News Marlin Mickle
EE Professor Makes Commitment
to Establish Two Chairs
Marlin Mickle recently documented the most generous gift commitment the Swanson School of Engineering has ever experienced from
one of its own faculty, and he intends to use the gift to honor his parents’ memory. A recently established trust, along with a bequest through his estate calls for the creation of two endowed chairs in electrical engineering, each expected to be funded with $1.5 million.
The creation of the Ruth E. Mickle Chair and the Howard T. Mickle Chair in Electrical Engineering will give the EE department a tremendous advantage, according to Gerald Holder, the U.S. Steel Dean of Engineering, “Endowed chairs for our faculty help us attract
and retain the nation’s best scholars since we can offer a highly competitive salary and research support package. Competing
head-to-head with the nation’s elite engineering schools takes
considerable resources,” he adds, “and the number of endowed chairs a school possesses is a significant benchmark… it is truly remarkable for one of our own to create not just one, but two chairs.”
For Mickle, who holds the Nickolas A. DeCecco Professorship, the Swanson School of Engineering has been a second home nearly all his life. He joined the faculty as an assistant instructor in 1962, but his connection here started all the way back to 1958 when he enrolled as a freshman at Pitt, majoring in electrical engineering. He stayed on to complete his graduate degrees, earning an MSEE in 1963 and PhD in 1967. During the years between his studies and appointment to the faculty, Mickle worked for IBM. While the work was interesting, Mickle knew his heart was back in the classrooms and labs at Pitt, “It was important for me to know how and why things worked in addition to building new things,” he said.
The motivation behind this gift was simple according to Mickle, “My parents were determined to give me every opportunity to pursue a wonderful and rewarding life.” His father worked as a carpenter and supervisor, while his mother hung wallpaper and was a truant officer. “Even though we didn’t have a lot,” Mickle said, “they did everything they could to encourage my interest in science and engineering, and I think this is the best way to honor their memory.”
For all their support and sacrifice, Howard, who passed away when Marlin was 10 years old, and Ruth helped give Pitt one of its most prolific researchers and a recurring favorite among students in the classroom. Mickle has four patents to go along with more than 150 research publications and 93 funded research projects. But it is his latest research effort that holds the most promise to transform the world of microelectronics. For the past five years, he has helped develop technology that may replace barcodes as the universal identifier for retail goods in supermarkets and department stores, and for tracking shipped products or managing inventories. Using microchips that are 1/50 the size of a penny, these tags can be
programmed and reprogrammed using wireless technology to contain substantially more information than a simple barcode. This particular technology is based on the concept of a crystal set radio deriving its power from the incoming radio frequency energy.
Mickle’s commitment is helping Pitt continue its remarkable progress toward the goal to raise $1 billion in private support through the Discover a World of Possibilities capital campaign. His bequest counts toward both the University’s overall goal and the Swanson School of Engineering’s $100 million goal.
