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Angela Pakes Ahlman, overseeing the rapidly progressing Education Building.

Angela Pakes Ahlman has a scene from an old grade-school environmental education film seared into memory. It depicts a factory belching thick smoke into the sky, while in the foreground, a pipe spews an oily plume into a river.

In the late 1970s era that produced the federal Superfund toxic cleanup program, this was the quintessential symbol of pollution. But today, Pakes Ahlman’s environmental focus is on something less obvious, yet more pervasive in our lives.

“Growing up, we were taught that manufacturers were the polluters,” says Pakes Ahlman, a 1996 UW-Madison dual-degree graduate in Geological Engineering and Geology/Geophysics. “But it hasn’t been until recently that we’ve recognized that our built environment — basically, what it takes to build and operate all the homes and buildings of the world — is really the biggest culprit in greenhouse gas emissions.”

As an architect and engineer manager for UW-Madison Capital Planning and Development, this shift in perspective serves Pakes Ahlman well. She joined UW-Madison in 2006 and is leading a number of high-profile campus building projects, including the School of Education, Union South, Human Ecology and the Wisconsin Energy Institute.

With each project, Pakes Ahlman says the ultimate goal is to design and construct a building that will serve the University for at least 100 years. In terms of the value-added for modern buildings, she says additional goals are to make them welcoming, flexible and sustainable.

It’s safe to say those haven’t always been adjectives of choice in describing campus buildings. Certainly not the windowless concrete monoliths from the 1960s “Brutalist” era, such as Union South and Humanities. In the current UW construction boom, Pakes Ahlman says each project is being treated as an opportunity to create something that enhances the campus experience.

“We are changing the way we think about design and construction to more sustainable means,” she says. “We seek ways to reduce the amount of energy needed to operate buildings by using active chilled beams for cooling, increasing daylight opportunities, and adding more green space to enhance those outdoor ‘third-places’ we all enjoy so much on our campus. We’re also sourcing more materials from Wisconsin-based companies.”

UW-Madison currently has eight major projects seeking LEED certification, and each on target to reach a silver or gold level, she says.

“It means a lot more to me because this is my alma mater,” she says. “If I were a student here again, what kinds of spaces would I appreciate? Where would I like to hang out with friends or get a cup of coffee or meet my study group? I want every building we develop to be special and more sustainable than the past.”

Refining, Redefining Campus Spaces

Pakes Ahlman cites a number of future favorite spaces she is helping create. At Union South, now about 50 percent complete, that ‘third-place’ will be a massive sun garden on the south side of the building.  Sun will heat the space in the winter and be blocked by exterior fins in the summer. The building has also been designed to accept building-mounted wind turbines.

At the Wisconsin Energy Institute (WEI), which is breaking ground later this year, it will be a collection of “demonstration gardens” that will grow some of the very materials being researched as potential biofuels. “At some of our projects, we look at ways to integrate photovoltaics and wind energy in a way that shows the public how renewable energy can be functional and efficient. We are also using geothermal as a source of free energy from the earth to improve the energy efficiencies of some of our buildings.”

But her favorite addition will be the north-facing section of Education Hall on Bascom Hill. That unfinished building back-section had always been an eyesore, with small “nodes” built for extra space and a narrow parking lot that put Bascom Hill pedestrians in harm’s way of vehicles. Pakes Ahlman researched, promoted and received approval for a complete makeover of that space, with a subsurface parking lot and an elevated green terrace with a view of Lake Mendota and Muir Knoll.

“What an addition to campus – to have another terrace overlooking the lake,” she says. “We’re giving people a tough decision now: Do I go and sunbathe on Bascom Hill or do I embrace the lake views from the new café from the north side of the building?”

Early Experience with Ford Motor Co.

While building is her passion today, her first experiences out of college were more in taking buildings down. After finishing her civil engineering master’s at the University of Michigan and working for Ford Motor Co., Pakes Ahlman received an offer from Entrix Environmental Consulting in Houston to open her own office in Michigan and do consulting work for the auto industry, which is a huge global property holder.

Starting with her first contract of $10,500, Pakes Ahlman built the business over four years into a 45-employee operation with numerous multi-million dollar contracts. The biggest was with Ford, doing environmental assessments on its massive Rouge River plant, one of the largest factory complexes in world history. One project was to reassess underground resources across the entire 100-year-old, 1,100-acre plant — larger than all of UW-Madison, from Memorial Library to Eagle Heights.

She would work with The Rouge again under tragic circumstances, when in February 1999 a powerhouse exploded and killed six people. Her knowledge of the resources around the plant helped the company slowly decommission and demolish the damaged structures. She was reminded of the devastation of the blast from coal bunkers next to the powerhouse, which were still smoldering in June of that year.

Her biggest professional leap may have been, ironically, to a job back with Ford in 2002. This time, she was hired by the Ford Land Division to serve as its lead civil engineer for new building projects. “I didn’t know the first thing about construction,” she says, but was convinced by a Ford vice president who wanted strong project management and problem-solving skills.

Pakes Ahlman’s first project was to travel to Toronto to participate in building a new Ford Canada headquarters along Lake Ontario. After introductions, the group immediately got to work and rolled out blueprints of the site. As she reviewed the blueprints, something immediately struck the trained geological engineer: there was a significant geological fault line running right through the middle of the building site. She knew exactly what to say and do.

“An immediate comfort level just washed over me,” she recalls. “It was at that point in my life I realized, my solid education in engineering gave me exactly the right tools to do whatever I wanted to do. That was a really incredible feeling.”

Adam Richards, a senior in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, provides an inside look at “eMOO,” the university’s latest vehicle designed for the national Hybrid Vehicle Challenge.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Susan Hagness created the course Introduction to Society’s Grand Challenges to show students the impact engineers can make on the world’s future.

“Several years ago, the National Academy of Engineering identified 14 Grand Challenges for the coming decade. It’s important for us to introduce students to these responsibilities and opportunities as soon as possible so that they can be inspired by these challenges.”

Jim Thompson at Qualcomm

Driving through San Diego’s Sorrento Valley, where rolling hills are populated with dozens of gleaming buildings bearing the Qualcomm Inc. logo, it’s hard to imagine a time when Qualcomm would have been considered a corporate underdog.

But that time was just two decades ago, when the era of digital cellular technology was beginning to take shape. Jim Thompson, a three-degree graduate of the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering, joined Qualcomm during those pivotal early days, when a high-stakes technology gamble fueled the company’s meteoric rise.

Thompson, vice president of Qualcomm CDMA Technology (QCT), today leads
engineering efforts in the Qualcomm chipset division. CDMA—short for code division multiple access—is the heart and soul of Qualcomm, and the platform technology that enabled the explosion in “smart phone” capability that the world enjoys today.
But CDMA was viewed as a longshot in those early days, Thompson says. At the time, the cellular phone industry was searching for the best answer to moving from “the scratchy analog days” of wireless (Remember the 2-pound brick phone?) into the tremendous promise of digital wireless. The core question: Which technology will support the broadest consumer usage and the fastest and most dependable cellular transmission?

This is a tale of two competing approaches. The majority of the industry backed a system known as TDMA—time division multiple access—as the best solution, Thompson says. Both CDMA and TDMA aim to accomplish the same thing—essentially, to enable multiple users to share the same frequency or channel on the radio spectrum—but with fundamentally different approaches.

One metaphor about the technologies imagines conversations at a cocktail party.
The TDMA approach would require having each person at a party take turns speaking
in a round-robin fashion to complete a conversation. CDMA, on the other hand, would have all conversations taking place at once, but each one in a different language.

“One of our lead engineers did a study and found that he could improve the capacity of the cellular network using CDMA by a factor of 40,” Thompson says. “TDMA was expected to improve it by a factor of three. That’s when you could say that we really bet the company on this technology.”

Facing industry skepticism, Qualcomm forged on with CDMA development, using profits from a satellite tracking system it had developed in the 1980s for the trucking industry. When the company started demonstrating success, Thompson says the competition became fierce.

“Things got really heated over time,” Thompson says. “There were stories about how CDMA couldn’t possibly work because it defied the laws of physics. There were big technical and legal battles over CDMA, as well as battles in the press. In the end, we prevailed simply because the technology was so much better.”

The rewards of that risk have been great. As the largest fabless semiconductor producer in the world, Qualcomm sells more than a billion chips a year, all for the cellular industry. Fortune magazine this year ranked Qualcomm No. 9 in the list of the top-100 companies to work for.

For Thompson, it has been an incredibly rewarding ride.

“I feel so lucky to be part of this industry, starting at Qualcomm when I did,” Thompson says. “We started out with a relatively small group of people working on this new technology. We felt like we were going to change the world with it, and I think we did. The dramatic growth of the company forced young guys like me—who were barely shaving—to take on big leadership roles.”

The big-picture impact of the cellular industry also inspires Thompson. “Four billion people now own a cell phone. And close to a billion people use a 3G phone, a very data-capable device. When you think about Internet access today,” he adds, “more of it will come through cell phones than through a desktop or laptop computer.”

As the head of engineering, Thompson now works with a new generation of engineers and a new set of challenges. Foremost is reducing power consumption in cellular phones, he says. With a tiny battery and little surface area to dissipate heat, the growth of cell phone capability rests with packing more and better features into a day’s supply of battery power.

One way Qualcomm is answering the challenge to increase battery life is with mirasol display technology. Qualcomm has developed a reflective color display that doesn’t require power-hungry backlighting. Thompson says a display pixel made from thin-film optics using interferometric modulation reflects color in natural light. He likens it
to the physical phenomenon that produces vivid colors found in multilayered butterfly wings.

Thompson earned a bachelor’s (1985), master’s (1987) and PhD (1991) in electrical and computer engineering, and studied under ECE Professor Jim Beyer. He credits his success to getting a mix of engineering fundamentals and a broad education outside the field. (His father, Howard Thompson, is a professor emeritus of business at UW-Madison.)
Says Thompson: “Graduate school was about developing an independence—being able to think for myself, manage my own time, pursue my own ideas and gain the confidence that you can actually accomplish something without a professor assigning you homework.”

Thompson says he remembers stumbling across a Forbes magazine article in graduate school titled “Over the Hill at Forty,” and at the time the concept seemed ridiculous. But after 20 years in the technology business, he says it now makes perfect sense.
“The only way to avoid becoming obsolete in the technology world is to keep learning and relearning,” he says. “What’s important is always changing. The broad education I received at Wisconsin is instrumental in allowing me to keep up with changes and branch into areas outside my expertise.”

—Brian Mattmiller

Mike Duckett at Miller Park

While your typical Milwaukee Brewers fan might have a favorite moment to share about a game at Miller Park, Mike Duckett can narrow it down to his favorite time of day.

Duckett, the executive director of the Miller Park Stadium District, says he is enamored with that intersection between the end of his workday and the start of a night game, when he can watch thousands of fans thread into the sprawling ballpark. “I’ll often wait until about 7 p.m. to leave work, and just watch the building load with people,” he says. “My favorite time is when you see the families bringing kids in, some for the very first time, and they’re holding their mom or dad’s hand, looking up and just going, ‘Wow.’ That’s really fun to see them soaking it all in.”