After earning his degree from Maryland and spending four years with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in White Oak, Md., Robert Fischell began a career at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. While designing satellite control systems, he turned to bioengineering, creating pacemakers, implantable defibrillators and more. Ever since, variety has characterized Fischell's livelihood. An entrepreneur, he developed the company AngelMed to market his creation that alerts cardiac patients to nascent heart attacks. He holds more than 200 patents, for inventions such as the internal insulin pump. He serves on boards of the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the College of Computer, Mathematical and Physical Sciences. He is also a trustee of the University of Maryland, College Park Foundation. He was named United States Inventor of the Year in 1984, and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He was inducted into the University of Maryland Alumni Hall of Fame in 2000, and established the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering in 2005.

Grow a site. Grow a community. This is the mantra of Webs.com, founded as Freewebs Corp. by brothers Zekeria and Haroon Mokhtarzada. Since graduating from Maryland, they have done plenty of building. Freewebs began as a hobby, a place where people could go to construct their own Web sites for free. But it kept expanding, even as Haroon finished his economics degree summa cum laude, and Zekeria capped off a double major in computer science and mathematics. Haroon traveled the world, then went to Harvard Law School; Zekeria became the first employee at WebOS, creator of the world's only Web-based operating system. During this time, Haroon ran Freewebs while Zekeria broadened its technical architecture and protected the servers located in his apartment. In 2005, with school behind them, the two turned their hobby into a calling. They raised venture capital and relaunched their company as Webs.com. Now, the community they have grown includes more than 30 million monthly visitors to personal and business-related Web sites launched and hosted through Webs.com.

There's profit in chaos. Just ask James Kaplan, a mathematician by training who used his head for numbers to found a series of successful finance companies catering to institutional and private investors. Kaplan began as a student of mathematical chaos pioneer and Maryland professor James Yorke. His doctorate in applied math focused on the ways in which active systems could be stabilized or destabilized through a series of well-timed interventions. These purely academic inquiries can have practical implications in the financial management industry, where Kaplan found himself after 15 years as a university professor. Today, Kaplan is president of Cubic Asset Management. His alma mater stands in line to applaud his extensive contributions to the study of mathematical chaos and his reputation as an authority in the financial services sector.

Dr. Weaver received her Ph.D. in 1993, with Prof Andrew Wilson as her advisor, also advised by Dr. Richard Mushotzky at Goddard. She is Associate Director for Science in the Astrophysics Division at Goddard Space Flight Center. She has served as Deputy Project Manager for the Constellation-X satellite project and as Program Scientist for the Spitzer infrared space mission. She won the Presidential Early Career Award in 1993. She is also Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University, and has served on the Executive Committee of the High-Energy Astrophysics Division of the American Astronomical Society. She has published more than 90 papers in peer-reviewed journals, and is the author of a popular book on X-ray astronomy, "The Violent Universe: Joyrides Through the X-Ray Cosmos," published by Johns Hopkins University Press. She discovered a massive asteroid belt around a sunlike star. She is an x-ray astronomer, internationally known for her work on starburst galaxies and black holes.

Dr. Paul Alan Dirmeyer's dissertation research centered on innovative computer modeling studies of the role that changes in surface vegetation may have on the earth's climate. Following his graduation Paul took up a postdoctoral position at the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies, where he currently has the title of Associate Research Scientist. Paul's research has continued to focus on the role than vegetation plays in interacting with, and thus influencing, climate at both global and local scales. Paul has advanced the development of sophisticated computer models of vegetation-atmosphere interactions. Paul has also played a strong leadership role in this area of research through his work with the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) and as a rotator at the National Science Foundation. In recognition of his many contributions Paul was the 2006 recipient of the American Meteorological Society's top award for young scientists, the Clarence Meisinger Award, "for improved understanding of the role of soil moisture in land atmospheric coupling, climate variability and climate predictability, and for leadership in GEWEX land modeling activities".

Vipin Kumar received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of Maryland in 1982 under the guidance of Professor Laveen Kanal. After leaving Maryland, Vipin taught at the University of Texas at Austin before joining the University of Minnesota in 1989, where he is currently the William Norris Professor and Head of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. During 1998-2005, he also served as the Director of the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center, which is a multi-university consortium funded by the US Army for HPC research. Vipin is internationally recognized for his research in the areas of parallel computing, graph partitioning, and data mining. He and his students developed highly scalable parallel formulations of combinatorial algorithms (e.g., problem solving search algorithms used in Artificial Intelligence), numerical and graph algorithms that underlie scientific and engineering simulations, and data mining algorithms for association pattern discovery and predictive modeling. One of Vipin's significant contributions is the isoefficiency metric for analyzing the scalability of parallel algorithms. This metric represented a major breakthrough in understanding scalability, and is now routinely covered in major textbooks on parallel computing. Vipin is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of IEEE. He received the 2005 Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society for his contributions to the design and analysis of parallel algorithms, graph-partitioning, and data mining.

President and Principal Hydrogeologist of Environmental Alliance, Smith was awarded an M.B.A. from Widener University in 1999. With over 20 years experience in management of key environmental projects, he has published over twelve papers/presentations at national environmental conferences on remediation topics from complex, large scale pump and treat projects to integrated sequenced biodegradation projects utilizing aerobic and/or anaerobic degradation pathways. He was the former Chief Operating Officer and Senior Vice President of Technology for a $150 million environmental consulting firm, Principal in charge of several RCRA Corrective Action Project during RFI, CMS, RA, and CMI over the past fifteen years and Project Manager of numerous groundwater and soil remediation projects utilizing LNAPL/DNAPL Extraction, Soil Vapor Extraction, Air Sparging and Bioremediation. He is a certified Professional Geologist in the State of Delaware and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and has professional affiliations with the National Groundwater Association and the Pennsylvania Council for Professional Geologists.

Dean has had a long connection to the University of Maryland. He grew up in College Park. He not only obtained his PhD with me but he also earned two other degrees, M.A. (1982) Mathematics and B.S. (1980) Biochemistry from Maryland. After receiving his PhD, Dean accepted the offer from the prestigious business school at the University of Chicago as assistant professor. He was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in four years. Then after some heavy recruiting from the University of Pennsylvania he moved to the Department of Statistics at The Walton School where he now holds the William H. Lawrence Professor of Statistics. During his career, he has worked as a visitor at several prestigious schools (Northwestern and Institute for Advanced Studies/Hebrew). Dean has done some fundamental work in theoretical statistics and game theory. In the evaluation of Dean in 2000, Robert Auman (2005 Nobel laureate) wrote "He has done some of the most important and original work in game theory in recent years. Worthy of special mention are the paper with Vohra, "Calibrated Learning and Correlated Equilibrium," Games and Economic Behavior, 1997, and on an entirely different subject, the paper with Young, "Stochastic Evolutionary Game Dynamics," Journal of Theoretical Population Biology, 1990. Both have had tremendous influence and have really become classics."

Joey Thompson was a Postdoctoral Research Assistant with Professor Sarah Eno from 1993 to 1999, working on the Dzero experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. After leaving Maryland, Joey was offered a job at Lucent Corporation. They had heard of his expertise in fiber optics, and asked him to take over their 10 Gigabit R &D effort. This was quite an impressive offer- it’s not every day that a physicist doing fundamental research is offered a $1M laboratory in a major technology company. Joey worked for Lucent for a few years, after which he co-founded his own company: Circadiant Systems, Incorporated.