alumni

Photo courtesy of @NYSE

On June 1, Knife River President and CEO Brian Gray rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange to celebrate the company’s first day as an independent, publicly traded business.

“It was exhilarating, one of the most exciting moments of my life,” said Gray, B.S. civil engineering ’93. “My wife and family were there to share the moment. It was special for that reason and because I was able to represent the 6,000 men and women at Knife River whose work made this possible.”

Photo by Johanna Carson

Emma Knight finished her mechanical engineering bachelor’s degree in 2016, but she keeps coming back to Oregon State. 

Her first job after graduating was as a mechanical designer with Systems West Engineers, in Springfield. That brought her back to the Corvallis campus to conduct pre-analysis for what would become the four-year, $159 million Cordley Hall renewal project, scheduled for completion in 2024.

“Being back at Oregon State was quite a full-circle moment,” Knight said. 

Photo courtesy of Oregon State University Athletics

Mike Hass finds daylight in a game against LSU on Sept. 4, 2004. The Beavers lost 22-21 in overtime against the defending national champions. 

By now, most diehard Beavers fans know that Mike Hass, B.S. civil engineering ’06, was recently inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame — one of only three Oregon State players who have earned the high honor. The path he took to get there could have gone straight through Hollywood. 

Photos by Karl Maasdam, Lucas Radostitz, Gale Sumida.

Every engineer spends countless hours learning their field inside and out, but only a relative few ever launch a company to bring their inventions to the world. Luckily, the Oregon State University Advantage Accelerator helps faculty, staff, students, and alumni take that critical step by shepherding new companies through all phases of the startup process.

In the fall of 2019, during the recently completed Merryfield Hall renovations, a plumber descended into a crawl space beneath the building to tap a water line for a new drinking fountain. He also found an odd bit of construction: a dozen concrete-filled barrels, aligned in two parallel rows, supporting a significant chunk of the building. The barrels, it turns out, had also been observed during a 2014 remodel of one of Merryfield’s labs. Who knows when anyone had seen them before that?

Photos by Peter Knox and courtesy of the Schmierer family.

Mike and Barb Schmierer created a student success endowment in their name and have been loyal annual donors to the College of Engineering for more than 20 years.

Photos by NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCL, and Kerry Dahlen.

Last Christmas, Amrit Nam Khalsa, B.S. mechanical engineering ’18, woke up to a wonderful gift: the perfect launch of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, the largest, most complex space telescope ever built.

“I thought, ‘Finally, this is actually happening.’ Then I thought, ‘Now comes the hard part,’” Khalsa said. “The launch was not necessarily the hardest thing the telescope had to endure. There were still weeks of nail-biting deployments and positioning.”

Photos courtesy of Rick Robertson.

Rick Robertson was barely a teenager when he started his first construction job. He dug catch basins, pushed concrete, and hauled materials through the long summer days. The hard work was nothing new.