2021 Alumni Award recipients

Milligan is executive director and chief executive officer of ABET, a nonprofit organization that accredits more than 4,300 college and university programs in 41 countries in the disciplines of applied and natural science, computing, engineering, and engineering technology. Each year, these programs prepare over 175,000 students to enter the global workforce.

Milligan leads a full-time staff headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, that supports the operations of more than 2,000 volunteer experts from 35 professional and technical societies. He is responsible for executing ABET’s strategic vision, administration and global operations and reports directly to the president, ABET Board of Directors. Milligan serves on several international advisory boards and executive committees focused on STEM education.

Prior to joining ABET, Milligan held various leadership positions in government and academia. Milligan was a systems director at the Aerospace Corporation, leading a team at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center developing the next generation of environmental satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

He also served 24 years as a career U.S. Air Force officer working in the areas of operations, space communications, international research and development, education and technology acquisition. He served six years as an associate professor and deputy department head in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the USAF Academy, Colorado. He finished his Air Force career as the deputy commander of the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development in London, United Kingdom.

From 1979-83, Milligan attended Michigan State University and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1983. While at MSU, he participated in the International Studies Abroad program at the University of London, United Kingdom, and was a passionate MSU Ice Hockey fan.

His academic achievements are:

• Ph.D., Electrical Engineering (Computer Architecture), University of Texas at Austin, 1996 Dissertation: “A Memory Architecture to Support Real-Time Computer Systems”
• M.S., Electrical Engineering (Digital Design), University of Massachusetts at Lowell, 1989
• M.B.A., Western New England University, 1987
• B.S., Electrical Engineering, Michigan State University, 1983
• Air War College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, 2004
• Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, 1997
• Squadron Officer School, Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama, 1988

Milligan is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and a member of both the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society and IEEE Eta Kappa Nu Electrical Engineering Honor Society. He is a registered Professional Engineer (PE) in Colorado and Maryland and a Certified Association Executive (CAE). Milligan is passionate about supporting his local community through volunteer activities. Over the past few years, he led the construction of a native plant boardwalk nature path and raised bed gardens for two elementary schools supporting their environmental science programs, landscaped the new Gold Star Family Memorial in Severna Park, Maryland, which recognizes four fallen service members, and helped plant numerous trees for Bluewater Baltimore.

He enjoys international travel, skiing, cycling, woodworking, and any project that improves natural habitats for native plants and animals.

He and his wife, Alison, a naturalist and retired electrical engineer, live in Severna Park, Maryland. They have three sons: Matthew, Kyle, and Austin.

She graduated with an Applied Engineering Sciences degree in 1993 and has been supporting and/or recruiting Spartan Engineers for jobs in industry ever since. First, she was a recruiter at Detroit Diesel (1994-1999) and since 2000, she has been a recruiter for Ford Motor Company Purchasing. She particularly focuses on AES students in the supply chain cognate.

Aikens has been Ford’s full frame buyer (chassis) since December 2014.She helps AES students get internships and jobs in several areas, including manufacturing, supply technical assistance, and global data and analytics.

Aikens has been a member of the AES Alumni Board since 2002 and has chaired the board for the past two years. She is a continuous source of mentoring to undergraduate and graduate students and served as a capstone judge from 2018 through 2020.She and her husband, Scott, who earned a 1992 bachelor’s degree in biology at MSU, have twin,15-year-old daughters and live in South Lyon, Michigan.

Aikens enjoys reading, golf, walking with her dogs and her husband, and being involved with her daughters’ high school golf and swimming activities.

“Our family has many Spartans and are huge sports fans,” she said. “I attended my first football game when I was in high school. My father surprised us with a visit from Sparty at our wedding! Both my husband and I went to the 2014 Rose Bowl with the alumni tour. Our twin daughters hope to be future Spartans, too!”

Forbush received his master’s degree from MSU in agricultural engineering in 1989. While at MSU, he studied the effects of ventilation on the process quality of chip potatoes out of storage under the watchful eyes of the late Burt Cargill and Roger Brook.

Since graduation, he has applied his knowledge and experiences to the commercial potato storage industry at Techmark, Inc. A popular speaker, his list of presentations and webinars in 2021 alone includes the World Potato Congress, Manitoba Potato Growers, Michigan Potato Growers and Mid Atlantic Fruit and Vegetable Conference.

He is the current president of the Michigan Section of The American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers.

Forbush said he loves working for produce farmers in Michigan and around the world. “These men and women invest themselves and their finances in producing healthy fruits and vegetables for our consumption.”

He is an active member of the Williamston Free Methodist Church, where he serves as a Children’s Sunday School Teacher and member of the nominations committee.

He is also an avid outdoorsman, who loves to hunt and fish for about anything that runs, flies or swims. He and his family enjoy many meals from these harvests.

He and his wife, Kristen, live in Laingsburg, Michigan. They have three children, Tyler, Taylor, and Morgan, and four grandchildren.

Hockstra grew up in Rockford, Michigan, and was the first member of his family to go to college. He attended MSU from 1976 to 1980, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering. He started working for Dow Chemical in the fall of 1980, working in research and development in several different areas.

In 1983, he moved to pharmaceuticals manufacturing and in early 1985 moved to Italy to design, build, and run a new pharmaceutical plant on the Garessio site. He returned to Michigan in 1989 working in the Pharmaceutical Tech Center. He moved to Global Process Control in 1991 as the project manager of the Dow Operator Work Station Project.

In 1993, he moved to Terneuzen, The Netherlands, where he worked in the Styron/Tyril plant consolidating the control rooms with the operator station system. The next year he moved to LHC 1 as the cracker production leader.

In 1996 he moved to Texas as the LHC Technology Leader. In 2000 he assumed the additional responsibility of LHC R&D director. In 2002, he was named manufacturing director of engineering plastics, and in 2004 he assumed the role of manufacturing director for engineering polymers (Engineering Plastics plus Polystyrene).

In 2007, he was named vice president and site director - Texas Operations in Freeport. Hockstra was named vice president of M&E for Advanced Materials in September 2011, relocating to Philadelphia. In early 2014, he was named vice president, Ethyleye and Propylene Operations and returned to Texas. He held that role until he retired in the spring of 2017, having spent almost four decades with the company.

Through the years, Hockstra spent eight years providing leadership to MSU through the Engineering and Chemical Engineering Alumni Boards. He is a member of the MSU Alumni Association.

Other activities included being an executive sponsor for several professional associations and as site leaders in Texas and Philadelphia. He also worked with local economic development councils, Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, various church activities, and Brazosport College Foundation finance director.

His memberships through the years include the Texas Chemical Manufacturers Association, Texas Taxpayers and Research Association (TTARA), and AiCHE. He attended the executive MBA program at Indiana University.

Hockstra enjoys saltwater fishing, both inshore and offshore, hunting, cycling and golf.

He and his wife, Ruth, share a passion for travel. They have two children, Nicholas and Cristina and two grandchildren.

He oversees all operations for Christman Constructors, Inc., The Christman Company’s self-perform affiliate. For more than 125 years, Christman specialized in concrete and carpentry trades. Under Peters’ watch, the expertise has grown to include demolition, earthwork projects connected with excavation and embankment operations, utilities, and mass timber construction.

A graduate of Lansing Everett High School, Peters began at the MSU College of Engineering in 1989 and was a member of the Chi Epsilon National Civil Engineering Society. One day after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1992, he was commissioned into the Regular U.S. Army as a Distinguished Military Graduate of the Spartan Army ROTC Battalion, Engineers, second lieutenant. He was assigned to the Sixth Engineer Battalion, Sixth Infantry Division (L) in Fort Wainwright, Alaska.

He served as platoon leader and company executive officer in the 47th Engineer Company. His unit’s mission was to provide mobility, counter-mobility and survivability direct support to the infantry maneuver elements in the division. He also led two separate U.S. Army construction deployments to the central Pacific islands of Kwajalein Atoll, Johnston Atoll and Tarawa. During his service, he completed the U.S. Army Airborne School, the Scout Platoon Leaders Course, and the Engineer Officer Basic Course.

After serving with the U.S. Army, he worked for a national concrete construction services firm and earned a master’s degree in project management from Northwestern University’s Department of Civil Engineering.

Peters joined Christman in 2001 as a project manager, was promoted to director of concrete operations in 2007, to vice president in 2009, to executive vice president in 2014. He was promoted to president of Christman Constructors, Inc., in 2016. Notably, he is a Christman Way Cornerstone Award Recipient, the highest internal recognition presented to one individual each year for effort, attitude and achievement in representing the company’s core values. Peters is also a member of Christman Enterprises and Christman Constructors, Inc., board of directors.

A superior technical background, project management skills, and focus on data-driven business solutions have contributed to the success of the projects under his leadership. To address an industrywide challenge, Peters pioneered the development of CopperWorksSM, a patent-pending human resource leveling iOS application which earned the Associated General Contractors of America 2020 Innovation Award. Since his promotion to president of Christman Constructors, Inc., annual revenues have doubled to nearly $100 million.

Peters spearheaded and contributed to the completion of multimillion-dollar projects for several of the country’s premier companies, nonprofits, universities, and municipalities, including work on behalf of Pfizer, Accident Fund Insurance Company of America, the University of Michigan, Blue Cross Blue Shield, McCormick Place in Chicago, the Detroit Metropolitan Airport Midfield Terminal, and hundreds of projects at Michigan State University, including the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), and the STEM Teaching and Learning Facility, which is the first facility in Michigan built with mass timber for its load-bearing structure.

Recent career highlights include the completion of the Detroit Pistons Performance Center in Detroit, which was selected by the Construction Association of Michigan as the 2020 Project of the Year; Apex Clean Energy in Charlottesville, Virginia, the state’s largest mass timber structure; and, Pfizer’s B541 Warehouse Expansion project in Kalamazoo that received the Golden Trowel Award in 2017 for achieving the highest industry standards in superflat concrete floor placement, including the setting of two different world records for Fmin longitudinal flatness and Fmin transverse flatness.

Peters is a licensed professional engineer in the State of Michigan and Commonwealth of Virginia. His professional interest and his most significant experiences are in the construction of massive concrete structures primarily for nuclear particle shielding, and massive foundations that require unique construction and engineering practices including concrete formwork design and mitigation of the effect of thermal stresses caused by the heat of hydration during the concrete curing process.

He is a current voting member of the American Concrete Institute’s Concrete Formwork 347 and Mixing and Transporting 304, and sits as an associate member of Mass Concrete 207. He is also a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Society of American Military Engineers, and the American Society of Concrete Contractors.

He has two children. His son, Douglas J. Peters Jr., M.D., holds two MSU bachelor’s degrees, biochemistry and molecular biology (with honors), and economics, and graduated in May 2021 from MSU’s College of Human Medicine. He is now in his first year of an Internal Medicine residency at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. His daughter, Kendall J. Peters, is a Grand Valley State University graduate with a bachelor’s degree in economics and minor in applied statistics (Cum laude).

Flynn earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at MSU in 1985, followed by a master’s degree in 1986 and Ph.D. in 1990, both in computer science at MSU.

During his years at MSU, he lived in six different residence halls as well as three different off-campus apartment complexes - since he was enrolled in classes or conducting research at MSU continuously from September 1981 through March 1990. He took one three-month break for an internship in 1987.

He started research work at MSU in 1984 in the biomedical signal processing laboratory operated by Marvin Siegel and Roland Zapp in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Systems Science. From 1986 to 1990, he worked in the PRIP Lab and completed his dissertation under the direction of University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Anil Jain.

At the start of graduate school, he met Laurie Starr (MS '86) in an advanced matrix theory class. After an MSU courtship involving many dates at El Azteco, they married in 1988.

Flynn held faculty positions at Notre Dame (1990-1991, 2001-present), Washington State University (1991-1998), and Ohio State University (1998-2001). In 2007-2008, he held a visiting scientist appointment at the National Institute of Standards and Technology during a sabbatical leave.

In 2016-2017, Flynn served as Provost Fellow and Director of Notre Dame California, with oversight for all of Notre Dame's research and educational activities in the state. During that year, he designed and led the pilot offering of the Silicon Valley Semester, which enrolls Notre Dame students in a semester of full-time coursework and part-time internship work at a variety of Bay Area companies.

His research interests include computer vision, biometrics, and image processing. He has advised or co-advised 21 Ph.D. dissertations, 10 postdoctoral fellows, 21 master’s theses and two bachelor’s theses. His research has produced two patents and one commercial technology license. He has been involved in several entrepreneurial ventures including several start-up companies, one of which won Notre Dame's McCloskey Business Plan competition in 2013.

He is an IEEE Fellow, an IAPR Fellow, and an ACM Distinguished Scientist. He was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Biometrics Compendium from 2016-2017 and is a past associate editor-in-chief of IEEE Trans. on PAMI, and a past associate editor of IEEE TIFS, IEEE TIP, IEEE TPAMI, Pattern Recognition, and Pattern Recognition Letters.

He has received outstanding teaching awards from Washington State University and the University of Notre Dame, and Meritorious Service, Golden Core, Certificate of Achievement, and Technical Achievement awards from the IEEE Computer Society.

When the current health crisis allows, Flynn plays bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, and baritone saxophone in various concert bands in the South Bend area. He has also arranged several compositions for Notre Dame's clarinet choir.

Flynn and his wife have two grown children: Daniel is an Indiana University alumnus and a software developer living in Houston with his wife Leslie, and Helen is a Purdue alumna and a research scientist at Eli Lilly. The couple volunteered extensively with their children's school band programs.

Today, they live just north of the Notre Dame campus and are raising their second dog and their sixth cat.

Fishbeck was also the on-site engineer who oversaw the installation and certification of the new system, which included participation on several test flights. The airplane has been on permanent display at the Air Force museum in Dayton, Ohio, since 1998.

After returning to Michigan State to earn an MBA degree in 1970 he embarked on a 30-year career with Analog Devices, a leading global high-performance semiconductor company that creates products that sense, measure, power, connect and interpret. The company’s 2020 revenues totaled $5.6 billion, compared to $16 million for the year he joined the company.

Fishbeck began his Analog Devices career as a product marketing engineer, and subsequently held a series of marketing management positions prior to becoming director of investor relations, reporting to the CEO. He retired in 2002.

He learned to fly in the MSU flying club and has logged over 3,000 flying hours. He has owned a twin-engine airplane for 23 years. Other activities include being an electronics hobbyist, a computer enthusiast and the treasurer on the board of directors of their homeowners association.

He and Lee Morgan have been together for over 25 years and have been living on Martha’s Vineyard Island in Massachusetts for 19 years. They have established two professorships at Michigan State, one for Electrical and Computer Engineering and one for the Broad Business College.

“My career wouldn’t have been possible without the education I received at Michigan State,” he said. “I’m very grateful to have had that opportunity and will continue supporting the university so that others can have the same opportunity.”

He earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at MSU in 1975, he obtained his Ph.D. at Oxford University in 1978.

He returned to Michigan State as an assistant professor in 1979 and was promoted to associate professor in 1984, having been principal investigator of three National Science Foundation grants and co-PI of two more. He left MSU in 1985 to start his own international heat transfer engineering consulting company (but maintained his lab in operation until about 1990 as an adjunct).

In 1998 he returned to academics joining the EPFL as the chair in Heat and Mass Transfer. His research and engineering work have encompassed numerous facets of macro- and microscale two-phase heat transfer and fluid mechanics and development of new technologies, most recently micro-cooling systems for electronics.

He is the current co-owner and technical director of JJ Cooling Innovation Sàrl in Lausanne and Global Cooling Technology Group LLC in Phoenix.

He is the author of five books and is editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Two-Phase Heat Transfer and Flow (16 volumes).

He received the 2017 Nusselt-Reynolds Prize, the 2019 IEEE ITHERM Award and the 2019 ASME InterPack Medal, the ASME Heat Transfer Division's Journal of Heat Transfer Best Paper Award in 1998, the United Kingdom’s Institute of Refrigeration J.E. Hall Gold Medal in 2008, the 2010 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, among others.

About 20 of his former students and post-doctoral assistants are now professors in Europe, Brazil and the United States.

Hartley worked in the Biomechanics Lab for Dr. Robert Soutas-Little and his wife, Patricia. It was through the lab that she met her husband, Thomas Hartley, Jr. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering at MSU and was a member of the MSU baseball team from 1995-1999.

After graduation, she worked for Chrysler in Auburn Hills, Michigan, from 1999-2008, focusing on automotive safety. Hartley released restraint systems and conducted vehicle crash testing. From 1999-2001, she attended Oakland University and earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

From 2000-2002, Hartley was the cheerleading coach at Troy High School. It was during this time she realized her passion for working with high school students. In 2004, she earned a teaching certification in physics and mathematics from Oakland University as part of a post-bachelor’s program. She completed a master’s degree in education in 2009 from Oakland University.

Hartley started teaching physics and math at Walled Lake Central High School in 2008. In 2016, her mentor, Judy Davis retired. Since that time, Hartley has solely taught physics, including calculus-based AP Physics.

Hartley’s engineering background has allowed her to introduce real world application into the classroom and encourage students to look beyond the curriculum to see value in what they are learning.

She subscribes to “modeling” teaching methods, encouraging students to be scientists. In her honors physics class, students develop physics equations through observation and experimentation. Her goal is for students to be critical thinkers who can break down and work through difficult problems.

“I have often said that being able to struggle through a difficult problem is proof of learning ability. We all fail at times, by my goal for my students is to get back up, persevere, and learn from mistakes that were made. This is true in both academics and in life.

“It is this philosophy that has gotten me through the past year of teaching during a pandemic. This has been a year that none of us will ever forget. My colleagues and I have had to think outside the box and try new things. Some things have worked, and some haven’t. But through this process, we have found ways to move forward. Reaching beyond one’s comfort zone and taking risks is where real growth stems from. I am thankful for what I have gained throughout this process. I have been introduced to new technology, new teaching methods, and most importantly I have found new ways to connect and reach students.

”She and her husband, Tom, are avid Spartan fans. They have been married 20 years and have three children and a recently adopted kitten. Her oldest daughter, Cara, is a junior at West Bloomfield High School. She enjoys art, volleyball, and softball. Their son, Craig, is an 8th grader at West Bloomfield Middle School, who enjoys hockey, snowboarding, skateboarding, and gaming. Their youngest daughter, Kelsey is a 7th grader at West Bloomfield Middle School. She enjoys music, dance, and volleyball.