Vice President and General ManagerPower Solutions Division, ON Semiconductor Phoenix, ArizonaMichael Stapleton has essentially had three careers — each one building on the previous one — since earning his bachelor’s degree. He credits Oregon State with giving him the foundation he needed to move seamlessly into each.
“Oregon State gave me a hands-on under- standing of electronics, along with the theories and the math to go with it,” he said. “It gave me a breadth beyond electrical engineering — the chemistry, the mechanical engineering, the dynamics, the physics — being able to walk into a problem and theorize what was going on.”
Stapleton applied his electrical engineering skills at the Trojan nuclear power plant for three years, and then spent almost a decade with Anderson Controls in Kent, Washington. At Anderson, he helped numerous and diverse heavy manufacturers improve their businesses by converting purely mechanical manufacturing systems to electronically driven systems.“
Those were very physical environments, so I was solving not just a circuit design problem but a physical problem,” he said, “And I got a lot of that ability — that skill set, that toolkit — from Oregon State.”During his early career, he also earned a master’s in electrical engineering and a master’s in business administration with a focus on international business.Stapleton’s next career started at Intel, where he helped to launch the first gigahertz processor. His current career began when he accepted a senior management position at ON Semiconductor in 2004. Today, he helps a broad customer base find smaller, lower-cost, higher-performance power solutions for building and delivering better products.
Degrees
- B.S. Electrical Engineering, 1986