A digital special section of | Subscribe


Rich Stanbaugh

Rich Stanbaugh

President/CEO | NuArx, Inc. | Class of 1990

The list of professors Rich Stanbaugh learned from on his way to dual UI degrees would take all day to rattle off.

But there’s one who taught the future cybersecurity CEO what to do with all that knowledge.

“As influential professors go, my list starts with Steven Franke,” the NuArx, Inc. CEO (BS ’90, electrical engineering; MBA ’93) says from suburban Detroit.

“Professor Franke taught a number of ECE classes on remote sensing and RF/microwave communication. Before taking these classes, it felt as if the university was jamming my head full of knowledge and tools, but that everything existed in isolation.

“Professor Franke taught an approach to finding solutions that was based on applying disparate knowledge from sundry sources to manageable chunks of the problems that started me on the path of understanding how it all fit together. He guided my senior project to decode a signal from a NOAA satellite and display the image on a PC, which seemed pretty cutting edge in 1989.

“This manner of thinking and engineering has had, and continues to have, a big impact on my approach to learning and, ultimately, my career.”