AREVA TN Americas and UNC Charlotte’s William States Lee College of Engineering are partnering to recognize engineering and innovation in the Carolinas this fall through “Honoring our Legacy: Preparing Tomorrow’s Leaders.”
A division of AREVA Inc., AREVA TN Americas will be the lead sponsor for this annual engineering legacy banquet, scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 4. Organizers anticipate more than 200 engineering student scholars, engineering leaders and Lee College supporters to attend this invitation-only event.
Mike McMahon, senior vice president of AREVA TN Americas, noted, “We are dedicated to investing in the development of engineers in order to ensure the strength of the nuclear industry in the future. AREVA TN has invested in the industrial base in the Carolinas and continues to invest in the growth of a strong pool of talented young engineers who will be vital to shaping the future of energy in our nation.”
Robert Johnson, dean of the Lee College, said, “The college will be celebrating its 50th anniversary, or 49 + 1 in the 49er number system, of the college’s first graduate in 2015. The successes of the faculty, staff, and students have made the William States Lee College of Engineering excel in the past, and they will take it to greater heights in the future.”
Innovator and entrepreneur Igor Jablokov will be the keynote speaker for “Honoring our Legacy: Preparing Tomorrow’s Leaders.” Jablokov is entrepreneur-in-residence for Blackstone NC, a regional initiative focused on commercializing university-based research. He also serves as an advisor to Penn State's College of Engineering, UNC Charlotte's College of Computing and Informatics and the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers. He was awarded Eisenhower and Truman National Security Fellowships to heighten collaboration between government and industry.
Previously, Jablokov was founder and CEO of Yap, a venture capitalist-funded startup that pioneered cloud-based speech recognition. Its technology was deployed by dozens of customers, including Microsoft and Sprint; the company received accolades for its innovations including North Carolina’s Early Stage Company of the Year and was a finalist at Silicon Valley's TechCrunch Conference. The firm was acquired subsequently by Amazon.
As program director of IBM's multimodal speech recognition group, Jablokov led a worldwide team that invented the first-ever speech-enabled Web browser. With almost two dozen patents, he was named an industry luminary by Speech Technology magazine and an outstanding engineering alumnus of Penn State. Igor holds a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from UNC Charlotte (2000).
AREVA TN is the market leader for used fuel storage and fuel transportation in the American nuclear industry; it offers innovative total systems solutions for the safe storage of used fuel, industry best pool-to-pad services and nuclear fuel and waste logistics.