ALUMNI ON THE MAP

Thousands of Georgia Tech alumni live and work internationally in more than 135 countries around the world, many of them making a significant impact on global communities. Thousands more remain in the United States but their efforts ripple far beyond borders. Here are the stories of 10 Yellow Jackets who have helped put Tech on the map in engineering, entertainment, politics, fashion, health care, humanitarian efforts and more.

Spring 2016 | by Roger Slavens

Georgia Tech has long held strong ties to Panama, with Ramblin’ Wrecks enlisted to help engineer the Panama Canal more than a hundred years ago. Now that Tech alumnus Juan Carlos Varela serves as president of the country, those ties have never been stronger. Varela is near to finishing his second year leading the Central American nation—he was elected on May 4, 2014—and he readily admits he’s leaned heavily on his engineering education at Tech when making decisions as head of state.

“Engineers are trained to understand and solve problems,” Varela says. “Engineers think differently. I’m using that training to help transform many of my country’s bureaucratic ways to build a government that’s focused on service and operates with transparency and honesty. Politics, like engineering, should be about making life better for everyone you serve, not just yourself.”

In tackling that formidable task, Varela has identified a variety of specific intiatives he’s started in his country, such as providing more support for senior citizens, improving transportation infrastructure and promoting bilingual education. In fact, on a recent stop at Georgia Tech, he spent a considerable amount of time talking to several Panamanians enrolled in the Georgia Tech Language Institute’s Intensive English Program.

In addition, Varela checked in with aerospace engineering undergraduate Ulises Nùñez Garzón, a Panamanian student he’s sponsoring on scholarship. “Ulises is doing great, but I know how challenging Georgia Tech can be,” Varela says. “All I ask for him is to put forth his best effort, as my professors once demanded of me.”

She won’t brag about it, but Anu Parvatiyar and the nonprofit organization she works for played a big part in helping to nearly eradicate polio from the African nation of Nigeria. In 2015, for the first time, there were no recorded cases of wild polio in the country, down from 122 cases in 2012 when eHealth Africa first got involved.

As eHealth Africa’s program manager for polio, Parvatiyar’s team supplies the technology and logistics to map—via mobile phones and GPS—the efforts of vaccination teams throughout Nigeria. “At the beginning, we started with an empty map,” says Parvatiyar, who manages some 300 workers on the ground in Kano and other cities and villages in Nigeria. “Now we have 100 percent of north Nigeria mapped.”

In addition, she and her team endeavor to make sure the vaccine gets delivered to wherever it’s needed, even the most remote areas. “Sometimes it gets down to identifying that a specific village has the only refrigerator that can store the polio vaccine within a 30-mile radius,” she says. “It’s amazing to see how such information can transform local health systems and governments.”

Parvatiyar’s ultimate goal is to eventually help wipe out polio everywhere—there were some 55 cases worldwide last year—using and sharing what eHealth Africa learned in Nigeria.

“Not only that, but our work here with polio is translatable to eradicating other diseases and stopping outbreaks in other places,” Parvatiyar says. “The data we collect and manage can make a lasting legacy and inform future public health policy and decision-making in the field.”

Case in point: When Ebola hit Nigeria in the summer of 2014, she says eHealth Africa was asked to use its mapping technology to assist in stopping the outbreak. Parvatiyar lives in the Bay Area, but spends about 75 percent of her time in Africa. “It’s hard to manage what we do from afar,” she says. She started her career working as a design engineer in the medical device industry, but when she had the chance to work abroad, she jumped at the opportunity.

Moviegoers are in love with IMAX, the large-screen movie format—often paired with 3D effects—that’s delivering dramatic wows and big box-office returns worldwide. It’s Andrew Cripps’ role to lead the expansion of IMAX’s footprint in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, which currently includes 225 theaters, using his more than 25 years of experience in movie distribution.

Cripps started his celluloid career working for a British company looking for someone to set up an office in Tokyo to distribute videocassettes and laser discs in Japan and Korea. While there, he was approached by United International Pictures (UIP) to go into sales, and he rose through the ranks—eventually moving to London—until he was named UIP’s president and COO to handle the marketing and distribution of all Paramount, Universal, MGM, United Artists and Dreamworks films outside of North America. When UIP broke up in 2006, Cripps became president of Paramount Pictures International. But when his job moved to Los Angeles, he stayed in London for the sake of his teenage children and soon joined IMAX.

The timing couldn’t have been more perfect; Cripps climbed onboard as IMAX was soaring. “IMAX has been around for almost 50 years, and while our roots are in North America, it has become a truly global brand operating in 66 countries,” Cripps says. “Today there is an IMAX theater operating virtually every second of every day. The majority of our network growth will come from international markets.”

Of the 1,008 IMAX theaters around the world, 574 of them are located outside the U.S. “Also, approximately 87 percent of the 364 theaters we currently have in backlog will be installed in international markets,” Cripps says. “Similarly, a majority of our global box office is generated from our international locations. Nearly two-thirds of our third-quarter box office last year was generated outside North America.”

While movie theaters are facing increasing competition from streaming and other in-home alternatives, IMAX stands apart. “Our immersive cinematic experience offers consumers something that is difficult to achieve or replicate in the home,” Cripps says. “Still, in response to that competition we have to continue to do what we’ve been doing for almost 50 years—innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible in our theaters.”

A Brit born in Sri Lanka and then raised in Yokohama, Japan, Cripps came to Georgia Tech by happenstance. Many of his friends were headed to universities in the U.S., and he thought he’d do the same. “At the time, I only knew one person in the states—my sister—who lived in Monroe, Ga.,” Cripps says. “My high school counselor knew little about schools in Georgia, so he basically told me to pick between Tech, the University of Georgia and Georgia State with no other guidance. Luckily for me, I chose Tech.”

Cripps keeps many close friends from his time at Tech, and he hopes to meet up with them in Dublin, Ireland, later this year to catch the Yellow Jackets football game.

Chances are, as you read this, a Georgia Tech alumnus is hurtling through space above you. This past December, NASA astronaut Tim Kopra launched into space aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. He joined his crewmates, cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency and Tim Peake of the European Space Agency, on Expeditions 46 and 47 to the International Space Station (ISS).

Kopra is no stranger to international missions: It’s his second trip to the ISS. His first mission was the two-month-long Expedition 20 in 2009, which launched on the Space Shuttle Endeavor and returned on the Space Shuttle Discovery. Alongside Russian, Japanese, Belgian and U.S. crew members, Kopra served as a flight engineer.

On his current mission—which is scheduled to last until June—Kopra is serving as a flight engineer on Expedition 46 (the first leg), but in March he will become the commander of Expedition 47 as fellow NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov end their one-year stints aboard the space station. Kopra received a little scare in January when on a scheduled spacewalk, he noticed a four-inch bubble of water accumulating into his helmet. The walk was cut short for precautionary reasons. “I could definitely tell the sides [of the water-absorbing pad] were swollen,” Kopra reported after returning to the ISS.

But coping with such anomalies is part of his training. Kopra joined NASA as a test engineer in 1998, then was selected to become an astronaut in 2000. He completed two intense years in space shuttle and ISS flight instruction. To bridge differences in language and procedures with international crewmates, Kopra had to complete a Russian language immersion course in Moscow, and then spent time at Russian, Japanese, German and Canadian training sites.

When Archel Bernard moved to Monrovia, Liberia—her ancestral homeland which her parents had fled in the 1980s during a brutal civil unrest—she wanted to be the Oprah of West Africa. “I would go to communities and shoot videos of exciting things happening in the city,” Bernard says.

“And, of course, the West African Oprah just had to wear West African clothing.” So Bernard would design bold, colorful dresses that combined African fabrics and patterns with U.S. styles and have a local shop make them for her. That is, until she realized that not only was her dressmaker taking far too long with her orders, but also that she had copied Bernard’s design and made one for herself and was selling them to other customers.

“At that point, I realized I could figure out a way to design and make my own dresses, and possibly make a profit it from it,” Bernard says. “I made eight different styles, found two tailors and paid them a small amount to make my first line. I didn’t even know I was creating a line, much less a company. I sold out of everything and used the feedback and money to create more styles.” She called her fledgling company Mango Rags, and by scraping up every bit of money she could earn, she opened up a small storefront.

And then the Ebola outbreak happened, and all Bernard had worked so hard for, seemed lost. “People were scared to shop, so my business declined,” she says. “I got a ticket back to the U.S., closed the shop and left my employees without knowing when or if I would return.”

Travel is big business in the United States. But it’s becoming even bigger in China. After working for Oracle Corp. in the U.S. and China following his graduation from Georgia Tech, James Jianzhang Liang capitalized on the online travel trend by co-founding Ctrip.com International in 1999.

Headquartered in Shanghai, Ctrip.com is a powerhouse Asian alternative to online travel booking companies such as Expedia and Priceline. (In fact, Priceline is an investor in the company.) Through Liang’s leadership, Ctrip.com quickly grew into one of China’s most recognized travel brands, and its transactions exceeded US$24.5 billion in 2014. In terms of the volume of bookings made by consumers—rather than travel agents or group travel companies—it is the largest consolidator of hotel and transportation tickets in China. To handle this massive demand, Ctrip.com employs more than 30,000 people in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea and Japan.

With his formidable technical background, part of it forged at Georgia Tech, Liang has also been a driving force for the company’s use of cutting-edge algorithms to optimize the customer experience, as well as its rollout of Ctrip.com services onto mobile platforms. And though mobile is all the rage in the U.S. right now, the scale of the Chinese market still boggles the mind: The company’s app has been downloaded more than 1 billion times.

During his last State of the Union address to the country, President Barack Obama announced a new initiative that amounts to a cancer “moonshot”—that is, an unprecedented commitment to fighting cancer much like the United States’ effort in the 1960s to put a man on the moon. Few could have been happier than Lynn Austin, the chief operating officer for the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health.

Austin may not be trained as a medical doctor or epidemiologist, but she inarguably has made a larger impact during her operations career by “keeping the trains running” and making sure that researchers and practitioners have the resources to do their jobs. At the NCI, she oversees 5,000 employees—500 of them who work for her directly—as well as a budget of $5 billion and 120 buildings and facilities.

The revitalized commitment to fighting cancer means she’ll have more support than ever. “I absolutely love my job,” Austin says. “We are doing the cutting edge, complicated research that’s difficult to fund outside of government. Then we share wour findings so that that they can be put into practice broadly.” That means not only in the U.S., but also globally. “The NCI works with other countries to help them detect, deter and respond to diseases and conditions,” she says. “We also learn a lot from other countries’ research and operations, and we work together to tackle problems.”

Austin long yearned for such a world-changing career. “I was indoctrinated into government service at a young age,” she says. “My mother worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and I found it so interesting that what I was seeing in the news was what my mom was dealing with in her job. She helped send epidemiologists out to research such things as botulism outbreaks.”

Austin herself served with the CDC for 25 years. While there, she was empowered to earn her PhD in public policy from Georgia Tech, which helped her advance her career. Former CDC Director Julie Gerberding named her chief of staff in 2005. And Austin was later selected as deputy director for the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response in 2009. In that role, Austin led operational responses to the earthquake in Haiti, the H1N1 flu outbreak and many others.

“I had come full circle from what I saw my mom doing,” she says. “As I did with my time at the CDC, I feel the impact of my work at the NCI every day. I love solving problems and making sure the work gets done—especially when the stakes are high.”

When Mike Everly moved his family to New Zealand in 2009, the main objective was to give his family an opportunity to live outside the United States for a spell. But at the same time, Everly was looking for business opportunities. “I knew that we’d be there for about three to four years, and I wanted a project that wouldn’t consume me fulltime—preferably a business I could eventually manage back in the States,” Everly says.

The opportunity he found was literally a sticky proposition—making honey. But this wasn’t your run-of-the-mill honey. New Zealand is one of only two places in the world where you can find manuka trees, a flowering plant in the myrtle family that New Zealand bees love to forage upon. The resulting manuka honey is prized around the world as a super food and for its health benefits.

“The manuka market had been around for 10-15 years, and the demand was skyrocketing, so I thought it would be a safe investment,” Everly says. At first, he bought some beehives and let local workers manage things for him. But after spending two seasons observing, Everly took over operations and put a plan in place to expand the business and differentiate his product from the competition.

“For one thing, manuka honey is expensive—you can find it in Whole Foods for $40 to $50 a jar,” he says. “By selling our honey online, direct to consumer, we can limit our costs and charge $36, which is a big advantage.”

When Curt Hopkins graduated from Georgia Tech with his master’s degree in management, the Internet was taking off globally—especially the use of email and basic web browsing. With a background in telecommunications, he was recruited to take a look at a new joint venture opportunity in Kazakhstan, a relatively new country formed when it declared its independence from the Soviet republic in 1991.

“There were 15 million people living in the country,” Hopkins says. “And it was a very educated populace eager to find out what was happening around the world. But its telecom network was shockingly bad.”

The venture, called Nursat, was a collaboration with Lucent Technologies—which itself had just split off from AT&T—as well as the U.S. government and Kazakh investors. Hopkins was hired to help bring the Internet and other telecom services to consumers and corporate networks in 25 cities using satellite technologies. “Over a span of four years, we built up Nursat to $10 million in annual revenue and then sold the business in 2000,” Hopkins says.

Though he enjoyed being part of a startup in a place with so much growth opportunity, Hopkins decided to look for a role with a larger, more stable corporation in a larger, more stable location—London. For the next several years, he held positions overseeing business units for major companies such as Marconi, Fujitsu, Nortel and Vodafone, among others.

“But then I decided I wanted to get involved with startups again,” Hopkins says.

He acquired with private equity a company called Redeem that focused on recycling trade-in mobile phones and other electronic devices, growing the business to $45 million in annual revenues before selling it to financial investors. And then he began looking for other new, small- to medium-sized technology-related businesses to help lead, fund and grow to scale. “I’ve been a serial entrepreneur and investor ever since,” he says.

Today, Hopkins is the COO for Novastone Media, a software business that provides secure mobile messaging for private banks and wealth management firms. “It’s like a secure form of WhatsApp, allowing users to talk to high-value customers in a safe way but also compliant with financial regulations,” Hopkins says. “Email phishing and spoofing is a big threat in this arena.”

In addition, he is heavily involved in tech startup incubation through the Alacrity Foundation in Wales, where he’s so far helped launch five startups with 10 more in the pipeline.

“Silicon Valley may get all the attention, but London has a very vibrant startup scene, especially in FinTech,” he says. “It’s a dynamic ecosystem and there are a lot of Georgia Tech alumni who are part of it.”

Two years ago, just before she “got out” of Georgia Tech, Jasmine Burton and her team of students won Tech’s InVenture Prize—the largest undergraduate invention competition in the United States—with their design of an inexpensive, portable toilet called SafiChoo. She’d been inspired to do something about the global sanitation crisis after learning as a freshman that nearly half of the world didn’t have access to a toilet, and that women and girls were disproportionately burdened. “Pubescent girls in the developing world frequently drop out of school because their schools lacked toilets,” Burton says. Such realities angered her as both a designer and a woman, and she decided to dedicate her life to solving such problems.

After graduation, Burton went to Africa to further development of the SafiChoo and to work on a number of water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure initiatives. She launched Wish for WASH, a social impact startup that seeks to bring innovation to sanitation. Through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, her team raised nearly $26,000 to support their efforts.