Oregon Graduate Center

The original board of trustees of OGC was Harry Alpert (U of O), Henry Cabell, Vernon Cheldelin (OSU), Arno H. Denecke, S.L. Diack (chairman), physicist Walter P. Dyke (Linfield College, Field Emission Corp.), Gerald W. Frank (Governor's Advisory Committee), educator James T. Marr, Harold M. Phillips, Donald E. Pickering (OHSU), G. Herbert Smith (Willamette University), Willard B. Spalding (dean of PSC), Richard H. Sullivan (president of Reed College), metallurgist R.H. "Rudy" Thielemann (Martin Marietta Metals Co.), C. H. Vollum and Harry White.[9]

Donald L. Benedict was originally hired as a consultant to Gov. Hatfield's committee. Benedict favored theoretical or pure research, as opposed to the applied research favored by most of the industrialists and philanthropists on the committee. His major accomplishment was acquiring the new campus on Walker Road from Tektronix Foundation, where the first new building was dedicated on 15 August 1969. Cost overruns resulted in his dismissal by the trustees just 12 days after the dedication.[3]

E. Robert de Luccia, a Pacific Power & Light Co. executive and board member became interim president in 1969, following Benedict's dismissal. De Luccia had been a trustee from 1968 to 1972. OGC had to borrow money to meet the payroll and pay contractors for new buildings. Mergers with Lewis & Clark College and PSU and a takeover by Tek were proposed, and most OGC employees were looking for other jobs. De Luccia left OGC for a job in the Nixon administration in Southeast Asia in June 1971, and the original OGC facility on Barnes Road was sold for $350k that year.[10] De Luccia was named a Life Trustee of OGI in 1990 for his longtime support.[11]

Arthur F. Scott (1898-1982), a provost of OGC and former chemistry professor and president (1942 to 1945) at Reed College, was appointed acting president in 1971–1972. Negotiations with PSU failed to produce a merger, a request for $1.5M in operating funds from the state legislature was denied, and OGC was on the brink of extinction during this time. The chemistry building at Reed is named for Scott.[10]

Western Kraft Corp. founder Ira C. Keller (1899-1978) was appointed president in 1972. His business approach kept OGC afloat, and brought full accreditation in 1973. Applied physics professor Lynwood W. Swanson and partners incorporated FEI Company in 1973, although Swanson remained on the faculty at OGC until 1987.[12] The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and Weyerhauser Co. all made generous grants to OGC during Keller's tenure. Keller retired as president in 1977 and became chairman of the board of trustees upon Diack's retirement.[10] The Keller Fountain Park in downtown Portland was named in honor of Ira Keller for his philanthropy and civic involvement, and Keller Auditorium for his son Richard B. Keller. Western Kraft began as a joint venture between the Willamette Valley Lumber Co. and Santiam Lumber Co. in 1954, and merged with Willamette Industries Inc. in 1973.[13] The younger Keller was a trustee of OGC from 1984 to 1987.

J. Richard "Dick" Kerr, a professor of electrical engineering at PSC and OGC and later the executive vice-president of OGC, was promoted to president in 1977. Kerr, a laser expert, was hired by OGC as a researcher in 1966. He resigned in 1979 amid more financial crises and controversy with the faculty over cutbacks.[10] The Jack Murdock Research Laboratory, housing the physics and electrical engineering programs and funded by a $2M grant by the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, opened in 1978 as the third building on the OGC campus.[14] After OGC, Kerr was an executive at Flight Dynamics Inc. and FLIR Systems Inc., and founded Max-Viz Inc. in Portland.

Electrical engineer F. Paul Carlson was hired by OGC as the vice-president for development in 1977 in the midst of a financial crisis, and became acting president in 1979. OGC purchased 100 acres of land adjacent to its 77-acre campus in 1980, and Carlson was elected president of the center. The additional land became the Science Park in 1982, a site for start-up companies intended as an endowment for OGC. Planar Systems, a Tek spin-off, began developing flat-panel displays there in 1984.[15] Ground was broken for the Samuel L. Diack Memorial Library in 1979, and the building was completed in 1980, named in honor of the first chairman. The Computer Science building was completed in 1981, with Richard B. Kieburtz coming from State University of New York at Stony Brook to head the new department. Jacqueline Jackson, coordinator of a gifted education program in Portland Public Schools (Oregon), started the Saturday Academy, a science program for high school students at OGC and other area campuses, in May 1983.[16] Vollum was awarded OGC's first honorary doctor of science degree in 1984. Carlson retired as academic president of OGC, and became president of the Oregon Graduate School Corporation and chairman of the OGC board of trustees in 1985. The OGC Corp. was formed to be the developer and landlord for Science Park after the withdrawal of Rembold Corp.[3] The Science Park was intended to provide, in the form of an estimated $4M annual rent from tenants, the endowment that OGC sorely needed for its survival.[3] Planar Systems was the first tenant, in August 1983. A campus quarterly magazine, Visions, was begun in the spring of 1985, with historian Norman R. Eder as its managing editor and Georgiana Johnsrud as editor. The circulation of Visions reached a peak of ~15,000. Prolific author Lawrence E. Murr was a professor of MS&E and the vice-president for academic affairs during Carlson's term. Carlson returned briefly in 1986 as acting president of OGC upon Kahne's departure, then resigned as chairman of the board and took a job with Honeywell.[17]

Stephen J. Kahne (1937- ), an electrical engineer and dean of engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), served as president of OGC in 1985–1986.[18] Before RPI, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota and Case Western Reserve University, directed a division of the National Science Foundation, and was president of the IEEE Control Systems Society in 1981.[19] Vollum, upon his death in 1986, bequeathed $14.8M to OGC, which became OGC's first endowment.[8] Kahne worked for the MITRE Corp. and Embry Riddle Aeronautical University after leaving OGC. Lawyer Monford Orloff served as chairman of the board of OGC circa 1986.[20]

James J. Huntzicker was hired by OGC as a professor of atmospheric chemistry in 1974. He served as acting president from 1986 to 1988.[9] The Oregon Institute for Advanced Computing opened in 1988 on the OGC campus, intended to be the SEMATECH of parallel computing.[21] Huntzicker stayed on as a professor at OGC, and joined OHSU in 2001 when OGI merged with OHSU. He became Head of the Department of Management in Science & Technology in 2004, which became the Division of Management in the OHSU School of Medicine. As head of the Division of Management he co-led the development of the OHSU-PSU MBA in Healthcare Management in the School of Medicine. He is a former chairman of the board of directors for Saturday Academy.

Dwight A. Sangrey, a professor of civil engineering at Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University and dean of engineering at RPI, was hired by OGC as president in 1988, "with a mandate to increase significantly the size of OGC's faculty and student body."[8] OGC was renamed OGI in 1989. Sangrey was awarded the State-of-the-Art Civil Engineering Award by ASCE in 1990 for a paper on the reliability of offshore foundations such as oil rigs.[22] FEI Company moved into Science Park circa 1990, but relocated to its present headquarters in Hillsboro in 1992. The 65,000-ft² Cooley Science Center, the first new laboratory building on campus since 1983, was completed in 1993.[23] Sangrey left in 1994, and was hired as an administrator by Pacific University in 2009.[24]

Paul E. Bragdon, a lawyer and president of Reed College 1971–1988, was succeeded Sangrey in 1994, and took on the task of rescuing OGI from a $2M deficit. Bragdon had been a member of the OGI board of trustees. He retired in 1998, but served as an interim president of Lewis & Clark College in 2004–2005. He was awarded an honorary D.Sc. by OHSU in 2004. OGI reported 448 employees in 1994.[25] A master's degree in management in Science and Technology, in conjunction with Willamette University's Atkinson Graduate School of Management, was launched in late 1994 in a ceremony attended by U.S. Senator Mark Hatfield.[26]

Paul Clayton, a professor of materials science and engineering and the campus provost, served briefly as an interim president in 1998 after Bragdon's departure. Clayton's research included tribology and wear, in addition to his administrative duties.[1]

The last president, Edward W. Thompson came to OGI in 1998 from HRL Laboratories, where he led a team of 40 researchers developing technology for defense contracting, telecommunications and space.[27] Thompson became the dean of the OGI School of Science and Engineering and a vice-president of OHSU after the merger in 2001.

OGI considered mergers with OSU and PSU in the late 1990s, but the 90-mile distance of OSU in Corvallis and the large-public-university nature of both OSU and PSU were deterrents. The OGI board squelched a proposed merger with OSU in 2000.[57] OGI merged with the Oregon Health Sciences University (OHSU) in July 2001, with OGI becoming the OGI School of Science and Engineering, one of four Schools within OHSU. OGI president Ed Thompson became the dean of the school. The enlarged OHSU was slightly renamed the Oregon Health & Science University. Although OHSU is the state medical school, it had become a public corporation in 1995; this was closer to OGI's business model than either OSU or PSU.[58] The MS&E department moved to downtown Portland and became part of PSU's mechanical engineering department in 2001.[59] Fragments of other departments also moved to PSU.[60] The OHSU-OGI merger was funded in part by a $4M grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, an organization started by Vollum's partner at Tektronix, Jack Murdock. The award was earmarked to help launch a new biomedical engineering program at OGI SS&E.

• Donald L. Benedict, physicist, 1966-1969
• E. Robert de Luccia, 1969-1971
• Arthur F. Scott, chemist, 1971-1972
• Ira C. Keller, engineer, 1972-1977
• J. Richard Kerr, electrical engineer, 1977-1979
• F. Paul Carlson, electrical engineer, 1979-1985
• Stephen J. Kahne, electrical engineer, 1985-1986
• James J. Huntzicker, chemist, 1986-1988
• Dwight A. Sangrey, civil engineer, 1988-1994
• Paul E. Bragdon, lawyer, 1994-1998
• Paul Clayton, metallurgical engineer, 1998
• Edward W. Thompson, 1998-2001

OHSU sold the 40-acre OGI School of Science and Engineering campus at 20000 NW Walker Road in Hillsboro in 2007 for $44.4M, but also signed a 7-year lease for the property. The campus had 15 buildings totaling 286,000 ft².[61] The OGI School of Science and Engineering was renamed the Department of Science & Engineering within the School of Medicine at OHSU in 2008.[62] OHSU vacated the OGI property in 2014, and it was sold again in 2015 for $15.1M.[63] The OGI degree programs in biochemistry, molecular biology, computer science and engineering, electrical engineering, and environmental science and engineering were moved to OHSU's Marquam Hill complex. The rest went to PSU or were discontinued. Science Park was renamed AmberGlen Business Center. The Samuel L. Diack Memorial Library closed in June 2013.

Companies that have roots at OGI include Cascade Microtech Inc. in 1983, Integra Telecom Inc. in 1984, and electron-ion microscope maker FEI Company.

First M.Sc. graduate Terry Lee earned a Ph.D. in chemistry at the U of O in 1977, and returned to OGC as a post-doctoral fellow in mass spectrometry. He was hired by the Beckmann Research Institute in California in 1982, and was working for the City of Hope National Medical Center in protein research in 1988.[64] First Ph.D. graduate Paul Perry became a computer services manager at Western Geophysical Exploration Production in Texas.[65]

• D.G. Atteridge, Advanced Nanoscale Coatings with Plasma Spray, PN, 2000.
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