College of Engineering Presents
Three Outstanding Alumni Awards

Keith A. Bentley (’80 BEE), Vance V. Kershner (’79 BME), and Levi T. Thompson (’81 BChE) were selected as the 2006 College of Engineering Outstanding Alumni and were recognized at the College of Engineering Honors Day program on May 5, 2006, in Pearson Hall.

Bentley is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Bentley Systems, Inc.; Kershner is the founder of LabWare, Inc.; and Thompson is Professor of Chemical Engineering, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, and Director of the Michigan-Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (MI-LSAMP) at the University of Michigan.

Keith A. Bentley

A year after completing his bachelor’s degree at UD, Bentley earned a Master of Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Florida.  He then went to work for the DuPont Company, where he created the “MicroStation” software that remains Bentley Systems’ flagship engineering platform product.  Bentley was President and CEO of Bentley Systems from its founding in 1984 until 1998, when he became the Chief Technology Officer.  As a member of the Board of Directors, he remains active in the company’s leadership and development of its products.

Author of numerous software patents, he received the National Computer Graphics CAD Society Award for the Advancement of Computer Graphics, the A/E/C Systems Ed Forrest Award for Excellence, and the Eastern Technology Council’s 1998 CEO of the Year under 40.

With over 2,000 employees worldwide and 2005 revenues over $330 million, Bentley Systems is one of the largest privately held software companies in the world; the firm earned the Eastern Technology Council’s Technology Company of the Year award in 2005.

Vance V. Kershner

Kershner began a nearly 13-year stint in the DuPont Company’s Field Program in 1979, working on energy conservation and process plant support.  In the early 1980s, he developed a robotics system to analyze in-process samples in support of a major plant start-up.  This effort brought Kershner face-to-face with the difficulty of interfacing laboratory instruments and computer information systems.  In response, he started his own business, which emerged as LabWare, Inc. in 1987.  The company’s LabStation™ was the first commercial product built on the first object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk.

Kershner left DuPont in 1991 to devote himself full-time to LabWare, which today is an international organization serving Fortune 500 companies, with offices in 15 countries and annual sales exceeding $55 million.  Over the past ten years, LabWare has maintained 100 percent employee retention, which is virtually unheard of in the software industry.

Two of Kershner’s current entrepreneurial projects include developing a private island in the British Virgin Islands and creating a 15,000-acre private game reserve in South Africa.

Levi T. Thompson

In addition to his UD bachelor’s degree, Thompson holds a master’s in chemical and nuclear engineering and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Michigan.  After working for two years at KMS Fusion, he returned to the University of Michigan as a faculty member.

Thompson’s research areas include nanostructured catalysts, micro-reactor and micro-fuel cell systems, and hydrogen technologies.  Author or co-author of more than 200 papers and presentations, he has also been awarded 10 patents and leads a multidisciplinary team developing compact devices to convert gasoline into hydrogen.  Recently, Thompson was appointed Director of the Hydrogen Energy Technology Laboratory.

Among Thompson’s many honors are the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Union Carbide Innovation Recognition Award, and the Dow Chemical Good Teaching Award.  With his wife Maria, he co-founded T/J Technologies.  He is a Consulting Editor for the AIChE Journal, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Assembled Chemical Weapons Alternatives Programs, as well as the External Advisory Committee for the Center of Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems at the University of Illinois, and the AIChE Chemical Engineering Technology Operating Council.

“We are proud not only of our College but also of our 9,000-plus alumni,” said Dean Eric Kaler.  “The Outstanding Alumni Awards give us a chance to honor the most accomplished of these individuals every year, and their collective achievements are truly remarkable.”

by Diane Kukich