2026 Alumni Award Recipients

Receiving the 2026 Claud R. Erickson Distinguished Alumni Award is David L. Lamp, who has more than four decades of technical, commercial, and operational experience in the refining and chemical industries. He is former president and chief executive officer of CVR Energy, Inc.

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

David is past executive chairman of CVR Partners, LP, a position he held since December 2017. He was chairman of its board of directors from January 2018 until March 2023. Prior to joining CVR Energy, he served as president and chief operating officer of Western Refining, Inc. from July 2016 to June 2017. Previously, he was president and chief executive officer and a director of Northern Tier Energy LP from 2013 until its merger with Western Refining in July 2016. He also held senior executive roles with HollyFrontier Corporation (now HF Sinclair Corporation). 

David retired in December 2025. 

In 2014, he created the $2 million David L. and Denise M. Lamp Endowed Chair in Chemical Engineering to support faculty research. He has also funded an endowed scholarship and an endowed fellowship for undergraduate and graduate students in chemical engineering.

He served on the board of directors of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers Association for 10 years and is a past chairman. 

David earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from MSU in 1980. He is from a family of Spartan graduates, including his father (Ph.D.) and three sisters, who earned bachelor’s degrees.

His wife, Denise, is a 1978 psychology graduate of Oakland University. The couple lives in Dallas, Texas.

Charles (Chuck) Kosmas is a seasoned automotive executive and the current director of quality for Stellantis North America Cross Car Line Platforms Electrified Body on Frame vehicles. With over three decades of engineering and leadership experience, he has built a career defined by technical excellence and a relentless commitment to quality. 

His journey began with an entrepreneurial spirit. At age 15, he grew a local lawn maintenance business into Kosmas Landscape Inc., which he successfully operated for 14 years to fund his education. After beginning his studies in chemistry at Albion College, he transitioned to Michigan State University to pursue a more "hands-on" path in Engineering.

Chuck’s career took off in 1990 as a systems engineer for GM’s Chevrolet Central Office (via EDS). Driven to be closer to the hardware, he joined Chrysler in 1994. Over the following years, he held pivotal roles across manufacturing and chassis engineering — notably championing the 5-link rear suspension for the Jeep Liberty and Nitro. His leadership was instrumental in the successful launch of the Chrysler Pacifica, the first FCA vehicle to meet aggressive new quality targets, leading to his 2018 promotion to senior manager of North American Propulsion Systems Quality.

Beyond the office, he is the current chair of the AES Alumni Board, where he mentors students on internship navigation and interviewing. A lifelong athlete, he has maintained a rigorous six-to-seven day weekly training schedule for more than 40 years and is an avid mountain biker.

He is the proud father of three daughters: Jacqueline (MSU BA 2020), Constance (GVSU BA 2024), and Stephanie (MSU 2028). He lives in Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan.

Pete A. Muñoz is senior engineer and practice lead at Biohabitats in the Cascadia Bioregion office in Portland, Oregon. Pete excels in the integrated design environment. He works around the globe helping to implement nature-based solutions that promote healthy communities, resilient infrastructure, and ecological complexity.

Pete is a licensed engineer in 21 states and has helped connect communities through appropriate ecological systems and dynamic water infrastructure. He has been involved in hundreds of projects involving wastewater treatment, stormwater management, rain harvesting, nutrient recovery, environmental remediation, and watershed restoration with a focus on balancing the nexus of water, energy, food, and ecology. He has over two decades of water infrastructure experience with a special emphasis on utilizing natural treatment components, such as constructed wetlands, sand filters, and solar aquatic systems. 

Water conservation, water reuse, and working landscapes (edible and regenerative) are guiding factors in his practice. Pete has supervised or participated in a wide range of sustainability and regenerative design projects, including SITES, LEED, One Planet Living, and Living Building Challenge (LBC) projects. He received the Living Building Hero Award from International Living Future Institute in 2017 and frequently collaborates with Living Future staff on trainings and technical sessions. He also advises projects on LBC integration and criteria.

He has taught courses and been a guest lecturer in higher education settings across the country.

He and his wife, Karen, have two daughters and live in Portland, Oregon.

Matthew Neurock is the Shell Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science and professor of chemistry at the University of Minnesota. Matt is a leading pioneer in the field of computational catalysis. He has made seminal advances in the development of ab initio methods and their application to understanding and designing catalytic and electrocatalytic reaction systems. 

He has over 300 publications and is the coauthor of two textbooks on computational catalysis. He is one of the founding leaders in establishing the field of computational catalysis having organized the initial government and international workshops that shaped the field. He was an editor for the Journal of Catalysis for more than 10 years and has been a leading consultant in catalysis to over 16 chemical companies. He has received numerous awards for his work. 

Matt truly enjoys teaching and guiding students, a love he inherited from the exceptional instructors he had at MSU. At Michigan State, he coupled his love for math, chemistry and engineering with his strong passion for sports. He was a member of the MSU men’s varsity gymnastics team from 1981-1986 and the team leader on pommel horse. He placed third on pommel horse at the 1983 and the 1984 men’s Big Ten Invitationals. 

Matt received his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Delaware. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Schuit Institute of Catalysis at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and subsequently as a visiting scholar at DuPont Central Research in their Corporate Catalysis Center. He joined the faculty of chemical engineering and chemistry at the University of Virginia in 1995. He moved to the University of Minnesota in 2014. 

He met his wife, Dory, in Delaware. They have been married for over 31 years and have two daughters, Nicole and Sabrina. They live in Bloomington, Minnesota.

Cindy Westerhof is a 36-year veteran of Consumers Energy. She joined the company’s energy management department in Kalamazoo, calling on large commercial and industrial customers after graduating from MSU. 

Later she became the local economic development coordinator and department superintendent, while completing her MBA from Western Michigan University.

Cindy moved into a new corporate department called corporate performance analysis and worked on cost saving projects for senior management before joining the human resources department and becoming the company’s staffing director in 1990.

She has held a variety of roles in human resources ranging from director of Human Resources at CMS Enterprises to executive director of Human Resources for CMS Energy. She is a familiar face at MSU, visiting and supporting College of Engineering events many times through the years.

She retired as the director of People Services & Talent Acquisition in 2016. Cindy has demonstrated sustained leadership in both corporate and community engagement. She has led United Way campaigns within her organization and community, and is an active member of the Society of Women Engineers. She has served on the Corporate Advisory Board for Institutional Diversity at Michigan Technological University and on the Advisory Board for the CoRe Engineering Experience at Michigan State University. 

In addition, Cindy completed two terms on the Michigan State University College of Engineering Alumni Board, including serving as Board Chair, and has contributed her expertise as a member of the external advisory board for the University of Michigan’s Center for Engineering Diversity and Outreach. 

During her tenure at Consumers Energy, she was known for improving diversity and the representation of women, minorities and veterans in all segments of the workforce. 

Cindy and her husband, Jim, live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Salil Prabhakar is the founder and CEO of OptiML Vision, Inc., where he is building Verifiable Live Identity (VLI) - a new identity architecture that makes impersonation fail by design. He previously co-founded Delta ID, a pioneer in mobile biometrics, where his team developed touchless iris recognition deployed on consumer devices. Delta ID was successfully acquired. He is an expert in the area of biometrics - fingerprints and iris scanning technology that are deployed at a global scale.

He is a founding architect for biometrics for India’s UIDAI / Aadhaar system, the world’s largest ID system with 1.4 billion people enrolled.

He is a Fellow of IEEE, IAPR and SPIE. He has co-authored 50+ publications (14,000+ Google Citations), two editions of the award-winning Handbook of Fingerprint Recognition, five book chapters, and eight edited proceedings. 

He has several patents granted and pending. He has served as an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI), SPIE Journal of Electronic Imaging, EURASIP Journal of Image and Video Processing, Elsevier Pattern Recognition, and Current Bioinformatics.

He was lead guest co-editor of April 2007 IEEE TPAMI Biometrics Special Issue. 

He has been a co-chair/program chair for 10+ IEEE, IAPR and SPIE conferences, was general co-chair of the 5th International Conference on Biometrics in 2012 in New Delhi. He was vice president - finance of IEEE Biometrics Council during 2010-2012. 

He received a Ph.D. in computer science and engineering from MSU in 2001. He earned a B.Tech degree in computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Varanasi.

He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area in California.

Innovation advisor Ray Owen is a founder of Farallon Research LLC, a founder-friendly accelerator platform for early-stage startups. Under this model, startups accelerate information technologies into effective, enterprise-scale capabilities and deployments. 

Ray has spent 25 years at the intersection of telecoms, cybersecurity innovation, and national security policy. He pioneered non-dilutive investment models for dual-use deep tech. He is co-founder of two enterprise tech accelerators and, he is a commercialization advisor to SBIR-funded research and development companies. 

He spent almost 22 years at General Dynamic as the strategy and business development vice president, where he was responsible for the chief technology office, mergers and acquisition, and channel partnerships. Early in his career, he served as a technical advisor for GE Aviation Systems.

Ray is an entrepreneurial advisor to BMNT in Palo Alta, California. He especially enjoys serving as an advisor for MSU’s Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, where he helps undergraduate and graduate students focus on building connections between startup teams and the Silicon Valley ecosystem. 

He has two degrees in electrical engineering: a bachelor’s degree from MSU and a master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. 

He lives in Los Gatos, California.

Keith Sultana is the retired senior vice president of global operations and integrated supply chain (GISC) for Trane Technologies.

Keith retired from Trane Technologies in July 2025, where he was an officer and member of the enterprise leadership team. Prior to that, he led operations and integrated supply chain for Ingersoll Rand. Ingersoll Rand’s family of brands includes Club Car®, Ingersoll Rand®, Thermo King® and Trane®.

Under his leadership, the global integrated supply chain team had responsibility for operational excellence; global sales, inventory and operations planning and materials management; global procurement; advanced manufacturing engineering and quality; and environmental, health and safety.

Keith began his Ingersoll Rand career in November 2008 as vice president, GISC for industrial technologies. His career progressed to include vice president, GISC for climate solutions, vice president, GISC for Trane North America and EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), and vice president, global procurement.

Prior to Ingersoll Rand, he was with General Electric for 17 years and held various operations and distribution leadership roles. Keith has served eight years on the College of Engineering alumni board, as an active member he demonstrated commitment to the college, its students and faculty. 

He has been married to Leslie Sultana for 29 years. They own a classic car restoration business and enjoy traveling and working on their other hobbies. They have three sons, Dominic, Ethan, and Jonathan and live in Davidson, North Carolina.

For as long as Julie Tafelski can recall, she aspired to be a Spartan. The dream was no small feat - financial boundaries could have thwarted her vision. Through multiple academic scholarships, work study and financial aid, Julie made her dream a reality. 

She was inducted into the MSU Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society her junior year and graduated from MSU with honors in Spring 1990, earning a bachelor’s degree in social science teaching, with a minor in biology. 

She taught biology at Northview High School in Sylvania, Ohio, and then biology and American government at Churchill High School in Livonia. She furthered her education at the University of Michigan Dearborn and has been teaching basic biology, AP Biology, Ecology, AP Environmental Science and Bioethics for 30 years. In 2023, she completed a three-year Master Science Teacher Fellowship with Wayne County RESA. 

She and her husband, Mike Tafelski, also a Spartan, have four children: Micala, Aidan, Justin, and Lucas. Micala graduated from MSU Engineering in 2020 and is employed as a senior analyst for Accenture in Chicago. Aidan, an applied engineering sciences senior, will graduate in May and has accepted a supply chain analyst position with Eli Lilley in Indianapolis. 

“As I ponder my imminent retirement from teaching, I realize just how fortunate I have been. I appreciate this recognition and feel humbled by this honor and how it came to be.” 

The Tafelskis live in Plymouth, Michigan. 

Julie Tafelski was nominated for the 2026 Green Apple Teaching Award by her son, Aidan Tafelski, a senior in Applied Engineering Sciences.