircraft around southern Arizona.
|
Sahana Nagaraja MS in Computer Science, 2010 I am currently working as Senior Manager at Hexagon Mining, India. I joined Hexagon back in 2011 through a campus fair at UA. When my family decided to move back to India, I was able to continue my passion and work with Hexagon without a glitch from their office here. Arman Reyes BS in Computer Science, 2012 I'm currently working at a startup called Playco, whose goal is to make HTML5 Gaming mainstream. I've worked at Microsoft and Disney in the past and was a part of launching the Disney+ streaming service. I enjoy life in the Seattle area with my wife and my 14 month old son. Kevin Dawkins BS in Computer Science, 2012 After graduating from Arizona, I started my career at Microsoft, where I had the privilege of working in several groups: Azure KeyVault, DevOps, and IoT. During my tenure on Microsoft IoT, I was one of the founding engineers on IoT Geospatial and IoT Edge. I left Microsoft and moved to Square, where I currently help lead Square's global onboarding initiatives and Square's decentralized identity plans. I am engaged to my beautiful fiancé Maren, and we will be married in May! Sankar Veeramoni PhD in Computer Science, 2014 Senior Software Engineer at IBM Jeremy Menke BS in Computer Science, 2016 Cloud Developer at IBM working with 3rd party Independent Software Vendors to onboard their products onto IBM Cloud Catalog, also create open source automation using Terraform to build/install/deploy on Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters, on any cloud. Heather (Covello) MacDonald BS in Computer Science, 2017 I'm based in Portland, OR, working remotely for Verta AI. Verta is a startup that builds software to help data scientists manage their AI/ML model lifecycle. I've been married for five years and have adopted a small senior doggo. I recently convinced my partner to get a CS degree too! Nick Silvestri BS in Computer Science, 2019 I'm the lead developer at a startup in Washington, DC called ElectroTempo. We're building data analytics to guide the future of electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the country!
|
Matthew Cleveland MS in Computer Science, 2011 Principal software engineer at Motorola Solutions. Technical lead on a product to secure municipal network against ransomeware, malware, etc... Andrew Gunsch BS in Computer Science, 2012 After college, I worked at Google building software for several years, and by the time I left was leading their Cloud API platform product. I'm currently in Seattle, leading engineering organizations for Ad Hoc, a company that improves how government digital services get built. I oversaw the development of VA.gov from a website project into a platform with dozens of teams building applications for Veterans, trying to make the VA's websites more usable and benefits more accessible. Now I'm helping guide engineering teams doing infrastructure improvements at the Library of Congress, supporting digital archival of media and large parts of the Internet. Elizabeth Connor BS in Computer Science, 2014 Software Engineer at Viasat, Inc in Carlsbad, CA. The Computer Science department and especially the Section Leader program gave me the skills I needed to transition into the "real" world of coding, and I'm still loving every moment of it. Karin Carmona (Blanford) BS in Computer Science, 2015 Currently working at Microsoft as a software engineer, I build end to end web applications on the Office experience team. I live in Seattle with my husband and our dog, Diana. Dan Deblasio PhD in Computer Science, 2016 I am currently working as an assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. Between Tucson and El Paso I spent 3 years as a Lane Fellow in the Computational Biology Department at the Carnegie Mellon University, School of Computer Science. My work continues to be primarily focused on the Algorithm Configuration problem; that is finding input-specific parameters for existing domain tools; with applications in Computational Biology as well as Engineering. Aakash Rathore BS in Computer Science, 2018 I have been working as a software engineer at Google Seattle for the last 3.5 years. It has been an exhilarating ride working and solving problems in a fast paced environment. I also got promoted soon after I joined full time. Caleb Pomayo BS in Computer Science, 2019 I am currently a Software Engineer at State Farm. I’ve had the opportunity to design and develop user interfaces and automate a lot of manual processes in infrastructure. I bought a house in Gilbert in late 2020, where I currently live with my dog Xan.
|
Federico Cirett Galán MS in Computer Science, 2010 I am now an Associate Professor at Universidad de Sonora in México, and I’ve helped to create and direct the Masters program of Engineering IoT & AI. Raquel Torres Peralta MS in Computer Science, 2010 "I am an associate professor at the University of Sonora. I am currently in charge of the Information Systems Engineering program at this university, with around 400 students. Also, I was a member of the committee for the creation of the Masters in IoT and AI program, which has been running for the last 2 years. Emily Luu BS in Computer Science, 2014 I've moved to Seattle and am working for Microsoft on the Word Web team. Young-Kyoon Suh PhD in Computer Science, 2015 Assistant Professor at Kyungpook National University in Korea. Andrew Stockton BS in Computer Science, 2016 Since graduating, my wife and I have gotten a pony, started a business, had 3 kids, and moved to East Tucson. The business is actually an evolution of my senior year Computer Vision project - web-based 3D customization software for designing 3D printable D&D miniatures. So far it's done well enough to keep us and a friend employed; here's hoping for many years to come. Thanks Phil Amburn for a great Computer Vision class! Eric Newberry BS in Computer Science, 2018 Eric Newberry is a Senior Software Engineer at NortonLifeLock in Tempe, Arizona. After graduating from UofA, he obtained a Master's from the University of Michigan. Pooja Lakshmi Narayan MS in Computer Science, 2019 Currently working for Google in LA.
|
Pratik Bhandari MS in Computer Science, 2020 Working as a Software Engineer at Trend Micro in Austin, TX. Jiacheng Zhang BS in Computer Science and Mathematics, 2019 Working at Lumen Technologies as a Senior Operations Engineer (Automation) Priyamvadha Gopalakrishnan MS in Computer Science, 2021 I am currently working as a Principal Business Analyst at the University of Arizona. I have been automating manual business processes for the Central HR of the UA for the past 10 years.This summer, I plan to move to India with my family to spend quality time with my extended family. |
Ivan Webber BS in Computer Science, 2020 Data science at Microsoft (Maps & Geospatial Intelligence). Rock climbing, skiing, and more. Alexander Thompson BS in Computer Science, 2021 Currently working as a software engineer at USAA on APIs for member data. My family is nearing the turn in date of our seventh volunteer trained service dog Zephyr. Bianca Lara BS in Computer Science, 2021 Currently, I am taking time to develop my industry skills as a Software Engineer at Google. As part of this job, I moved to San Francisco. This is my first time living in a big city outside of Arizona!
|
Angel Aguayo BS in Computer Science, 2020 I currently work at Google as an L3 SWE after going through their Engineering Residency program! Currently Im working on the Android core graphics stack, developing end to end graphics features for billions of devices. For the first time ever, I have moved out of Tucson AZ and been in Mountain View California where I've gotten to experience a whole different culture than what I've known before :D Clay Downs BS in Computer Science and ISTA, 2021 Engineer on OpenSearch at AWS Jade Marmorstein BS in Computer Science, 2021 I'm working full time as a software engineer at Imagine Learning, developing educational activities for children grades k-8. I'm also working on some of my own indie game projects in my spare time.
|