Dr. S. Szygenda holds the Cecil H. Green Chair in Engineering at SMU, where he served as Dean of Engineering from 2000 to 2004. Before assuming the position of Dean at SMU, he was the Dean of Engineering at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), from 1996 to 2000, and Chairman of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (ECE) at The University of Texas at Austin (1993 to 1996), where he also held the Clint Murchison Sr. Chair of Free Enterprise (1986 to 1996), and served as Director of the Center for Technology Development and Transfer (CTDT). CTDT was created by the Texas Legislature, to facilitate the commercialization of technology from Texas universities. Dr. Szygenda formed a company, CCSS, which was the first multi-product simulation and test company, producing very large software and hardware systems. Over the years he has graduated more than 150 M.S. and 50 Ph.D. students, acquired extensive government and industrial research funding, received numerous awards, served on the boards of numerous companies. He published more than 150 papers and seven book chapters. His areas of expertise include: technology entrepreneurship; start-up companies; incubators; management and planning; technology transfer; software engineering; telecommunications engineering; simulation and diagnosis; automatic programming; fault-tolerant computing; reliability and maintainability, and leadership.