Campaign UW: People Who Gave

Frank Jungers (ME ’47) knows plenty about leadership. He met presidents, kings, prime ministers, and assorted VIPs over a 31-year career with Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), the last five (1973–78) as chairman and CEO.

Based in Saudi Arabia for 27 years, he was in the hot seat during the 1973 OPEC embargo on oil to the United States. Jungers became the “go-to-guy” for the U.S. media, including an interview by Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. He crisscrossed the U.S. and Europe to confer with corporate CEOs, and even visited the White House for a brief meeting with President Nixon.

Jungers also led years of complex negotiations for the transfer of Aramco ownership from U.S. oil company shareholders to the Saudi government. He won plaudits for making the right decisions at the right time, for his imaginative problem solving, and ability to engender trust and respect at all levels from oil field laborers to the Saudi royal family to the halls of U.S. government and corporations.

With strong insight on the transformative power of leadership, it’s no surprise that he has created endowments to attract and support outstanding leaders for the college. Prime among them is The Frank and Julie Jungers Endowed Deanship in Engineering, the first of its kind at the UW. It enabled the college to recruit Matt O’Donnell in 2006.

“I like to support programs in ways that have a big multiplier effect,” Jungers said. “The endowment was an opportunity to bring in a preeminent leader with vision and ability to do things in new ways to move the college forward.” He feels the results are already evident in the high caliber of recent faculty hires, expanding research programs, and new methods of instruction. An earlier endowment, the Frank Jungers Professorship in Chemical Engineering, drew Mary Lidstrom, a highly regarded microbiologist, to the UW in 1986. Lidstrom founded and co-directs the NIH-funded Center of Excellence in Genomic Sciences. An exceptional scientist and administrator, she was appointed UW vice provost for research in 2001. “Both these endowments have had tremendous multiplier effects,” Jungers affirmed. “The returns they are bringing to Engineering and the University, in both activity and outside funding, are worth far more than the money I put into them.”

Raised in North Dakota and Oregon, Jungers served in the Navy during World War II, then entered the UW to study mechanical engineering. In 1947 he joined Aramco in San Francisco. After a transfer to Saudi Arabia in 1949, he steadily rose from field engineer at a refinery into the ranks of management.

In retirement Jungers has been busy as an independent investor and consultant and with service to several corporate boards and two higher education institutions. He was a founding member of the UW Foundation board (1988–1992).

He and his wife, Julie, a talented photographer, reside in Portland and Bend and enjoy traveling to locales such as Antarctica, Africa, India, the Middle East, and Myanmar, with China next on their itinerary.

“Beyond everyone’s wildest dreams” is how Steve Rogel (ChemE ’65) sums up the great success of Campaign UW for the University and the College of Engineering. As chair of Engineering’s Campaign Executive Committee he’s had a hand on the wheel of the ambitious initiative, and in encouraging alumni to get on board.

“More than 5,400 alumni, individuals, and organizations made first-time gifts,” Rogel said. “That is as heartwarming as it was essential, given the magnitude of the campaign. We proved engineers can open their wallets,” he added with satisfaction.

More than doubling the number of student and faculty endowments merits even louder toots of the horn. “We have excellent leadership at the college and with more support, we can keep attracting the talent necessary to move to the next level of achievement and recognition,” he said.

As the campaign headed into its closing months, Rogel and his wife, Connie, contributed generously to that effort by establishing an endowed professorship in Chemical Engineering. They made the gift at a significant transition time in their lives. Rogel retired in April after 11 years as CEO of Weyerhaeuser, though he continues serving as chairman of the board of directors. He and Connie, an alumna of Seattle University and member of its board of regents, have built a waterfront home in Port Ludlow, where they plan to enjoy their boat and continuing proximity to Seattle and their alma maters.

They’ve had quite a journey from Ritzville, a small wheat-farming community in Eastern Washington where both were born and raised. The son of the local Buick and GMC dealer, Rogel was servicing cars and trucks by age 13 and running heavy farm machinery not long after. Gritty summer manual-labor jobs convinced him that earning a UW chemical engineering degree would broaden his career opportunities.

A summer internship at St. Regis Paper Co. drew him into the forest products industry, and following graduation, assignments that would take him from the southeastern U.S. to Canada. He joined Portland’s Willamette Industries in 1972 and worked his way up the ranks to CEO in 1995, gaining a reputation as a strategic thinker with a sharp eye for cost efficiencies. From there it was a short jaunt north to Federal Way in 1997 and the significantly bigger arena of Weyerhaeuser.

“I owe so much of my success to my engineering education that I felt a need to return something to the UW,” Rogel said. He believes the Rogel endowed professorship comes at an exciting transition time for the Chemical Engineering program.

“The stopwatch and bucket brigade measurement of flows and volumes is over,” Rogel said. He points to dramatic changes in the past 10-15 years, as the discipline has moved off a primary focus on industrial processes and into an interdisciplinary juncture with bioengineering and medicine and work on the molecular and nanotechnology levels.

“It’s a new world, and I hope our endowed professorship will enable the department to hire or retain exceptional faculty who will forge a leadership role for the department in this area.”

A member of the Engineering Campaign Executive Committee, Rich Amen shares a hometown with Steve Rogel, a fellow alumnus of Ritzville High School in Eastern Washington. “He graduated a year ahead of me, and his wife Connie was my classmate,” Amen says.

Amen was raised on a wheat farm, and like Rogel, operated heavy-duty farm machinery and loved fixing cars as a teen. A ham radio hobby sparked an interest in electronics, and drew him to the UW Electrical Engineering program, bucking the Coug allegiance of his parents and brothers.

In 1965, degree in hand, Amen headed to Palo Alto for a position in design engineering and to earn an MSEE at Stanford, where he later returned for an MBA. By 1976 he had been recruited as CEO for a struggling tech startup producing desktop word processors. “It was so much fun to come into a company and get people charged up and focused on the goal to build the business,” he says.

For his next CEO challenge, with a corporation developing optical character scanners, he grew revenue 40-fold and completed its initial public offering. In 1988 his career took another turn when he and his wife, Mary Lou (a Seattle University grad), founded Venture Management Associates (VMA), a private investment banking and corporate development firm. He guided strategy and managed more than 30 merger, acquisition, and financing projects for businesses in the information technology sector.

Now living on the Southern California coast and semi-retired for the past seven years, Amen turned his focus to real estate, buying and upgrading rental apartment buildings in the Phoenix area. “The tenants love it,” Amen says. “Everything I’ve done over my whole career has had the same themes — building value, building success, and improving the lives of people.”

Those same themes motivated the Amens to make a gift of property to be divided among their three alma maters. Its sale will fund the Richard E. and Mary Lou Amen Endowed Scholarship in Engineering, along with 50 percent UW matching funds through the Students First initiative.

“We’d like to see the scholarships go to high-potential students from Eastern Washington, where many students need financial support to be able to attend college and improve their lives,” Amen says.

Engineering used to be described as a calling, to be undertaken with passion and intensity,” said Tom Delimitros, who applied that philosophy to his own career in industry and as a venture capitalist investing in high-tech companies.

“Engineers are at the forefront in creating value in our society. I want to see many more young people thinking about an engineering career,” Delimitros said. “We need more scholarships and fellowships to attract the brightest students.”

To that end, Tom and his wife, Jeannette, established an endowed fellowship in Materials Science & Engineering that supports its first student this year.

Raised in Seattle, Delimitros was both a “gadget-happy kid” and a talented violinist/concert master of the Lincoln High School orchestra. Unsure whether to study engineering or music in college, he enlisted in the Army Chemical Corps to get away and figure out what he wanted to do.

“I realized I wasn’t good enough for a career as a violinist, and I liked science, so gadgets won and I enrolled at UW to study engineering,” he said. A talk by Professor Jim Mueller convinced him that ceramics was an up-and-coming field, so he gravitated to materials science and earned his BS in 1963 and MS in 1966.

At Boeing he helped develop rain erosion coatings for the SST. His career took off when a friend in New York offered him a position at a company developing electronic ceramics. More doors opened and he gained experience with companies producing specialty chemicals for oil field operations and water treatment plants. During his 14-year sojourn back East, Delimitros added to his skill set, earning an MBA at Harvard.

By 1979 he was president and CEO of Magma Corporation, a Houston-based producer of specialty and oil field chemicals, which he grew to a $100-million company. Then came a move to Dallas as a general partner in a venture capital firm. By 1987 he was a founding general partner of AMT (Advanced Materials Technology) and an investor in high-tech companies. He is now largely retired, though serves on several corporate boards.

Delimitros never let geographic distance get in the way of engagement with his alma mater. He chairs MSE’s advisory board and helped raise funds to build Mueller Hall. Each year he speaks to an MSE class on ethics in engineering work. He served on the Campaign for Washington volunteer committee in the late 1980s, on Engineering’s executive committee for Campaign UW, and for the past three years chaired the selection committee for the college’s annual Diamond Awards program recognizing outstanding alumni.

“Engineering offers a great skill set for self-expression that can take you in many directions,” Delimitros affirmed. “I see our fellowship as a vehicle for that. You can make things happen if you have passion, enthusiasm, and commitment.” In that regard, he says, “being an engineer can be just as good as being a musician.”

Delimitros now will apply his passion and enthusiasm to help keep the beat going on the University level as a new board member of the UW Foundation.

What’s not to like about young alumni who work hard, pedal hard, and can point you to the best bakeries in the region? And, they contributed to the Campaign UW pie by establishing a fellowship to support “a starving grad student” through surely the most creatively named endowment in UW history.

Meet CSE alumni Lauren Bricker (MS ’93, PhD ’98), Ruben Ortega (MS ’94), and Paul Franklin (MS ’98). They were among a dozen grad students and alumni who formed a team to ride in the 1995 Seattle to Portland (STP) bike race — with the team name inspired by CSE’s Steam-powered Turing Machine mural.

Many team members continued riding together even as they pedaled off campus and into careers and family life. Bricker and Ortega have sons aged 17 and 9, the younger of whom rode the first half of the STP this year. Ortega, an expert in search technology, worked at Amazon.com for nearly 10 years and is now with the startup Trusera.com. Bricker consults on user interface architecture and teaches and does IT work at Lakeside School. Franklin is a software developer at Amazon.

The three contributed to the Allen Center capital campaign and this year organized a consortium through the bike team to fund a Students First endowment. They made generous lead gifts to enable the 50 percent match in UW funds, and by June 30 contributions had topped $256,000 with gifts from 11 alumni and friends.

“We got a great education at the UW, which opened the doors to great jobs, so we wanted to give back to CSE,” Ortega said. “Creating an endowed fellowship offered a terrific opportunity to do that and the timing was right for all of us,” Franklin noted. “You don’t have to be a team member to contribute to the endowment,” Bricker said. “Just visit the website to learn more.”.

They plan to give the first fellowship recipient a PPTM team jersey. If the student happens to be a biker, well, that would be ice cream on the pie because he or she could join the group on training rides. By the way, their favorite refueling stops are Alki Bakery and Café and Snohomish Pie Company.