Advisors
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Glen A. Barton
Glen Barton is the retired Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Caterpillar Inc. in Peoria, Illinois. His career with the company spanned 43 years, from 1961 to 2004. During his five-year tenure as CEO, Caterpillar’s goal was to increase sales and revenues by 50% with dramatically enhanced profitability. Barton achieved this goal the year he retired, one year ahead of plan. Six Sigma was also introduced during this same period and played a major role in the company's improved performance. Barton currently sits on the Board of Directors of Valmont Industries, Newmont Mining Corporation, FireFly Energy and Absorbent Technologies. In past years, Barton was a member of the President's Export Council and served both as a Global Advisor to The Conference Board and as a trustee of the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award Foundation. Barton was also a member of The Business Council, The Business Roundtable, and the Illinois Business Roundtable.
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Robert B. Shapiro
Robert Shapiro is the former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Monsanto Company and a member of the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. He has also served as Director of Citigroup, Inc., Rockwell International, Silicon Graphics, Inc., and Sequus Pharmaceuticals. Shapiro joined G.D. Searle & Company in 1979 as Vice President and General Counsel. In 1982, he was named President of the newly formed NutraSweet Group of Searle. When Searle was acquired by Monsanto in 1985, Shapiro was appointed Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the NutraSweet Company, a subsidiary of Monsanto. He became President and Chief Operating Officer of Monsanto in 1993 and Chairman and CEO in April 1995. Shapiro has served on the President’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy, the White House Domestic Policy Review of Industrial Innovation, the Civil Aeronautics Board Advisory Committee on Procedure, and the Massachusetts Governor’s Task Force on Transportation. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Corporate Executives, and The Business Council.
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Robert R. Macier
Bob Macier is the former President of Solar Turbines, the world's leader in the manufacturing of industrial gas turbines and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Caterpillar, Inc. Macier joined Solar Turbines in 1981 as Manager of Systems Engineering, eventually becoming Vice President in 1987. For one decade prior to that, he held a variety of technical and managerial positions at General Electric including forcasing technological trends. Macier received both undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson College in New York. He also participated in the Aspen Institute, Caterpillar’s Advanced Management Program and Duke University’s Advanced Management Program Macier is a member of the Salvation Army Advisory Board, the United Way of San Diego Board and serves on the Board of Directors of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corporation.
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Jonathan Michael
Jonathan Michael is the President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of RLI Corp. RLI is one of the largest providers of niche specialty coverage, surety bonds and commercial property, liability and business insurance. A public company with a nationwide network of retail agents, RLI is an innovator in the hard-to-place risk market. Michael joined RLI in 1982 and was elected Chief Financial Officer in 1985. In 1994, he became President and COO of RLI Insurance Group, and was elected to the RLI Corp. Board of Directors in 1997. Michael is also a Certified Public Accountant.
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Major General Emile P. Bataille
Emile P. Bataille is President of Visual Information Technologies, Inc., Urbana, Illinois. VIT is an emerging Internet software company with paradigm shifting technology. VIT is commercializing technology it has licensed from the National Center for Super Computing Applications at the University of Illinois. Bataille retired from the US Army in 2004 as a Major General. His last assignment was at the US Strategic Command in Omaha, where he served as the Director for Communications and Computers. In his CIO role, he was responsible for a network architecture that supported 4000 end users. He had oversight for the military secure global satellite communications network and the development of the military computer network defense policies.
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Thomas A. DeFanti, PhD,
Calit2 at University of California, San DiegoTom DeFanti, a founding member of GLIF, has been instrumental in the planning, build-out and application architecture of today’s most advanced phontonic networks. As Senior Research Scientist at Calit2, DeFanti’s current work focuses on high-resolution visualization and virtual reality devices over long distances. He pioneered the 10-gigabit CAVEwave Research Network for OptIPuter and global use, and is an international expert in computer graphics.
Under his direction, Electronic Visualization Laboratory hardware and software was used to animate the ground-breaking 1977 movie Star Wars. DeFanti is also a founding member of the Calit2 CineGrid project—a networked test bed that enables creative communities working with ultra-high-performance digital media to collaborate, research, develop and demonstrate new kinds of distributed media product on photonic networks. Darkstrand is a CineGrid member. Calit2 is a pioneer in next-generation technologies and grid computing, with special expertise in advanced networking, cyber infrastructure, and visualization environments. Calit2 also collaborates closely with the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) in its work with next-generation, supercomputing applications and optical lambda solutions.
