College of Engineering at NC State recognizes outstanding alumni

The College of Engineering at North Carolina State University has named the Distinguished Engineering Alumnus award winners for 2010. The recipients are Carlos D. Gutierrez, president and CEO of United Resource Recovery Corporation; Dr. Ross W. Lampe Jr., president of SMD Software, Inc.; and Stuart Edward White, chairman of the board of Field2Base, Inc.

The awards were presented by Dr. Louis A. Martin-Vega, dean of the College of Engineering, at a banquet held Jan. 27 at the Park Alumni Center on NC State’s Centennial Campus. The award honors alumni whose accomplishments further their field and reflect favorably on the university.

Gutierrez graduated from NC State in 1960 with a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and went to work at Union Carbide in Bound Brook, NJ. In 1962 he moved to Spartanburg, SC, to work for Milliken Chemicals in the field of specialty chemical manufacturing. In 1966 he was promoted to director of development. Gutierrez left Milliken in 1974 and founded Unisphere Chemicals, a company that specialized in the development and manufacturing of surfactants for the textile and cosmetic industries. In 1986 Unisphere was sold to Specialty Industrial Products. Gutierrez also co-founded G&H Industries, which managed multiple plants for DuPont.

In 1992, Gutierrez founded United Resource Recovery Corporation (URRC) in order to refine silver and recover PET from X-ray films. A year later URRC was awarded the first of many US patents, and since 1996 Gutierrez has guided the recycling of PET in the bottle-to-bottle program. He has successfully promoted the use of URRC technology to build production facilities in countries across the globe. In 2008 URRC formed a joint venture with the Coca-Cola Company to build the largest bottle-to-bottle recycling plant in the world. The $50 million plant has a capacity of 100 million pounds per year.

Gutierrez is a generous supporter of NC State and the College of Engineering, serving on the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Alumni Advisory Board and the NC State Engineering Foundation Board of Directors and creating, with his wife, the Carlos D. and Barbara Hoyle Gutierrez Endowed Scholarship. He is also a member of the Wallace Carl Riddick Lifetime Giving Society.

Lampe received his bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering from NC State in 1977 and went on to receive his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983. He began his career in the defense industry working with RCA’s Missile and Surface Radar Division and eventually headed up the technical effort to construct a large ground-based air defense system in Taiwan. In 1988 Lampe left RCA to serve as a consultant in the defense industry.

Lampe joined the cellular telephone industry in 1990 and advanced to become Ericsson’s manager of RF technology for North America. In that capacity, he served as the architect for the RF chipset, secured foundry relationships, created an RFIC group and managed its designers.  Lampe’s group performed advance design work that led to dramatic cost reductions and quality improvements in cell phones. In 1998, Lampe started SMD Software, Inc., which has become a successful software business serving the commercial real estate industry.

Lampe and his wife, Ming-Mei, have continued the Lampe family’s tradition of philanthropy to NC State, supporting the J. Harold Lampe Engineering Excellence Fund and creating, with Ross Lampe’s father and brothers, the Ross W. Lampe Family Distinguished Professorship in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Their most recent gift established a distinguished professorship in the Joint NC State-UNC Department of Biomedical Engineering. Ross Lampe also serves on the Board of Directors of the NC State Engineering Foundation.

White earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering operations from NC State in 1978. After working for Westinghouse Electric Corporation for several years, he founded Utility Translation Systems, Inc. (UTS), a successful remote-meter reading software company. In 1996, he sold UTS to Itron, Inc., a leading supplier of energy information and communications solutions to the utility industry. He served as Itron’s chairman of the board until retiring in 2003 and has been a frequent speaker on metering and deregulation of the power supply industry at industry conferences throughout the world.

White is now chairman of the board of Field2Base, Inc., a Morrisville based technology company that uses tablet PCs, wireless communications and Field2Base software to support the mobile work force for a variety of industries including electric, gas and water utilities. He is also the founder of White Ventures LLC, a private equity and commercial real estate development company. White serves as chairman of the board for GRIDiant, Inc. and on the boards of directors for the Morrisville Chamber of Commerce, Stewart Engineering and the American Institute of Health and Fitness.

He is an outspoken ambassador for NC State and a member of the W.H. Page Lifetime Giving Society. White and his wife, Kathy, have created a Charitable Remainder Trust to benefit the College of Engineering that will provide funding for professorships, graduate fellowships, undergraduate scholarships and programmatic support for the dean of engineering. White is a member of the NC State Engineering Foundation Board of Directors and is its immediate past president.