Board of Directors – Fiscal Year 2024 – 25

President – Cecilia (Ceal) D. Craig, PhD (SWE SCV)

Now a not-for profit board of director officer in several local organizations, Dr. Cecilia (Ceal) D. Craig is a retired technology executive with 35+ years of experience in high-tech industries — printed circuit boards, typewriters, personal & mini computers, disc drives, Ethernet switches.

She earned a BSME (Mechanical Engineering: The Ohio State University), MSE (Engineering: California State University at Fullerton), and a PhD in Education (Walden University). A SWE Fellow, she has been a Society of Women Engineers member for 50 years. Dr. Craig’s passion is supporting activities that inspire young women to pursue engineering, physics, and computer science careers.

Vice President – Kim Parnell, PhD (ASME)

Dr. Kim Parnell is Principal and Founder of Parnell Expert Consulting (PEC), an engineering consulting firm focusing on providing litigation support as an Expert Witness and engineering support for early stage medical device and technology companies. He is an ASME Fellow, an IEEE Life Senior Member, and a Member of SAE and ASM. Kim is a Board Member for IEEE-CNSV (Consultants’ Network of Silicon Valley) and has been an active leader for the IEEE-SCV Section (largest in the World) (Past-Chair IEEE-SCV, Past-Chair IEEE-CNSV) and for ASME-SCVS.

He has over 35 years of consulting experience including design, regulatory, and failure/reliability issues of a variety of consumer products, medical devices, and industrial equipment covering a wide range of equipment and systems.

Kim was a full-time Adjunct Faculty at Santa Clara University in Mechanical Engineering from 2010-2012 and a Visiting Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, and is a coach and mentor for the innovative Stanford Biodesign program and a member of the Board of Directors for CSIX Connect.

Dr. Parnell is a Stanford PhD and MSME in Mechanical Engineering, holds a BES from Georgia Tech, and is also a Registered Professional Mechanical Engineer in California.

Kim plans to focus on expanding the Technical & Engineering Societies to become active Members of SVEC.

Treasurer – Elise Engelhardt (ASME)

Elise’s experience includes consulting in manufacturing engineering support at bio-device and startup companies. She is passionate about providing outreach activities and building communities of local professional technical societies and nonprofit organizations. As a volunteer, she is well known in the Silicon Valley community. She has put on a booth at every Bay Area Maker Faire since 2006.

She is a previous chair of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Silicon Valley Section as well as past President of the Silicon Valley Engineering Council.  In addition she is the current president of the local Coyote Grange organization.

Elise earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering from San Jose State University.

Secretary – Richard Schaefer (ASME)

My career focus is the market adoption of new technology solutions. I have performed technical and business roles across a variety of enterprise markets partnering with startups to Fortune 100 companies for the success of market impacting products.

I have technical experience ranging across the industry acceptance of multiprocessors, Java, mobile application security, IoT, AI and privacy. Past companies have included Sun Microsystems, Good Technology and Blackberry. Currently, I lead Product and R&D at PrivacyCode.ai where we apply AI to privacy.

In joining the board of SVEC I hope to use my partnership skills to engage potential new member companies. I am a strong believer in acknowledging the achievements of technical leaders through the Hall of Fame. Also, I am particularly interested in introducing engineering to students and encouraging their endeavors.

He holds BSE and MSE degrees in Computer Science from Princeton University.

 

Director – Glenn Friedman (IEEE)

Glenn Friedman is Principal Technologist for GXTec Consulting where he’s created strategies for novel device manufacturing, consulted on materials, processing, foundry relationships, and startup operations. He is an Adjunct Professor SJSU.

Current and past Chair of IEEE SFBA Nanotechnology Council, Friedman also served as Chair and Vice Chair of IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section in 2019, 2018.
Friedman’s held engineering and management positions in both silicon and compound semiconductor wafer fabs and fabless services foundries.

Friedman’s R&D portfolio includes phase change memories, interlevel dielectrics, multilevel interconnects, high-temperature superconducting thin films.

He’s reviewed 100 SBIR/STTR proposals for NSF for: manufacturing, semiconductors, memory devices, photovoltaics, batteries, MEMS, optical & electronic materials, hi-tech medical, biomedical nanotechnology, and nano-instrumentation.

Friedman earned an MS Electrical Engineering – Applied Physics from UC San Diego and an MS and BS in Physics from North Carolina State University

Director – Yanika Schneider, PhD (SPE)

Dr. Yanika Schneider received her Ph.D. from University of California at Santa Barbara in materials chemistry and did a post-doc at UC Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Since 2013, she has worked at Eurofins EAG where she specializes in the characterization of diverse materials using infrared and x-ray fluorescence spectroscopies. She also works as a project manager leading complex multi-technique investigations involving polymer degradation, contamination and deformulations.

In 2019, Dr. Schneider was invited to develop curricula related to polymer science at San Jose State University. She currently teaches two undergraduate courses (Polymers and Polymer Composites) and a master’s course (Research Methods). Dr. Schneider leads a research group focused on structure/function relationships in polymeric materials, including renewable and biodegradable polymers, anti-microbials and innovations in materials recycling.

Director – Michael Wright (IEEE)

Michael has been affiliated with SVEC since the early 1990s after attending Engineers Week Banquet at the Fairmont Hotel downtown San Jose. He began as a volunteer on the banquet committee and over time served in most leadership positions for the group.

Michael graduated from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1985 with a degree in Electronics Engineering and is a registered electrical engineer (PE). After spending two years at Edwards AFB working on flight test instrumentation he moved to Bay Area in 1987 for a position at NASA Ames Research Center. At NASA he has focused on wind tunnel instrumentation involving strain gage balances, specify measurement devices and sensors, prepare calibration plans, wiring diagrams, and write operating and troubleshooting procedures. Michael is also affiliated with Ames Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team, Communications (DARTCOM), and for many years involved with the Ames Amateur Radio Club.

He has been a member of IEEE since the early 1980s (joined as a student member) and joined the Instrument Society of America (ISA) in 1987 and served in all positions in this local section.

 

Director – Dr. KRS Murthy

Dr. KRS Murthy has previously served SVEC as President, Vice President, Secretary, Banquet Chair and has also received a Distinguished Service Award.

Dr. Murthy has chaired and delivered keynotes in a record number of conferences in diverse disciplines. He was a Child Prodigy Conference Chair and Keynote speaker in his teen years and has shared the stage as a speaker with Nobel Laureates, Presidents, Prime Ministers, $BB CEOs, literary giants, world-famous religious leaders and many global Who’s Who.

Dr. Murthy has held Board of Directors positions in six IEEE Societies and Standards Boards and has been an award-winning professor in six academic departments concurrently.

He has held many corporate level executive positions and served as Chairman of the Board for multiple high technology companies. He has led six black-owned companies and an African American high tech company grow from $50M revenue to $600M in 12 months, which was listed in Black Enterprise Magazine’s “BE 100” list as the Fastest Growth and Largest black company.

Dr. Murthy earned a BS and MS degree from Bangalore University and an M.Tech and PhD from the University of Mysore.

Past-President – Liana Ye (ACM)

Liana has worked as a computer engineer for more than 30 years and has researched, specified, designed, developed and maintained various software systems including: online ticketing database, class registration system, distributed railroad passenger ticketing system, machine aided translation system and internationalized domain name registrar.

She has worked in the agriculture, transportation and publishing fields as an Accountant, Technician, Machinist, Assistant Editor and System Analyst. She has taught courses that included Chinese as second language, English as second language, and translator training.

Her technical specialties are: Computational linguistics, Machine aided translation (English-Chinese) and Context management.

Liana earned her BA in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley