Keith E. Schaefer (left) and John A. Swanson

Pitt alumni Keith E. Schaefer and John A. Swanson were elected as new members of the University’s Board of Trustees during the board’s annual meeting June 23.

Schaefer is president and chief executive officer of BPL Global, Ltd., and Swanson is president of Swanson Analysis Services, Inc.

Biographical information on the two follows.

Keith E. Schaefer

An Internet communications pioneer, Schaefer of Indian Wells, Calif., founded BPL Global, Ltd., and also serves as a member of its board. The company is a leading service provider to consumers worldwide of broadband and Internet content via standard power lines.

Schaefer earned the Bachelor of Science degree in Pitt’s College of Arts and Sciences in 1971, concentrating in political science and economics. He then served three years as a naval officer and attended the University of California at Los Angeles Graduate School of Business.

Schaefer began his career in sales and marketing at Procter & Gamble, and then at Clorox and Atari. He went on to hold presidential and CEO positions at Computer Curriculum Corporation, Worlds of Wonder, and NEC Technologies. He then was named Senior Vice President of Technology at Paramount Communications, Inc., where he established the Paramount Technology Group, which set up early initiatives and strategic alliances with Microsoft and AOL. Schaefer also was responsible for Paramount’s Venture Capital Fund.

He went on to cofound Cybernautics, Inc., an Internet communications company specializing in design and audience development; he transformed Cybernautics into a leading customer relationship management company that was acquired by USWeb and promptly went public with a market cap of $2.2 billion.

Prior to establishing BPL Global, Schaefer was a senior partner at Constellation Partners, a professional service and venture capitalist firm serving small and midsize companies. Before that, he was founder, chair, and CEO of The Liquid Group, a private firm focused on mentoring entrepreneurs and investing in their early-stage enterprises. Between his years at Cybernautics and his position at the Liquid Group, he was executive partner of USWeb/CKS’ worldwide business development, that company’s largest and most profitable unit, generating more than $400 million in annual revenue.

Schaefer is a coauthor of the bestselling book Net Results: Web Marketing That Works (Hayden, 1998), which is used as a course text at many university business schools in North America and is considered to be a standard reference for Web marketing. He is a member of the advisory board of College Track, a nonprofit organization that assists disadvantaged high school students by providing practical work experience. He also serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the Socrates Society at the Aspen Institute.

Actively involved in the Pitt Alumni Association (PAA), Schaeffer is the PAA’s immediate past president, a volunteer for the Pitt Career Network, and the host for University on the Road programs for alumni in California. He also is a member of the University’s capital campaign steering committee and has established the Keith E. Schaefer Undergraduate Scholarship Fund at Pitt. He was named a Distinguished Alumni Fellow at the University’s 2000 Honors Convocation.

John A. Swanson

President of the finite-element consulting firm Swanson Analysis Services, Inc., and a resident of The Villages, Fla., Swanson is recognized internationally as an authority and innovator in the application of finite-element methods to engineering.

In 1970—only four years after he graduated from the Pitt School of Engineering with the Ph.D. degree in applied mechanics—Swanson founded ANSYS, Inc., to develop, support, and market the ANSYS program, a finite-element software code he created that is used by a broad spectrum of industries employing computer-aided engineering, among them the aerospace, automotive, biomedical, manufacturing, and electronics industries.

Swanson served ANSYS as president, chief executive officer, and director; at his retirement from ANSYS in March 1999, he was the company’s chief technologist. Headquartered in Canonsburg, Pa., with more than 40 sales locations worldwide, ANSYS and its subsidiaries today employ approximately 1,400 people and distribute products through a network of channel partners in more than 40 countries.

Prior to founding ANSYS, Swanson was employed at Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory in the stress analysis group in reactor design, the core analysis and methods group, and the structural analysis group. It was at Westinghouse that Swanson realized the significant resources companies could save by using integrated general-purpose finite-element software code to do the complex calculations engineers were then doing manually.

Swanson earned the Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in mechanical engineering at Cornell University.

In May 2004, Swanson was given what is considered to be the highest award in the engineering profession, the American Association of Engineering Societies’ John Fritz Medal. Prior awardees of the Fritz Medal include, among others, Orville Wright, Alexander Graham Bell, Alfred Nobel, Thomas Edison, and George Westinghouse.

Swanson has received many other prestigious honors, among them being named in 1986-87 Pittsburgh Engineer of the Year by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), winning in 1990 the Computers in Engineering (CIE) award for outstanding contributions to the engineering and computing industries, selection by Industry Week as one of the Top 5 of the Top 50 R&D Stars in the United States in 1994, election as an ASME Fellow in 1994, and receipt of the ASME Applied Mechanics Award in 1998 and ASME Honorary Membership in 2003.

At Pitt, Swanson created the John A. Swanson Institute for Technical Excellence, which houses the John A. Swanson Center for Micro and Nano Systems; the John A. Swanson Center for Product Innovation; and the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Center for Excellence. He also established the John A. Swanson Embedded Computing Laboratory in Computer Engineering and the John A. Swanson Fund in Pitt’s School of Engineering. In 1998, Swanson was named a Pitt School of Engineering Distinguished Alumnus. In 2002, he was inducted into the Cathedral of Learning Society, which recognizes individuals who have donated $1 million or more to the University.

Swanson currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Washington & Jefferson College, is a scholarship provider for the Canon-McMillan Schools, and supports several colleges and universities in addition to Pitt, including the School of Engineering at Cornell University.