Management Wing Honors Adler


Phil Adler is known for a remarkable memory that allowed him to maintain a long-term relationship with many students he taught during his nearly 40year career at Georgia Tech.

Neither have his former students forgotten Adler, who retired in 2000 as professor emeritus of strategic management.

A group of alumni have established an enduring tribute to him, naming the fourth-floor north wing of the Management building the Donna L. and Dr. Philip Adler Jr. Faculty Excellence Wing. About 45 alumni helped surpass the $750,000 goal to raise a total of $925,000.

The space will house faculty offices, which is only appropriate, according to Mack Reese, IM 83, MS Mgt 85, who led the drive.

"His teaching ability and interest in and compassion for students are something that all Georgia Tech professors should aspire to," Reese says. "He's always been available for me after I graduated and continues to be to this day. I've gone to him for advice on ideas and challenges I've faced in my own business. He's a friend in every respect of the word."

His wife of nearly 40 years, Donna Gibson Adler, died of cancer last June. They met when he was an assistant management professor and she was a secretary in the School of Chemical Engineering.


Pursuing Innovation


More than 400 people attended the Alumni Association-sponsored "Georgia Tech: Innovating Here and Now," which highlighted some of the cutting-edge research being conducted in nanotechnology, bioengineering and engineering.

The seminar was the Alumni Association's first live Web cast and was viewed by more than 100 people around the world via Internet, said Joe Irwin, president of the association, who moderated the event. The Web cast can be viewed at http://gtalumni.org/site/Page/HereAndNow.

As an introduction to the presentations by faculty research leaders on Feb. 15, President Wayne Clough said Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned to be a world leader in innovation.

"Innovation is the intersection between the creation of knowledge and the real world, taking ideas and moving them through to the point where there is a creation that can be used," said Clough, CE 64, MS CE 65.

Panelists were John McDonald, chair of the School of Biology and head of the Ovarian Cancer Institute Laboratory; Uzi Landman, holder of the Callaway chair in physics and director of the Georgia Tech Center for Computational Materials Science; and Gary May, EE 85, executive assistant to the president and Motorola professor in electrical and computer engineering.

McDonald said the future of biology is moving away from specialization and toward integration, a plus for Georgia Tech with its strengths in engineering and computational science.

Computational science has also had, and continues to have, a great impact on nanotechnology, Landman said. "We live in a very interesting intersection of science and technology where development of computational science intersects with the ability to create and control nature on a very small scale."

The landmark discoveries that have been made in nanotechnology are all computationally driven, he said.

May, who has specialized in the semiconductor manufacturing industry, said many of the technologies being pioneered at Tech will move into the marketplace, much as artificial intelligence techniques are being used to improve the semiconductor manufacturing process today.

"One of the tools that we use are neural networks," he said. "We have taken artificial intelligence technology to create our crude approximation of how a brain would work" to cut down on multimillion dollar mistakes in the very precise semiconductor manufacturing process."

©2005 Georgia Tech Alumni Association