The Smartest People In Columbia
By Becky Layne and Gretchen Pressley
Introduction By Sandy Selby
Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking are reported to have IQs of 160, but the intelligence quotient of actor James Woods trumps those famous smart guys by 20 points. One-name wonders Madonna and Shakira both have IQs of 140, the minimum score required to be considered a genius. Experts on human intelligence estimate that Leonardo da Vinci had an IQ of 220.
IQ, like age, is just a number; the world is full of underachieving geniuses. It’s what a person does with his or her intelligence that counts.
Here in Columbia, home of three respected institutions of higher learning and a thriving creative community, we enjoy an abundance of brainpower. But when Inside Columbia started asking the question — “Who are the smartest people in Columbia?” — the same names emerged again and again. They are researchers, entrepreneurs and businesspeople who are intelligent and creative enough to unravel big mysteries and roll out big ideas. Throw an obstacle at them and watch them overcome it. And by all means tell them, “It can’t be done,” because nothing pleases them more than proving that it can.
Is this the definitive list of Columbia’s smart people? Of course not. It would take volumes to mention all of Columbia’s great thinkers, but we’re pretty sure these people could hold their own against Gates and Woods, and even Madonna.
Frederick Hawthorne
In late March, Frederick Hawthorne came back from Salt Lake City with another in an ever-growing list of prestigious awards and validation that his Herculean achievements in chemistry have made him a monumental force in the field. The American Chemical Society honored the veteran chemist with its highest honor, the 2009 Priestley Medal, for his work on boron chemistry and neutron-based treatments for cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. The Priestley Medal is named after the man who discovered oxygen, so no explanation is necessary to explain why winning the award is one of the greatest achievements in science.
Hawthorne was born in Fort Scott, Kan., in 1928. His father was a civil engineer involved in President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s national construction program. Hawthorne’s family moved around so much when he was a child that he attended 23 different elementary schools. Because of this, a lot of what he learned early on was self-taught; he gathered information from local libraries and built his own chemistry lab at home. When he hit college age, he attended Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy in Rolla for chemical engineering. He finished up his undergraduate degree in chemistry at Pomona College in California and went on to get his doctorate in organic chemistry at the University of California-Los Angeles.
Throughout the years, Hawthorne not only dabbled in chemistry but also helped keep his country safe. In the ‘80s, Hawthorne served as a chemist on the U. S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. He also served on the National Academy of Sciences Board of Army Science and Technology, chaired an oversight panel at the U. S. Army Chemical Research, Development and Engineering Center, and served as a consultant to the Defense Science Board Task Force Study on the Detection and Neutralization of Illegal Drugs and Terrorist Devices. Hawthorne has earned numerous awards during his career, one of the most notable being the King Faisal International Award in Science in 2003. He was also the longtime editor-in-chief of the journal Inorganic Chemistry and currently directs the International Institute of Nano and Molecular Medicine at the University of Missouri.
Today, Hawthorne spends his time exploring new chemistry, biology and radiomedicine relevant to boron neutron capture therapy of cancer and dual use in rheumatoid arthritis radiotherapy. Trying to cure cancer is a monumental task, but for the Priestley Medal winner, it’s the next best thing to discovering oxygen.
Brant & Brock Bukowsky
Brant and Brock Bukowsky can spy an opportunity where most people see nothing. When others are too busy mourning their inability to cash in on the American Dream, the Bukowsky brothers are calculating the inputs and profits of a golden opportunity.
Brant Bukowsky, 32, and his brother Brock, 34, are the founders of the VA Mortgage Research Center, a company that Inc. magazine named as one of the 100 fastest-growing small businesses in the nation. Its success has gone bicoastal: it was mentioned in The New York Times, CNN Money and Los Angeles Times. The brothers founded the business not on experience or know-how (“We heard about some guys from high school making money in the mortgage industry, so we decided to give it a try,” Brant says) but on their entrepreneurial, risk-taking spirit that has led them into interesting business opportunities all their lives.
It began in 1997, when the brothers took advantage of a University of Missouri promotion with Coca-Cola in which a sticker on the can could be redeemed for a free ticket to a Mizzou football game. With mental cash registers racking up figures in their heads, the brothers bought the 75-cent cans and sold the free tickets for $10 each. They went on to put $30,000 on their credit cards to launch the Show-Me-Tickets ticket brokerage. This business venture also earned a spot on Inc. magazine’s top 500 small-businesses list. From there, the brothers started a computer repair business, a Palm Pilot software company, the Mortgage Research Center and a vacation rental Web site called LakeRentals.com, which the Weather Channel eventually acquired.
“We’re not too shy about taking some risks,” Brant says. “Some of the things we did were risky, but it would almost have been more risky not to do some of those things. If we hadn’t put $30,000 on our credit cards, we would never have got going on our business. We’ve probably failed twice as much as someone twice our age, but all those failures allowed us to learn quite a bit.”
After two years of losing money, the Bukowsky brothers and the Mortgage Research Center now sit atop the business world. Net profits are increasing, and the company has grown from a handful of employees to 210 with little turnover. The dedicated employees are rewarded for their hard work with massages on Fridays, free lunches on Mondays, various golf tournaments and no dress code. Brant says it’s the employees and the business’s ability to change that garner success.
“I think industries are changing, and if we’re not doing things to try to stay ahead of it, then we’re just going to have to go out of business at some point,” he says. “So we push really hard to change things as much as possible and stay ahead of the curve.”
As long as the Bukowskys can spot that opportunity when others can’t, staying ahead of the curve won’t be a problem at all.
Jim Spencer
Jim Spencer has an unusual way of watching the news. Two years ago at his mother’s house in Georgia, Spencer was watching the I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby trial. But instead of sticking to one channel, Spencer was alternating between watching Bloomberg, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.
As he watched, he wrote down his observations about how each network covered the trial. His mother asked what he was doing, and he mentioned that he often typed up notes on events and sent them to his friends. That could be a business, his mother said.
Bolstered by her support, Spencer put together a business model based on what he noticed about how people used the Web to find news and how they watched news on television. The result is Newsy.com.
Newsy is a Web site designed to give viewers multiple news angles on a single story. Newsy employees monitor footage from several sites. They then put their observations into a brief news video. As their site says, you will see CNN alongside Al-Jazeera, and the BBC right next to ABC.
“We live in an increasingly networked and interconnected world,” Spencer says. “Access to multi-perspective news is now a demand from informed global citizens. There’s more than one side to a story.”
Spencer decided he wanted to place his business in a city where he knew he would be able to find the smartest employees. He set up shop right down the street from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. “It’s like if you were doing a computer start-up and set it right next to MIT,” Spencer says.
Spencer came up with the idea for Newsy in the late fall of 2007. He pitched the idea to the journalism school in December. By May 2008, Spencer had moved his team to Columbia.
But this academic collaboration doesn’t just benefit Newsy. Newsy’s associates are now teaching two journalism classes at MU: an advanced global news class and an advanced online audience development class. Within these classes, students not only get the benefit of Newsy’s experience, they also get to participate in building Newsy’s stories and marketing at Newsy for four to eight hours each week.
“We help teach students how to write and produce for the Web, how you create an audience online, how to market on Facebook, Twitter, in online communities,” Spencer says. “Those are the skills people are hiring for.”
Spencer’s brainchild is so successful because he found a hole in the market just big enough for his idea. Newsy bases its broadcasts on the growing trend of viewing news videos online and using mobile devices to access the Internet. Both of those trends have more than doubled in the last year, Spencer says. His basic business plan is to guess what will happen in the news industry and get the best team together to integrate those trends into their product.
Spencer’s ideas and knack for picking future trends won’t stop now.
“We will constantly be listening to our viewers’ feedback to deliver an exceptional product for them,” he says.
Shubhra Gangopadhyay
Most of us can’t wrap our minds around a unit of science or technology that is one-billionth of a meter, but nanotechnology is responsible for some important advances in health, defense, alternate energy and electronics.
Shubhra Gangopadhyay, the LaPierre Chair and a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Missouri, is the mastermind behind nano research in Missouri. An acclaimed researcher in the fields of material science and physics, Gangopadhyay is a co-director of the MU Center for Nano/Micro Systems and Nanotechnology. She was hired at MU to develop a facility that would be a base of operations for everything nano in the Show-Me State.
“The main goal was to develop capabilities from the whole state of Missouri,” Gangopadhyay says. “Missouri is behind compared to many other states.”
Her new brainchild, the Gangopadhyay Research Group, is an electrical engineering and materials science research facility, the first of its kind in Missouri. The goal of the group is to expand knowledge about nano science and technology by using existing techniques and new research in the field. Their task includes brainstorming new products, methods and techniques, and integrating each into the field. The facility aims to train, educate and prepare students to enter the workforce as leaders in their field. The equipment and products they produce will be marketed around the world.
The group wants its products to be useful to everyone, not just nano experts.
“Many people are working on nanotechnology, but there aren’t that many products available in the market,” Gangopadhyay says.
Students and faculty from the engineering department own the company and will benefit from its success. They own the rights to many patents for equipment and techniques developed in the facility.
Gangopadhyay’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army and the National Institutes of Health. She recently received a $10 million grant from the Department of Defense for research and development with microscopic particles the size of atoms. She and the group collaborate with different departments at MU and with other nano centers around the world. Gangopadhyay’s research is well-known internationally, and she is using her connections to set up global partnerships that will further the nano research cause and help researchers in every country achieve the results they are seeking.
This is an exciting time for Gangopadhyay. Her research group is in the process of getting licenses for the nanotechnology products they have created, a step that marks the start of the product marketing side of the project.
Ed Hunvald
When Ed Hunvald chose his career path in life about 55 years ago, he didn’t know his decision would set him on course to be one of the most successful law professors the University of Missouri had ever seen. In fact, his decision to go to law school was pretty much a process of elimination.
“I didn’t want to go to medical school,” he says. “I didn’t want to be a doctor. I also didn’t want to go into business, so I thought law might be good.”
The MU Law School was lucky. Hunvald completed his A.B. from Princeton University in 1950 and his J.D. from Harvard University in 1953. He was hired onto the law faculty at MU in 1957. For 50 years, he inspired generations of law students until his retirement in 1999. He stayed on to teach part time until 2007.
“Teaching is fun,” Hunvald says simply, when asked how he was able to stay interested in his chosen field for so long.
During his many years at MU, Hunvald taught criminal law, criminal procedure and evidence, required classes for anyone enrolled in the law school; a majority of its graduates had Hunvald as a professor.
“They are both very interesting,” he says, speaking about his law specialties. “Evidence is the best course. It involves drawing fine lines in law, drawing inferences. If students can master that, they are on their way to being successful.
In 2008, Hunvald was elected Missouri’s Best Law Professor, voted on by MU students and graduates who remembered how much they learned under his tutelage. But Hunvald modestly points the success back at his own students.
“They are the ones who had to figure out what I was saying,” Hunvald says, alluding to his Socratic method of teaching — asking questions, but rarely just handing over answers. “They are the ones who did the work.”
Although he rarely practiced law himself, he served on several boards, including the Committee to Revise Missouri’s Criminal Law and the National Conference of Bar Examiners Criminal Law Committee.
But the accomplishment Hunvald is most proud of is his work on the Criminal Code in Missouri.
“I wrote a law review article about the need for revision, and the attorney general at the time thought it was an excellent idea,” he says. The group got the financing it needed, and Hunvald became the executive director of the committee.
“My job was to keep the thing running,” Hunvald says.
Even now that he’s retired, Hunvald still finds things to keep himself busy. “Well, as I tell people, I only have half as much to do, but it takes me twice the time,” he says with a chuckle.
He currently serves on the Supreme Court Committee, which is responsible for drafting changes to new statutes in the Legislature. He is also the retirees’ liaison at the MU Faculty Council, of which he was chair for three years.
Robert Duncan
As a kid growing up in St. Joseph, Robert Duncan was always interested in how things worked. Even though he couldn’t spell very well at age 11, he could repair televisions and radios with ease. In high school, he won national science awards and schooled everyone at the Northwest Missouri State University Math Olympiad. From there, he went on to MIT and the University of California-Santa Barbara for a bachelor’s degree and doctorate in physics, and then eventually to the University of New Mexico as a professor and associate dean for research.
When the University of Missouri went searching for a new vice chancellor for research, it wasn’t a difficult decision to select the St. Joseph science whiz. Duncan had spent years studying how liquids behave at very low temperatures and had served as the NASA principal investigator of a flight experiment called Critical Dynamics in Microgravity. The experiment shed light on quantum liquids, quantum phase fluctuations, cosmology and quantum statistics. Currently, he is working on fundamental physics experiments he would like to see done in space. He is also collaborating with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to make recommendations to the federal government on how best to use resources to understand how nature works in space. His reason for loving things most people can’t comprehend is simple.
“I love what can be,” Duncan says.
As vice chancellor of research, Duncan says he wants MU to become one of the world’s top suppliers of the radioisotope Moly-99, which is used for medical therapies imaging. He also wants to develop a $93 million effort in translational medicine, which takes basic research of life sciences and merges it with new methods of health care. Last but not least, he hopes to enhance MU’s comparative medicine department, which studies similarities and differences between veterinary and human medicine. If there is doubt about his goals, Duncan can tell you why he’s successful.
“There are basically two sorts of people, to be very simplistic: those who fret over their current situation and worry about it and others who try to find ways around the obstacles, keeping their eyes on what they can achieve and what goals they can make happen,” he says. “I’ve always been more in the latter category.”
Annette Sobel
University of Missouri professor Annette Sobel is a one-woman army. In fact, she just retired from a prestigious military career 1½ years ago.
During her years in college, Sobel became involved in the local ROTC group. She got a commission in 1979 and started down the long road to major general, earning dozens of medals and awards along the way. She credits luck to her quick rise in such a male-dominated field.
“I was very fortunate to have some excellent mentors,” she says. “I focused on my people and what was best for them. So it was mostly luck and having the skills I needed in the right place at the right time.”
During her military career, Sobel served as the director of intelligence for the National Guard Bureau and director of the New Mexico Governor’s Office of Homeland Security. She worked with national security and protection and did a lot of military work in defense medicine.
In 2008, Sobel eventually accompanied her husband, vice chancellor for research Robert Duncan, to MU, where she became not only the assistant to the provost/assistant to the vice president for strategic opportunities, but also an adjunct professor in both Family and Community Medicine and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Sobel’s job on campus is to develop collaborations between the university and agencies, businesses and researchers.
In actuality, Sobel seems to have tried her hand at just about everything. Along with her military background, she has trained as both a physician and as an engineer.
“I’ve worked most of my career designing technology helpful for medical and military,” Sobel says. “I have a pretty broad career, been involved in many things. Hopefully, I can use my experience to help the university with outreach.”
But her contributions to her local and global communities don’t stop there. Sobel is interested in helping charities that support women in emerging countries. She served three years on the Girl Scouts of the USA board and is currently a board member on what is called the World Foundation for Girl Scouts / Girl Guides. Sobel believes that empowering and educating women in developing countries is the best way to a secure world in which every person contributes to society.
To that end, Sobel has traveled all over the world to promote women’s rights to health care. She is especially proud of the work being done in Jordan. She’s been a guest of the Royal Medical Services and an official visitor of Brig. Gen. Princess Aisha bint Al-Hussein. She is also responsible for creating a program in New Jersey that encourages high school students to work with children who suffer from learning disabilities.
And after all that world traveling, where did she and her husband choose to settle down for a little while?
“We love Columbia,” Sobel says. “We are delighted to be back in Missouri. It’s a great place. I hope I can contribute a great deal to the university.”
Richard Mendenhall
Richard Mendenhall is real-estate royalty. He not only owns the major realty firms in central Missouri, he also lectures Realtors nationwide on houses and hard work. He is the fifth generation of a family that has prospered whenever homeowners hammered “For Sale” signs into their front lawns.
For Mendenhall, life has always been more about helping than houses. While serving in the Vietnam War as a Green Beret, Mendenhall saw firsthand how some people struggled to make ends meet. Years later, as he moved up the ranks of the real-estate world, from president of the Columbia Board of Realtors to president of the National Association of Realtors, Mendenhall lent his services to a variety of organizations and people. He has served on the boards of directors for the Columbia Chamber of Commerce, the Center for Education and Private Enterprise, the Howard A. Rusk Rehabilitation Center, the Columbia Rotary Club, and the Columbia Industrial Development Corp. He also served as president of the Columbia Swim Club, co-chairman of the Telethon for Missouri Cerebral Palsy and the chairman of Columbia Area Substance Abuse Task Force. He currently helps with the Boy Scouts of America and is president of the Mizzou Flagship Council, which raises money to promote the benefits of the university to state legislators and the community.
“I’ve just always gotten actively involved in community activities and things I care about,” Mendenhall says. “I just try to do everything the best I can do. I’m not very good at saying ‘no’ when people ask me to do things,” he says with a chuckle.
Amid all the clubs, organizations and councils, Mendenhall used his know-how and his prowess in the National Association of Realtors to help people in the field he knew best: real estate. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mendenhall started the Realtors’ Housing Relief Fund, which raised $8.5 million for more than 1,300 families who had a loved one die in the attacks. The fund paid three months of the families’ mortgage or rental payment with no caps.
“It dawned on me that some of these people were going to lose their homes,” he says. “I guess with all that training I had, I felt I had to take some action. Obviously I couldn’t issue arms or anything, but I just thought we had to do something as a national association.”
Mendenhall went on to establish the NAR Hope awards, which provide $10,000 scholarships to groups and individuals who have helped minorities find housing. Today, Mendenhall takes his show on the road to talk about real-estate, leadership and strategic planning in various countries. During his seminars, he talks about the importance of real-estate ethics and why being a Realtor goes far beyond yard signs and open houses.
Dale Cutkosky
Dale Cutkosky is skilled in two universal languages: music and math. Growing up in the Washington, D.C., area, Cutkosky played trombone in the school band. Music was his love. Only years later in college did he switch from playing notes to playing with numbers.
Cutkosky is now a math professor at the University of Missouri where he teaches students the power of numerals via his linear algebra, abstract algebra and algebraic geometry courses. His current research of algebraic geometry can be applied to engineering and computer science graphics. He has also written a graduate textbook on aspects of algebraic geometry, which has been published by the American Mathematical Society. He is both patient and precise, having spent years working on one problem with more than 400 pages of work to show for it. His vast knowledge of Xs and Ys and proofs has taken him to Canada, Italy, India and Spain where he has lectured at math workshops and taught mini-courses. Cutkosky says it was while teaching in these various countries that he saw firsthand that mathematics was truly a universal language.
“There’s so much misunderstanding between different cultures and different people, and when you travel a lot, you really are able to understand how all people are essentially the same everywhere and have the same issues and concerns,” he says.
Cutkosky’s goals are simple: continue to be a successful parent and professor, and try to learn all the different facets of his research. Cutkosky, along with wife and MU math professor Hema Srinivasan, currently enjoys teaching not only students but also their two children both notes and numbers. The children love music, and the family takes trips to Chennai, India, during the “music season.” With unlimited enthusiasm to educate, MU’s musical mathematician has a lot to teach those who want to learn both tone and tangents.