Hemant Thapar ’73 M.S. ’75 has been awarded the School of Engineering’s Distinguished Engineering Alumni Award for his advancement of electrical and computer science and engineering and his service to the School of Engineering. Thapar is the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of OmniTier. He previously founded and led two successful startups, DataPath Systems and Link_A_Media Devices. Together, these startups delivered many “industry firsts” in controllers for data storage and data recovery and system-on-a-chip technologies, contributing to the shipment of over 100 million chips for hard disk drives and solid state drives. Thapar received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Purdue University. He is the recipient of three best paper awards and was elected an IEEE Fellow.