Michelle Munson

"How Engineering (Actually) Changes the World - my experience as an inventor, entrepreneur and tech CEO"

Presented Thursday, March 3, 2016
3:00 - 1109 Engineering Hall

Michelle Munson

Abstract

The lecture will try to bring to highlight how engineering brings fundamental solutions to scientific and societal "big problems" focusing on the example of the birth and growth of Aspera's high speed transport platform, the problem origins, the invention, the financial enablement and the evolution in an ecosystem of distributed cloud computing and the explosion of data.

Biographical Sketch

Michelle Munson, Berkeley, California, is a 1996 graduate of Kansas State University in electrical engineering and physics, where she was a Goldwater Scholar for achievement in science and mathematics, and later a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University where she received a postgraduate diploma in computer science. The CEO of Aspera, Inc., she co-invented Aspera's fasp™ transport technology and is responsible for overseeing the company's direction in collaboration with co-founder Serban Simu. Munson was a software engineer in research and start-up companies including the IBM Almaden Research center before founding Aspera in 2004. She was the 2006 K-State College of Engineering Alumni Fellow — the youngest recipient on record, and has received national achievement awards from Glamour Magazine and USA Today. Munson is a frequent speaker on technologies and trends around Big Data Transport, Cloud Infrastructure and Mobile.