Eric began his career of innovation after graduating from the UW and serving time in the U.S. Army. In the midst of his UW years he received an ROTC commission and led a 40-man infantry platoon in Europe. Eric joined Monsanto where he played a key role in developing a Seattle plant that converted pulp mill waste into artificial vanilla, enough to flavor all the ice cream in the country. Following his success at Monsanto, Eric joined Weyerhaeuser where he used his engineering skill and leadership over a 30-year career, to make profound and lasting contributions to company plants around the country.

Tasked with developing system controls for sawmill machine centers, Eric took advantage of emerging computer technology to replace visual scanning of log dimensions. Using primitive PDP-8 mini-computers on chipping head-rigs, with only 4k memory, huge gains were realized in yield. Though originally resistant, mill supervisors eventually drove the efforts to keep the systems operational. Weyerhaeuser's investment of $30,000 for Eric's scanner resulted in close to a million dollar gain per machine each year.

Eric next addressed the issue of visually judging tree-length logs to determine available lumber, called bucking. Eric developed "auto-bucking", a patented system of scanning the shape of full-length logs in a more powerful mini-computer to calculate the optimum sawmill log lengths for the highest value. Today, nearly all mills are equipped with this technology.

Simon has made a profound impact on semiconductor devices, including transport processes in metal-semiconductor contacts, operational principles of microwave and photonic devices and the insulating properties of silicon nitride and silicon dioxide. With co-inventor Dawon Kahng, Simon fabricated the world’s first floating-gate NVSM device, able to record and retain data without consuming power. Today, NVSM, has given rise to a large family of memory devices including EEPROM and flash memory. NVSM is one of the most popular embedded-memory and mass-storage applications and can be found in more than 40 billion electronics products.

Simon received his MS in electrical engineering from the University of Washington and his PhD from Stanford. After working at Bell Labs, he went on to faculty positions at National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Stanford and National Taiwan University. He has consulted or directed at research centers around the globe, and is currently honorary chair professor at NCTU. He has authored or co-authored over 300 articles, and written and edited 16 books. Simon is the recipient of the IEEE J.J. Ebers Award, the Sun Yet-sen Award, National Endowed Chair Professor Award, and the National Science and Technology Prize. He is a life fellow of IEEE, academician of the Academia Sinica, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

While a materials science undergrad at the UW, Randy co-invented a patented process, Combustion Spray Pyrolysis (CSP) that earned him a record six publication co-authorships. The CSP process yields fine submicron size ceramic powders capable of being deposited as thin, dense and electrically conductive layers on solid oxide fuel cells that are both durable and long lasting. Solid oxide fuel cells are used in everything from mini power grids to military defense applications.

Randy's career began as a research engineer when his CSP technology was spun out into Seattle Specialty Ceramics, and he eventually was named the company's general manager. He has since overseen the growth of Praxair Specialty Ceramics, including several $1M line expansions and the commercialization of additional R&D products. His technical engineering skill combined with his entrepreneurial instincts has advanced the company. His innovations on the synthesis of solid oxide fuel cell materials have become the industry standard.

Prior to entering politics, Dan was a successful structural engineer for the City of Seattle, Associated General Contractors, and in private practice. Elected as governor in 1965, Dan's innovative approach to policy, a reflection of his engineering background, secured his reputation as a popular and effective leader. He founded the first state-level Department of Ecology and Washington's community college system. In 1983 Dan was appointed and elected to the U.S. Senate.

Though he chose not to run for political office again, Dan continued to serve his community. He has served on boards for the Northwest Parkinson's Foundation, The Nature Conservancy of Washington, Children's Hospital Foundation, and corporate boards of Costco, Puget Sound Energy, and others. Dan has been a champion of the University of Washington where he served two terms on the Board of Regents. Dan has been a member of the UW Foundation Board, chair of the Husky Stadium Renovation Committee, taught courses at his namesake college, the Evans School, advised on the Creating Futures campaign, served on the College of Engineering's Campaign Executive Committee and is a recipient of the UW Alumnus Summa Laude Dignatus Award. In 2012, Dan and his wife Nancy received the UW Gates Volunteer Service Award. His numerous other awards include the E. Donnall Thomas Medal of Achievement from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Legacy Award from the Rainier Institute.

Brad started programming at the age of 5 and became an entrepreneur by 17 when he founded his first company, Voting Booth (later FreeVote) in high school. Brad created the precursor to LiveJournal before enrolling at the UW. Originally a tool to help him stay connected with friends after leaving for college, his database-driven invention grew into an 8-million strong community. To keep up with the rapid growth of LiveJournal users, Brad created Memcached, software that speeds up data access to back-end servers. His clever program allowed LiveJournal to support a large scale of users without exponentially increasing resources. Today, Memcached is an essential component of practically every major web service, and an example of Brad's impact as a software engineer, designer and innovator. When Brad graduated from the UW, LiveJournal became his full time job before selling the company, by then called Danga Interactive, to Six Apart in 2005. At Six Apart, Brad developed OpenID, an open standard authentication system that allowed users to consolidate their digital identities across different sites. Approximately 9 million sites have integrated OpenID customer support with over 1 billion OpenID-enabled accounts on the internet.

Brad stayed with Six Apart as chief architect until 2007 when he left for Google. At Google, Brad has worked on Social Graph API, Google Profiles, Android Performance and is currently with the Go Programming Language team. He is frequently asked to speak at conferences and user groups. Brad is a widely respected leader in the open-source community, improving software development culture and creating open source projects used by millions of web sites around the world.