October 7, 2013 the speaker will be Bob Scott. He will speak about his grandfather, Charles Edward Ferris- founder of the
Technical Society of Knoxville. Bob ( who is writing this) is a person who everyone will want to hear and who claims to be the last student of Dean Ferris.
Charles Ferris in his time was a farm worker, lumberjack, elementary teacher, door-to-door booksalesman, surveyor, professor, football player, building designer, furniture maker and industrial recruiter. There is quite a lot of information about Charles Ferris on this Technical Society website but you can get a better feeling for our founder from Bob.
October 14 Columbus Day –
will not meet
October 21 Harold L (Lee) Dodds, UT Nuclear Engineering. He currently teaches an honors course at UT entitled “Energy Choices and Consequences,” which is open to students from all majors, not just nuclear engineering students and he has a presentation on the same subject for other organizations. The presentation focuses primarily on the different technologies for producing electricity and the consequences associated with each technology relative to economics, the environment, health and safety,
sustainability, and politics.
Dr Dodds is IBM Professor and Department Head, Emeritus in the UT Nuclear Engineering Department. He had experience in a variety of positions prior to taking his position at UTK.
October 28-David Washburn, President & CEO, UT Research Foundation will be the speaker. The title of his presentation will be “Straight Talk on Technology Commercialization at the University of Tennessee”.
Dave Washburn is responsible for overseeing a variety of programs designed to stimulate and encourage innovation, entrepreneurship and technology transfer from inventions realized across the University of Tennessee system.
Dave is a veteran of university technology transfer and three successful software start-ups.
Most recently Dave led the software commercialization practice at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he helped form 25 startup companies that raised over $75M in venture capital at an aggregate valuation exceeding $250M.
Prior to Illinois, Dave was a team member and led a variety of business development activities for InstallShield Software Corporation (acquired by Macrovision), Kuck & Associates (acquired by Intel) and
Wolfram Research, created of the groundbreaking Mathematica software platform and Wolfram|Alpha computational
knowledge engine.