The College has received a $50,000 grant from the Starr Foundation to support engineering students studying on exchanges and terms abroad.
Because of the tight schedules of their engineering courses, few of Union's engineering students have been able to take advantage of the College's eighteen programs of study abroad. One important goal of the new engineering curriculum being developed is to give each student the opportunity and the means to take advantage of the study abroad programs. The Starr Foundation grant will help provide the means.
Other recent gifts, grants, and bequests include:
A gift of $25,000 from Gerald Barandes '54, Dr. Martin Barandes '59, Robert Barandes '69, and friends of the Barandes family to establish the Max and Helen Barandes Endowed Scholarship.
More than $2,540,000 was received in distributions from trusts and estates. These include distributions from the estates of Margaret MacGregor Dyson, David Post, Claudia Umansky, Donald Dennis '78, the Franklyn Millham '32 Trust, and the Madhu Gokhale '27 Trust.
Four individuals made gifts totaling $20,846 for life income arrangements. Gifts from J. Dawson Van Eps '28 and William Bachtel '70 were for the pooled life income funds. Gifts from Gary Price '45 and William Wheeler '36 were for the charitable gift annuity program.
The strength and vigor of Union's eighty-three-year old Annual Fund lies in the involvement of more than 400 volunteers who extend the reach of the College and allow for more personal interaction with our graduates.
Our hats are off to all head agents, Terrace Council volunteers, associate agents, phonathon participants, and senior class gift committee members.
We'd like to recognize the following leadership volunteers who have joined our ranks:
1994 Blaine Langberg, Whitney Merrill, and Blaire Spritzer, co-head agents
1993 Julie Jamieson and Roxanne Schneider, co-head agents
1992 Jon Lennon, co-head agent
1986 Janice Thompson, co-head agent
1985 Tim Hesler and Suzanne Rice, co-head agents
1984 Carolyn Dulchinos, head agent
1983 David Smith, head agent
1982 Charles Freni and Ed Pletman, co-head agents
1979 Laura Connors, head agent
1976 Cindy Sipkin, Terrace Council regional vice chair
1975 Lance Jacobson, co-head agent
1971 Tom Davison, head agent
1970 Len Simon, Terrace Council regional chair
1969 John Bulova, Terrace Council regional vice chair
1967 John Temple, Terrace Council regional vice chair
1963 Cliff Mastrangelo, head agent
1958 Bob Howe, Terrace Council regional chair
1955 Vince Guerra, Terrace Council regional vice chair
1949 Sy Gluck and Pat McGivern, co-head agents
1942 Bill Birdsall and Ben Leland, co-head agents.
If you would like to help Union as an Annual Fund volunteer or just learn more about different ways to get involved, contact Deb Balliet, director of the AnnualFund. Her phone number is (518) 388-6174 and her e-mail address is ballietd @ alice.union.edu.
More than 1,000 alumni, parents, and friends around the country joined the Founders Day celebration on campus via satellite. More than ninety signed up for the Boston event, for example; Detroit, Denver, Raleigh/Durham, and Seattle each had thirty; Los Angeles had forty-five; and Washington, D.C., attracted seventy-five.
The Alumni Affairs Office and the College want to recognize the special group of volunteers who helped make our 200th birthday celebration such an overwhelming success.
Many people contributed in many ways to the success of the Bicentennial Celebration. One little-known group of important contributers are the “Bicentennial 200,” who helped underwrite the cost of the celebration.
These alumni and friends made special gifts above their capital commitments to the Bicentennial Campaign and their continuing, generous support of the Annual Fund. The College gratefully acknowledges the following “Bicentennial 200” members:
No one could ever accuse Peter Kissinger '66 of having a hard time making up his mind. Kissinger has been developing scientific machines for more than thirty years-all that's changed is the technology and the price tag.
As a precocious sixteen-year-old at New Dorp High School on Staten Island, Kissinger used $30, some borrowed equipment, and guidance from a father interested in electronics and a neighbor interested in organic chemistry to produce a simple polarograph for a science fair project.
Today, as a professor of chemistry at Purdue University and the founder and president of Bioanalytical Systems, Kissinger helps design some of the world's most advanced analytical chemistry instruments.
Founded in 1974, Bioanalytical Systems has 150 employees in Indiana, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Japan, and Europe.
“Being involved in a relatively small academic community, I had the opportunity to travel and develop a sense of the kinds of chemical measurement problems scientists were having,” Kissinger says, explaining why he formed Bioanalytical Systems. “Neuroscientists in particular needed better instruments.”
Kissinger knew what every good scientist knows-better instruments mean better science.
“What you find is that scientific progress and the development of new technology are linked,” Kissinger says. “Someone will make a new discovery, and that sparks the curiosity of another scientist who wants to take it one step further. But the next level requires new technology. So we invent the new technology, which leads to a new discovery, and then more technology is needed to bring the science one step further. It's all very cyclical.”
Bioanalytical Systems may sound like a distant, lab-laden land to the person who has never heard of instruments like chromatographs and mass spectrometers. Nevertheless, these devices affect us even as we walk down the aisles of a supermarket. Without analytical instruments, we wouldn't have package labels that tell us which vitamins and how much fat those blueberry muffins really have.
We also might not be able to detect small quantities (down to the level of one part per billion) of dangerous chemicals that can contaminate our water or understand how pesticides can affect the fruit we eat.
If a pharmaceutical company wants to market a new type of medication, Bioanalytical Systems can help figure out if a pill, capsule, or liquid form will best serve the therapeutic objective. And the company does contract work with the major pharmaceutical companies to support clinical trials.
Kissinger says that as the years pass, he is more interested in using his company's equipment to study the chemistry of disease-what he calls “chemical measurements to support health care research.” In recent years, Kissinger's company has developed instruments that will measure biochemical changes in diseases that range from Alzheimer's to manic-depression.
“Aging is something I get more interested in every year,” Kissinger says. “But it's also a major concern for the country and the health care world. We've been able to keep people alive
longer, so keeping the elderly healthy has become a new challenge. They're getting a well-deserved break from earning income, but the country is spending more on their health care every year. There's a lot of incentive for us to find solutions to the diseases affecting them.”
When Kissinger began his career as chemist during the 1960s, he and his colleagues at the University of North Carolina and the University of Kansas could figure out if a chemical was present in brain tissue but could not easily find the chemical's specific location.
Today, scientists can analyze neurotransmitters in living tissue or study a pin-prick's worth of blood from a premature infant. Not only that, says Kissinger, the machines that perform such tasks require personnel with less training, which in turn lowers the overall cost.
“Back in the 1950s and 1960s, science received a lot more positive attention,” he says. “People were excited about the Mercury astronauts and even the invention of the Teflon-coated pan.”
Then came the Vietnam War and the 1970s, when the public learned about environmental problems and associated them with chemical companies that were producing Napalm and Agent Orange. The industry has been trying to shake its poor image ever since.
“Scientists have to do a better job of educating the general public,” Kissinger insists. “If we don't, people don't truly understand the real problems we're facing, and that just results in bad legislation.”
Kissinger, who has published more than 175 scientific papers, delivered more than 300 lectures, and written several books, doesn't plan to stop spreading the word about the virtues of science and chemistry anytime soon.
“I'm still running around like a mad person, much like I did at Union,” he says with a laugh. “It's fun to direct research, teach, and sell products all in one day.”
A few days before the presidential election in 1992, when a victory for Bill Clinton and Al Gore seemed imminent, several Democrats realized that almost every appointed government employee in Washington, D.C., was a
Republican and resumes would soon flood in from Democrats who wanted jobs in the new administration.
That's when they decided to call Resumix, Inc., the nation's leader in computer-generated resume evaluation software systems. In less than three months, Resumix's artificial
intelligence based product helped process more than 30,000 resumes, many of them more than twelve pages long.
“It's a task that would have been physically impossible to accomplish without our product,” says Stephen Ciesinski '70, Resumix's chief executive officer.
If you're heading out on a job search in the near future, chances are getting better and better that Ciesinski's company will have something to say about your curriculum vitae. Since joining Resumix two years ago, Ciesinski has guided the company to a 150 percent increase in revenue, more than doubling the country's size and customer base and attaining consistent profits. Today, even the White House's Office of Productivity and Management uses Resumix.
Located in Santa Clara, Calif., Resumix produces software that scans resumes,
catalogs essential information, and automatically matches top candidates' qualifications with the positions that need to be filled. The company has sixty percent of the market share and clients that include Walt Disney, Motorola, Ocean Spray Cranberries, and Northern Telecom.
The story at Resumix echoes Ciesinski's earlier success at another technological company. Thirteen years ago he arrived at Octel Communications at a time when few people had ever heard of “voice-mail” and even fewer thought the product could play a useful part in their lives. When Ciesinski left Octel in 1993, it was a $350 million corporation, and voice mail had become a mainstay of business.
“I enjoy being with companies that create a need for new technology,” says Ciesinski, who also helped Applied Materials become the leading producer of the equipment that makes computer chips during the 1970s and 1980s.
“Everyone used to think communication had to be simultaneous and two-way, so at Octel we had to show people that they could talk to one another the same way they write letters,” he says. “I can leave you a message, you can get back to me by leaving me a message a few hours later, and then I can do the same. We're communicating and doing business even though we might not be talking to each other simultaneously.”
Now Ciesinski is teaching the world how technology can speed the hiring process. Last year, Resumix licensed its software to a British business consortium, which decided to take advantage of its citizens' love of gambling and set up a state-run lottery. Ciesinski and Resumix became part of the group, named Camelot, that was in charge of creating the lottery.
“We had to form a 500-person company in three months,” Ciesinski recalls. “It was fun for us because in that kind of a pressurized environment, where every day without a lottery you're going to be losing money, we can really thrive. That's what we do best.”
Ciesinski credits Union with preparing him for a career in managing high-tech companies. A double major in electrical engineering and modern languages, Ciesinski has the scientific background to understand
cutting-edge technology and the language skills that helps him explain the technology in a layperson's language.
As a result, Ciesinski feels just as comfortable in the lab with Resumix's thirty-five researchers as he does during what he refers to as his “missionary sells”-his meetings with other businesses when he has to convince them that they will soon need his technology to keep up with the corporate world. And his French and German have come in handy when he has done business abroad. “People really warm up to you when you attempt to speak to them in their own language,” he says.
Ciesinski has hardly limited his know-how to the corporate world. A Schenectady native and an honorable mention Little All-American in football at Union, Ciesinski was taught by a hard-working father to value education. Adam Ciesinski '41, a lawyer in Schenectady, sent all seven of his children to college, and now those children are passing on that legacy. The Ciesinskis have established a Union scholarship in their father's name to help students from Schenectady with an interest in both science and the liberal arts.
Ciesinski gives more than just financial support to education. He serves on Union's Board of Trustees, is on the cabinet at the California State University at San Luis Obispo, and is both a board member and a volunteer for Junior Achievement-an educational foundation – in Santa Clara County. Once a week, he teaches a class of graduating seniors at Yerba Buena High School about the world of business and technology.
“The press usually lambastes corporate and business types,” Ciesinski says, “but people have to realize that without business and commerce there wouldn't be a lot of jobs around.”
What does Ciesinski do when he isn't introducing the world to the latest technology? “I've got a
two-and-a-half-year-old and a five-year-old,” he says. “They keep me pretty busy.”
