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Scholl to Address December Grads

Tom Scholl (Photo by Al Santos)

Tom Scholl, general partner with Novak Biddle Venture Partners and chair of the Clark School's Board of Visitors, will be the commencement speaker at the engineering graduation ceremony on Dec. 20. Electrical engineering major Harneet Singh Khurana will serve as student speaker. Scholl is a successful entrepreneur and investor with more than 25 years of experience in communications systems, equipment, chipsets and software. He has been active with Washington, D.C.-area high-tech start-ups for more than 15 years. In 1990, Scholl founded Telogy Networks, a provider of embedded communications software products for wireless and IP networks. Motorola purchased Telogy's digital cellular technology in 1998 for more than $40 million. Texas Instruments purchased Telogy's embedded VOIP software for more than $700 million in 1999. Scholl co-founded Cognio, a developer for spectrum management and MIMO antenna technology for short-range wireless applications. Cognio was acquired by Cisco in October 2007. He has also served as director of Torrent Networking, and of Integrated Telecom, and was senior vice president of engineering at Hughes Network Systems. Scholl is the author of "Packet Switching" in the Electronic Communications Handbook published by McGraw-Hill. He holds patents relating to software, the Internet and digital telephone systems. Scholl has been honored as Entrepreneur of the Year by the Maryland High Technology Council and is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association of Computing Machinery. He holds a bachelor's degree from Purdue University. Scholl is also a member of the University of Maryland Board of Trustees. The winners of the Clark School's Staff Service Award and the E. Robert Kent Teaching Award for Junior Faculty will be announced at the ceremony. The Clark School's commencement ceremony will take place at the Cole Student Activities Building at 10 a.m. on the morning of December 20 and will be followed by a reception for the graduates and their families at the Kim Building. The main university commencement ceremony will take place on the evening of December 19 at 7 p.m. in the Comcast Center.

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December 5, 2007