Claud R. Erickson Distinguished Alumni Award

2025 - David A. Pahl

Receiving this year’s Claud R. Erickson Distinguished Alumni Award was David A. Pahl, vice president and head of Investor Relations at Texas Instruments (TI), where he oversees communications with TI’s investor community. He is a 1986 electrical engineering graduate.

The Erickson Award is the highest alumni honor presented by the college. It recognizes professional accomplishment, volunteer service, and distinguished service to the college and the engineering profession.

He has more than 38 years of TI experience. He began his career as an application engineer in Dallas, Texas, where he worked on MCU hardware design, ASIC design and developed software. He also taught classes for digital signal processing. He then worked in sales and sales management in Silicon Valley for eight years. His clients included a long list of Silicon Valley startups as well as some of the company’s largest customers.

He returned to Dallas as a marketing manager and then moved to Houston as a product development manager. There he managed the development of more than a dozen embedded processors, with teams based in Houston, Dallas, Tokyo and Bangalore. Later, he served as business manager of several product lines in what is now TI’s Embedded Processing segment.

Along with his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from MSU, he holds a master's degree in business administration from the University of Texas at Austin.

He served as a committed member of the College of Engineering Alumni Board, including in the role as co-chair. He currently serves on the Dallas Symphony Executive Board of Directors. He has been named on the All-America Executive Team by Institutional Investor Magazine multiple times during his tenure.

He has been married to his wife Michele, a 1986 graduate of the MSU College of Engineering, for more than 40 years. He has three children and three grandchildren, all living in Dallas, Texas.

About the Award

Dean Lawrence Wayne Von Tersch established the Claud R. Erickson Distinguished Alumni Award in 1982. Claud Erickson, for whom the award was named, was the first recipient. Since then, it has been given annually to a College of Engineering graduate with a minimum of 15 years’ professional experience who has attained the highest level of professional accomplishment; provided distinguished and meritorious service to the College of Engineering and the engineering profession; and engaged in voluntary service at the local, state, national, and/or international level.

Nomination Form (.doc)

Past Recipients