Alumni Award, Honorees

2019 Alumni Medal: Nicolaos Alexopoulos

For five decades, Dr. Nicolaos G. Alexopoulos has been a leader in academic administration, electrical engineering research, and engineering outreach. Under his 11 years of leadership as UC-Irvine’s dean of engineering, the school more than doubled enrollment and faculty, and nearly tripled research expenditures. He helped establish the National Fuel Cell Research Center, Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility, Center for Engineering Science in Design, Biomedical Engineering department and the first-named school on campus. Recently, the school and donors created the Nicolaos G. and Sue Curtis Alexopoulos Presidential Endowed Chair. Previously, during nearly 30 years at UCLA, as EE department chair he established the nation’s first High-Frequency Electronics Research Center with a $3 million gift from Hewlett Packard. He has served as editor-in-chief of Electromagnetics and authored more than 270 journal and conference papers. Ten of his journal publications have been published in volumes of the most significant contributions in the field. He and his students have received three Best Paper Awards from IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. He is the former principal investigator of two STEM programs focused on underrepresented students in California. Since 2008, he has served as a vice president at Broadcom Corporation, and more recently, the Broadcom Foundation. Dr. Alexopoulos was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2007 for “contributions to microwave circuits, antennas, and structures for low observable technologies, and for contributions in engineering education.”  Read more.

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2019 Distinguished Alumni Service Award: Karen Schreiber Fireman

Karen heads the external advisory board of the $100M Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS). For several years, Ms. Fireman served as a Michigan EngineeringAlumni Board member and was vice-chairman of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Council. She has sat on investment boards of several charitable endowments and has provided financial advice to multinational institutions. She has been an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins, and a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan. Ms. Fireman is a chartered financial analyst whose c-suite resume includes chief technology officer of ManTechCyber, the chief financial officer of Columbus Properties, and chief compliance officer of Columbia Partners. Currently, she is a principal at Fireman & Associates. She lives in Houston with her husband, also a Michigan Engineer.  Read more.

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2019 Outstanding Recent Alumni Award: Kelley Maynard Elahi

In only eight years, Kelley Maynard Elahi has established herself as an accomplished leader in global health. As a design engineer in Vietnam, Ms. Elahi developed a continuous positive air pressure device and a phototherapy device for newborn care. She helped set up 11 neonatal wards with such equipment in Vietnam, Myanmar, the Philippines, and India. At the Rice 360 Institute in Houston, she led a team of engineers developing multiple global health technologies and represented the institute at the World Health Organization in Switzerland. Witnessing dire circumstances in hospitals inspired her to combine nursing training with her engineering background to provide more comprehensive care and bridge the two fields. Presently, she is a registered nurse at the prestigious Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.  Read more.

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