I have consistently advocated education and openness of Entrepreneurship and
Open Source in my own technology businesses and in my  past voluntary roles
as Vice-Chair and Chair of the Management Division and Chair of the Chemical
Engineering and Law Forum of the National American Institute of Chemical
Engineers (AIChE).  I was also appointed and served on the new AIChE Center
for Innovation and Entrepreneuring Excellence (CIEE) bylaws committee in
2012-2013.

In addition to my engineering experience, I am also an action-oriented,
senior level software professional specializing in product and program
solutions within enterprise Service Oriented architecture (SOA), Web Services
domain and middleware.   Due to my extensive experience over several decades,
I can say that I attribute the success of Unix and all of its derivatives due
to the Open Source community. Even Apple's Darwin kernel was based on Unix
principles.  The open source community not only improves source code and
functionality for themselves but for all users.  For example, users of
proprietary public off-the-shelf software experience large lag times between
reported bugs to correction or implementation of requested features.  With
open source, a community of coders and organizers actively maintain their
software and are easily accessible to directly interact with users resulting
in quick turnarounds to fix bugs and continuously implementing new features
based on responses of the entire community of users.

My academic background includes earning a Master’s degree in Chemical
Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and being awarded
the IITRI Fellowship to complete my Doctorate in Chem. Eng. with a thesis
that includes developing and coding one of the first 3-dimensional,
multiphase Computational Fluid Dynamics software packages that is still in
use today. I also completed the Executive MBA program at the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign earning a MBA degree in 2010.