2022 Alumni Award recipients

Michael W. Lamach Sr. is a proven executive leader, director and former CEO with deep expertise in strategic planning, environmental, social and governance matters, operational excellence, fiduciary responsibility and capital allocation. He is the retired Executive Chair and Chief Executive Officer, Trane Technologies Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Ingersoll Rand.

He served as Executive Chair and CEO at Trane Technologies, a global climate innovator, for 12 years. He has an extensive background in manufacturing and industrial markets around the world, and has orchestrated and led multiple successful strategic transactions including mergers, acquisitions, divestitures and spin-offs.

As CEO, he transformed Trane Technologies from a diversified industrial manufacturing company, formerly Ingersoll Rand, to an industry-leading climate company with consistent top tier financial and ESG performance.

He was named one of Harvard Business Review’s top performing CEOs and listed by Forbes among America’s 100 Most Innovative Leaders. The company’s total shareholder return over his tenure as CEO was nearly 800 percent - more than twice the total shareholder return of the S&P 500.

He led the creation of the company’s purpose-driven sustainability strategy, its proprietary business operating system, and its widely recognized culture of engagement and inclusion.

Mike also was the first industrial company CEO to join Paradigm for Parity, committing to gender parity in corporate leadership by 2030. As a champion for diversity and inclusion, he also joined CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion and serves as a founding member of OneTen, a corporate coalition working to develop and hire one million Black Americans over the next 10 years.

He has served on the Board of Directors of PPG Industries since 2015. He is a former Chair of the National Association of Manufacturers, representing the American manufacturing industry at the federal level on public policy and workforce development matters.

He is active in the Charlotte, N.C., community and currently serves as chairperson of the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council, a coalition of CEOs serving the Charlotte community. He Co-Chairs the Charlotte Mayor’s Racial Equity Initiative and is a member of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business Board of Visitors.

In 1997, he moved into the Altair sales organization as an account manager and in 2001, he took on a sales management role and was soon recognized with numerous awards for his achievements. In 2012, he was promoted to Vice President – Americas, and from 2013 – 2017 he served as Executive Vice President – Global Sales, responsible for leading the global sales efforts for both the direct and indirect sales channels. Most recently, as Senior Vice President – Americas, he is responsible for overseeing sales, support, and operations for Altair’s business throughout the Americas.

Jason and his wife, Janelle, met while both were attending Michigan State. They will celebrate their 23rd wedding anniversary this year. Janelle is a 1995 graduate with a degree in materials and logistics management (Supply Chain Management). They have three sons, Nicholas, Andrew, and Jacob. Nicholas joined his parents as a Spartan and is currently studying engineering at MSU. Andrew and Jacob are in high school and middle school, respectively. The boys are active in youth sports. Jason attends and supports many of the events. The family has lived in Rochester, Michigan, since 1999. They are all huge MSU fans and have been football season ticket holders since 1999.

Jason has traveled the world both professionally and personally, and he has visited many countries throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. He also enjoys golfing, skiing, boating, and spending time with his family and friends at their cottage in northern Michigan, where he serves as secretary on their homeowners association’s Board of Directors.

The Applied Engineering Sciences Distinguished Alumni Award was established in 2004. Recipients must have a distinguished career, evidenced by significant accomplishments; possess high standards of integrity that positively reflect on the college and the university; be recognized for leadership in the community; and demonstrate support of the applied engineering sciences program (formerly Engineering Arts), the College of Engineering, and/or MSU. The winner is selected by the Applied Engineering Sciences alumni advisory board.

Now retired and living in Bowie, Maryland, Essex served as the Associate Administrator, Agricultural Research Service (ARS) for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and was Acting Administrator in 1993-94. ARS is the chief research agency for USDA.

He was also a senior policy analyst in Washington, D.C., in the Office of the Science Advisor to the President in 1980-81. He is the past recipient of the Presidential Meritorious Executive Award.

Essex was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1994 for his research on the engineering properties of fruits and vegetables and his work developing commercial instruments. His administrative leadership skills were also cited.

He was raised in Powhatan, Virginia, and received his bachelor’s degree with honors in agricultural engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He continued his education with a master’s degree at Pennsylvania State University and earned a Ph.D. at Michigan State University in 1963. He was a Fellow of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1973-74.

In the early years, he was interested in advancing instrumentation and was able to work in an ARC instrumentation research lab as a research agricultural engineer starting in 1965. His initial research focus was on drying cereal grains.

During many years of service, he advanced through various ARC leadership roles. Among them, he was responsible for ARC programs in Beltsville, Maryland, the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, and the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.

He is a Fellow of the American Society of Agricultural Engineers (ASAE), and a member of the Institute of Food Technologists and Tau Beta Pi Engineering Association. He was particularly active in the ASAE Food Engineering Division Research Committee, the ASAE Foundation Trustees, and the Board of Directors.

Established in 2004, the BAE Distinguished Alumni Award is given to an alumnus or alumna who has distinguished himself/herself as a leader in the biological/agricultural engineering profession through professional contributions, public service, and personal accomplishments. Alumni who have graduated at least ten years ago with an undergraduate and/or graduate degree are considered.

John (Jack) Wilkens is the chief executive officer for Woundchek Laboratories (WCL), a company that specializes in developing and commercializing diagnostics for the wound care field of medicine. WCL is the first and only company to launch point-of-care diagnostics to assist caregivers in identifying why a wound may not heal.

WCL was formerly part of Systagenix, where Jack was vice president of diagnostics. He led the carve out of Systagenix’ s diagnostic business to become an independent company in 2014 by arranging private capital funding.

Prior to Systagenix, he was CEO of RevDia, a privately funded company which developed and commercialized a point-of-care periodontal disease diagnostic. From 2000 to 2005, he worked for Inverness Medical (Alere). As CEO, he was responsible for operations in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Denmark, China and the U.S. He was managing director of Unipath in Bedford, UK, where he led the project to develop the world’s first digital pregnancy test and was responsible for its manufacture at a new plant in Shanghai, China.

As managing director of Inverness Medical’s Scotland facility, he was responsible for expanding operations to the world’s largest producer of glucose tests and led the program to develop point-of-care glucose meters aimed at Asian and developing country markets.

In 1997 he was part of the team that identified, sold and moved Polaroid’s Medical Imaging business to Sterling Diagnostics, Greenville, S.C. Prior to Sterling, he worked at Polaroid Corporation for 24 years.

Jack was active in the Employee Ownership field and helped design curriculum on the subject. He also joined teams sponsored by the U.S. State Department to teach and speak on capitalism, employee ownership, and entrepreneurship in Russia after the dissolution of the U.S.S.R.

He and his wife, Virginia, have two grown daughters and live in Westport, Massachusetts, and Coconut Grove, Florida.

Initiated in 2000, the Red Cedar Circle Award recognizes MSU chemical engineering and materials science alumni for their distinguished service to the profession and outstanding commitment to the community. The Red Cedar River, which passes through the center of the MSU campus, is a favorite gathering place. This award is named in recognition of the importance of this landmark to MSU alumni.

Bellandra B. Foster, Ph.D., P.E., F.ASCE, is the president and owner of BBFoster Consulting, PC. Her company provides professional services to public and private sector clients in the field of civil engineering, including facilities management, program management, quality control, site safety, owner’s representative and utility coordination.

She began her career as a structural engineer and to infrastructure and transportation engineering as a design engineer with the Oakland County Road Commission and positions within design, construction and utilities/permits with the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT).

She was later appointed the Director of Highways and Streets for the City of Atlanta, Georgia, Department of Public Works.

Bellandra and her companies have received awards and accolades for contributions to civil engineering and entrepreneurship, including the U.S. Department of Transportation Minority Business Enterprise of the Year, MDOT Disadvantaged Business Enterprise of the Year, National Society of Black Engineers Award for Outstanding Entrepreneur, Michigan Chronicle Woman of Excellence, Dwight D. Eisenhower Fellow, King-Chavez-Parks Fellow, Great Lakes Center for Truck and Transit Research Scholar, profiles in Black Enterprise and Essence publications, and initiation into the Order of the Engineer. She was named an American Society of Civil Engineers Fellow in 2021.

Her philanthropic and volunteer contributions include founding the Michigan State University Benefield-Foster Spartan Scholarship, the Help House non-profit, donating a home to Grace Centers of Hope (Pontiac, MI), serving two terms on the Michigan State University College of Civil Engineering Advisory Board, and the College of Engineering Alumni Advisory Board, and serving as a board member on the Michigan State University Broad Executive Forum Board.

Bellandra is an International Coach Federation (ICF) ACC Certified Coach, she is OSHA 30 certified and has earned her Construction Management Diploma from North Carolina State University.

She is a licensed professional engineer in Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, and South Carolina.

Recipients of the CEE Distinguished Alumni Award must be: graduates of the department; national leaders in their profession; contributors to the department, the college, or the university in some meaningful way; and community leaders whose actions reflect favorably on MSU. Nominations are made by faculty, alumni, and other supporters of the department. The department’s professional advisory board selects the winner.

Xian-He Sun is a University Distinguished Professor and the Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair of Computer Science and former chairman of the Department of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech).

After receiving his Ph.D. degree at MSU, he served as a post-doctoral researcher at the Ames National Laboratory, a staff scientist at ICASE, NASA Langley Research Center, an ASEE Fellow at the U.S. Navy Research Laboratories, and a tenured associate professor at Louisiana State University - Baton Rouge. He joined Illinois Tech in 1999.

His current research interests include parallel and distributed processing, memory and I/O systems, software systems for Big Data applications, and performance evaluation and optimization.

He is a prominent scholar in high performance computing (HPC), with a spread expertise in computer system software, architecture, and performance modeling. He has published more than 300 research articles, book chapters, and books in the field and has six U.S. patents. His memory-bounded (also called Sun-Ni's law) and memory access delay performance models are introduced in many modern textbooks and are considered critical in the performance evaluation of scalable computing systems.

His recent work, the Concurrent Average Memory Access Time (Concurrent-AMAT) model, is considered by many as an essential tool for solving big data problems. His algorithms and software systems have been adapted by widely used commercial and open-source software libraries. He is currently leading multiple federal funded multi-institutional large software development projects in HPC I/O system developments. His citation count is more than 24,000 based on Google scholar.

He was named an IEEE Fellow in 2012 for his contribution in scalable computing. He has been an editor of eight international professional journals and provided leadership for numerous international conferences and workshops. His recognitions include the IEEE CS Golden Core Award and the ACM SIG Governing Board Service Award.

Established in 2004, the CSE Distinguished Alumni Award recognizes an alumnus or alumna who has distinguished himself/herself as a leader in the computer science and engineering profession through professional contributions, public service, and personal accomplishments. Nominations are made by faculty, alumni, and other supporters of the department. The winner is selected by the department chairperson and advisory committee.

Charles Macon is a principal electronics engineer at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. He oversees the research and development of advanced technologies to improve the survivability of the nation’s fielded and next-generation warfighting forces. His responsibilities include identifying research gaps and analyzing new developments across a range of scientific areas to close any gaps.

Prior to his current role, he led numerous research projects to improve national computational electromagnetic, antenna modeling, and radio frequency measurement capabilities. He chaired the Electromagnetics Code Consortium, a cadre of researchers and software developers from across the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), NASA, academia, and industry, who worked to improve the modeling capabilities of the nation’s premier antenna and electromagnetic scattering codes for national defense applications.

He supported NASA’s “Return to Flight” program as an AFRL team member responsible for generating synthetic radar data for Space Shuttle Discovery on DoD supercomputers. The data was used to train the operators for the launch. This program culminated in the historic launch of Discovery after a 2.5-year hiatus of shuttle flights following the Columbia tragedy.

Before joining AFRL, he was a computational scientist for High Performance Technologies Inc.

He has published in various journals and conferences and is a Senior Member of IEEE.

Dr. Macon currently serves as a member of the MSU College of Engineering Alumni Association Board. He has provided leadership to the External Advisory Board for MSU’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He helped start the Enterprise Workforce Development Alliance (EWDA) program to improve the talent pipeline between AFRL and universities. He continues to support EWDA as a recruiter, mentor and liaison with the ECE department.

As a student at MSU, he participated in enrichment opportunities that helped shape his personal and professional development. They included the College’s hybrid electric vehicle design project and study abroad in Zimbabwe.

Established in 2004, this award commemorates the outstanding professional contributions of John D. Ryder, former dean of the College of Engineering and professor in the department. Nominations are made by alumni, faculty, and students. The department’s advisory committee selects the award winner in consultation with the chairperson. The award is given on the basis of contributions in furthering the mission of the department.

Marcia L. Lampela is an association professional with a technical background, who has advocated for women in STEM throughout her career.

She is a long-time supporter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), an organization she describes as “having a very strong influence in my life and career.” She gravitated to SWE in her junior year at MSU. By 1989, her attendance at the MSU SWE conference encouraged her to become a professional member – which culminated in her becoming a Fellow in 2008. Her other roles include serving on the Board of Directors and as treasurer.

SWE particularly became a meaningful part of her life when a career pivot allowed her to work with SWE and former President Betty Shanahan (whose MSU legacy includes the prestigious Claud R. Erickson Award and a 1978 electrical engineering degree).

From 2009-2016, Marcia served SWE in multiple operational and governance roles. She led the team responsible for programs, governance, and office operations, and she was critical to transitioning SWE’s growth and advancement on a national scale. Among Marcia’s efforts, she advocated the transfer of administrative responsibilities from volunteer leaders to staff, including a more formalized and standardized mentor program. As manager of governance, she helped SWE focus on volunteer and board leadership and the re-organization of titles and functions.

Marcia is currently enjoying Chicago as the site manager for the Discovery Partners Institute at the University of Illinois System. In her role, she manages DPI’s facilities at 200 S. Wacker Drive and serves as site leader for on-site events.

During her career, she also spent 18 years at BorgWarner Transmission Systems doing product engineering and program management of transmission clutches and systems.

Marcia has served on MSU’s Mechanical Engineering External Advisory Board since 2018 and continues to be active in the MSU Alumni Club of Metro Chicago.

Established in 2004, the ME Distinguished Alumni Award honors a graduate of MSU’s Department of Mechanical Engineering who has a minimum of 15 years of professional experience in an engineering or engineering-related field; provides leadership in engineering, engineering education, the related sciences, or technical management; contributes to the department, the college, or MSU; and is actively involved in the community. The winner is selected in consultation with the department’s advisory committee and board of visitors.

Isaac Perry is a teacher, community organizer, advocate for equality, musician, writer, and overall busybody. After having taught English and Mathematics classes for the first 15 years of his career, he successfully implemented a Computer Science education program at Lakeland High School in White Lake, Michigan, after having attended Code.org's professional development conference in Grand Rapids.

He now teaches five AP-level classes, including AP English Language and Composition, AP Computer Science Principles, and AP Computer Science A (Java). He is the adviser for the National Honor Society and the Diverse Students United Club.

His community leadership in Milford includes founding member of the Huron Valley Martin Luther King Jr. Day Committee, the Huron Valley Film Organization, and Village Fine Arts Association – activities he continues to support to the present.

Isaac attended MSU from 1997-2001. For two years, he worked for the Climatology Department where he entered climate data on Michigan and assisted with various projects. He graduated with high honors in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Mathematics. He obtained a teacher certificate through the College of Education to teach English and Math, with a special authorization to teach Career Technical Education courses like computer science.

He is a lifelong resident of Milford, Michigan. He and his wife, Andrea, have two children, Lincoln and Layla. Isaac has several family members with connections to MSU. His daughter, Layla, has been accepted to MSU as a high school senior and is excited at the opportunity to be a Spartan. Many of his extended family members are also MSU alumni.

Isaac Perry was nominated for the Green Apple Teaching Award by Ken Michalak, a senior in computer science.

Established in 2006 at the suggestion of College of Engineering Alumni Association board member Joseph M. Colucci (B.S. ’58 Mechanical Engineering), the Green Apple Teaching Award honors a K-12 teacher who has inspired students to study math, science, and engineering.