5 alumni inducted into Fulton Schools Hall of Fame

New members’ achievements exemplify ASU engineering’s pursuit of excellence and aspiration to serve society

A steadfast commitment to cultivating a vibrant spirit of innovation among its faculty and students has propelled the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University into a leading producer of talent prepared to expand the horizons of engineering and technology.

With that opening message, Professor Kyle Squires, dean of the Fulton Schools and ASU’s senior vice provost of engineering, computing and technology, kicked off the 2024 ceremony in which five ASU engineering alumni were inducted as new members of the Fulton Schools Hall of Fame.

As he introduced Edward Dwight, Celeste Fralick, Robert Garner, Bill Slessman and George Slessman at the induction ceremony, Squires told audience members they would be meeting “five trailblazing alumni who fully embody what it means to be an innovator. They represent the continuum, the spark passed from one generation to the next that ignites ideas, pushes boundaries and transforms our understanding of what we can achieve.”

The ceremony featured a recounting of the range and extent of the progress realized through the inductees’ professional accomplishments as defining examples of impactful innovation.

“They each prove that the sparks of discovery and determination ignited at ASU have the potential to become extraordinary contributions to our world,” Squires said.

Lauding their achievements as reflecions of ASU’s spirit of innovation, Squires emphasized that honoring its alumni through its Hall of Fame inductions also reflects the Fulton Schools’ goal “to prepare every student to go out into the world and face societal challenges head-on.”

Ed Dwight

Edward Dwight
’57 BS in aerospace engineering
’86 LHD of human letters

Edward Dwight graduated from ASU while serving in the U.S. Air Force. After earning a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering, Dwight became a test pilot and trained in the Air Force Aerospace Research Pilot School program. He would later become the nation’s first Black NASA astronaut candidate.

After his military service, Dwight worked at IBM as a systems engineer and pursued ventures in engineering, as well as real estate and entrepreneurship. He also became an accomplished sculptor. His career highlights include earning numerous awards, among them an honorary doctorate of humane letters from ASU in 1986, the Air Force Commander’s Award for Public Service and the Bonfils-Stanton Foundation Artist Award in 2020. In addition, NASA named an asteroid after Dwight and this year he became the oldest person to fly in space. He has also been honored with the University of Denver Colleges of Arts, Humanities and Social Services Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022 for making significant contributions to the arts, humanities and social sciences at the university.

At the induction ceremony, Dwight told the audience what he took from his learning experiences at ASU has “been a part of everything that I’ve ever done, from aerospace engineering to construction and building huge sculptures that require tons of steel and bronze and granite, 30 feet tall sculptures that are in parks and on capitals in 38 states.”

Celeste Fralick

Celeste Fralick
’98 MS in biomedical engineering
’13 PhD in biomedical engineering

Celeste Fralick is an executive technical leader with more than four decades of industry experience, including positions with the McAfee, Intel, Medtronic, Fairchild, and Texas Instruments companies. Fralick’s process, product and system expertise spans statistics and artificial intelligence, or AI, innovation and development.

She was named to Forbes “Top 50 Women in Tech list” in 2018, the CDO Magazine’s “Global Data Power Women” in 2020 and 2021, and one of the “250 Pioneers in AI” in 2024 by Data Science Salon. Fralick has been awarded 18 patents in AI, authored numerous scholarly articles and been the subject of many news media features.

She is currently chief data officer with AI-driven startups Choir Power and Innovatio HealthDesign and maintains her affiliations with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers,  American Society of Quality, American Statistical Association and the peer-reviewed journal “Neural Computing and Applications.” She served on ISO 24028:2020 TG for AI Trustworthiness and led teams to publish international standards in process characterization.

Fralick earned a master’s and doctoral degrees in biomedical engineering from ASU with concentrations in neural networks, bioelectricity, and neuroscience.

As a nontraditional student, Fralick persevered to earn these advanced degrees, which she noted has made her a stronger person.

In her remarks,  Fralick shared lyrics from Helen Reddy’s “I am Woman,” saying “You can bend but never break me/ ‘Cause it only serves to make me/ More determined to achieve my final goal/ And I come back even stronger/ Not a novice any longer/ ‘Cause you’ve deepened the conviction in my soul/ Oh yes, I am wise/ But it’s wisdom born of pain/ But look how much I’ve gained.”

She said the impact of her education at ASU is part of what has driven her to return to work each of the three times she has retired. Fralick intends to contribute to advances that align with efforts at ASU to develop the abilities of artificial intelligence to improve health care.

“I am standing here because I stand on the shoulders of those who have helped me,” she said from the stage at the induction ceremony, referring to her teachers and mentors at ASU.

Robert Garner

Robert Garner
’76 BS in electrical engineering

After earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering from ASU and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Robert Garner joined Xerox’s System Development Division in Palo Alto, California, where he co-designed the Xerox 8000 STAR professional workstation and the first commercial 10 Mbps ethernet adaptor. He later he joined Lynn Conway’s pioneering VLSI design group at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Soon, Garner joined then-startup Sun Microsystems as the lead architect of SPARC, where he served as served as the lead archtiect of SPARC, Sun’s reduced instruction set computer.

Garner has 42 years of management and engineering experience in product development and research organizations at Sun Microsystems, Brocade Communications, Xerox PARC and IBM Research. In those roles, he helped to develop many innovative and award-winning products in his fields of expertise. From 2004 to the present, he has led a team of volunteers that has restored and maintains two 1960s IBM 1401 mainframes now exhibited live at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

“I can’t tell you how much the professors here at ASU cultivated me and gave me confidence in myself,” Garner said. “I had to take mechanical engineering classes, oh my, and I hadn’t realized at the time how important that would be, because when you’re designing high-end processors and servers, you need to know something about mechanical engineering. So, ASU opened so many doors for me.”

George Slessman

George Slessman
’97 BS in industrial engineering

Bill Slessman
’99 BSE in construction engineering

ASU football players and brothers George Slessman and Bill Slessman graduated from ASU with degrees in industrial engineering and construction engineering, respectively. The pair have gone on to dedicate their careers to improving cloud computing and data center efficiency.

The Slessman brothers have co-founded multiple companies, including IO Data Centers, which introduced modular data solutions to fit the distinct needs of organizations worldwide. They hold numerous patents for their technology inventions. The Slessman brothers continue entrepreneurial efforts to accelerate development in software, digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence through companies such as DCX Data Centers, GYPC Technologies and CR8DL.ai.

A true Sun Devil family, both brothers met their spouses at ASU, and Bill’s two sons are now earning their engineering undergraduate degrees in the Fulton Schools.

Bill Slessman

In their comments at the ceremony, the Slessman brothers emphasized that the most important thing they gained from their Fulton Schools professors was not only a desire to learn but the ability to learn quickly and be confident in applying their knowledge to overcome difficult challenges. That approach, they said, is the path to innovation.

The Hall of Fame ceremony recognizes not only the accomplishments of these exceptional individuals but also emphasizes the growing and enduring impact of the Fulton Schools community on engineering education, research and industry around the world.

As the Fulton Schools evolves as a hub for innovation, these inductees stand as beacons of inspiration for current and future generations of Fulton Schools engineers, exhibiting the spirit of excellence and dedication that defines ASU’s engineering legacy.

Professor Kyle Squires (second from right), dean of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, poses with the four of the five most recent inductees into the Schools Hall of Fame.To  Squires’ left are Robert Garner, Bill Slessman and Celelests Fralick. To his right is George Slessman. Photographer; Erika Gronek/ASU