The Rice Engineering Alumni (REA) board of directors has announced its 2006 awards for Outstanding Engineering Alumnus (OEA) and Outstanding Young Engineering Alumnus (OYEA). Named OEA was Hector Ruiz, chair and chief executive officer of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), who earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Rice in 1973. Named OYEA was J. Patrick Frantz, operations manager for Xilinx, Inc., who earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering from Rice in 1997.

Ruiz joined AMD as president and chief operating officer in 2000, and was named CEO two years later. Previously, Ruiz served as president of Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. In his 22 years with the technology firm, he held a variety of positions in the U.S. and overseas. Born in Piedras Negras, Mexico, Ruiz earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. Passionate about the role of technology in education and empowering the underprivileged, Ruiz announced AMD’s 50x15 Initiative at the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—a commitment to empower 50 percent of the world’s population with basic Internet access by 2015. Ruiz serves on the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology, which advises the president of the United States on issues related to technology, scientific research priorities, and math and science education. He also serves on the Eastman Kodak Company Board of Directors, the advisory board for the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management, and the board of directors for the Semiconductor Industry Association.

Frantz recently accepted a position as DSP (digital signal processing) Japan operations manager for Xilinx, Inc. He is based in Tokyo and focuses on business development in the Japanese and Korean markets for Xilinx’s DSP and embedded processing divisions. While executive and technical director of Rice’s Center for Multimedia Communication (CMC), Frantz was devoted to theoretical and experimental research of next-generation wireless communications systems. He was director of the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Industrial Affiliates program and was a lecturer on the ECE faculty. His research interests include DSP and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based hardware systems, mobile wireless devices, and communications algorithm implementations. Frantz has a passion for international engineering education and helping students prepare for the global marketplace. At Rice, he served as the special liaison for international engineering education and helped to establish several new programs, such as the NSF-funded INNOVATE conference and the NanoJapan summer research program.

Hector and Patrick will be honored during an event on Friday, November 17. The OEA has been presented annually since 1974 and recognizes alumni for outstanding professional achievement and community service. The OYEA, presented since 1996, recognizes the achievements of engineers 40 years and younger.