Ronald Whittier is an engineer, trained at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, where he received a bachelor’s and doctoral degrees in Chemical Engineering. Ron spent his working career in the integrated electronics (chip) industry, working for five years at Fairchild Semiconductor (1965-1969) and over thirty years at Intel Corporation (1970-2000). From 2000 through 2010 he was Chairman of Convera Corporation, an indexing, search and retrieval software company.

A large portion of Ron’s career in industry was involved in technology management, the last ten years at Intel in software related areas. Based on his experience in industry and his recollection of the “way it was” in high school, he became convinced that practical training in internet applications was “good” in general and in addition would give high school students vocational skills that would allow them to enter the job market upon graduation from high school. This employment would allow TechFutures graduates to support their college education. Over time, this would positively impact the economy of the local community. TechFutures is aimed at testing this hypothesis.

In his leisure time Ron loves to sail (race), hike, travel, spend time with his family, and walk his dog Dusty.