Michelle Munson (BS' 96) among Alumni honored for career success
The Kansas State University College of Engineering will honor 11 alumni for professional career accomplishment during the first 20 years following their graduation. The honorees will be recognized at ceremonies on the Manhattan campus April 2.
Recipients of the college's Professional Progress Award were nominated by their respective department heads and confirmed by Darren Dawson, dean of engineering.
Among the 2016 Professional Progress Award honorees is Michelle Munson, Berkeley, California, is a 1996 graduate of Kansas State University in electrical engineering and physics, where she was a Goldwater scholar for achievement in science and mathematics, and later a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University where she received a postgraduate diploma in computer science. The chief executive officer of Aspera Inc., she co-invented Aspera's fasp, a trademarked transport technology, and is responsible for overseeing the company's direction in collaboration with co-founder Serban Simu. Munson was a software engineer in research and startups, including the IBM Almaden Research Center before founding Aspera in 2004. She was the 2006 Kansas State University College of Engineering Alumni Fellow — the youngest recipient on record. She has been named Media and Broadcast Technologist of 2016, and has also received national achievement awards from Glamour magazine and USA Today. She is a frequent speaker on technologies and trends around big data transport, cloud infrastructure and mobility.