Board Member

Since 1962, Armand Neukermans has held various research and management positions within the organizations of KLA-Tencor, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, and General Electric. He founded Xros, an optical switch company where he served as Chairman and CTO, which was acquired by Nortel Networks in 2000. He is the author of 45 publications, and the inventor of over 75 patents in very diverse fields.

Armand serves on the board of both public and private companies. Since his retirement, he has been involved in various environmental projects and in fostering the causes of various social entrepreneurs, such as D-Rev, Jaipur Foot, and Benetech’s Landmine project. The Stanford-Jaipur Knee project, initiated and directed by the Neukermans Trust at Stanford, has resulted in a widely recognized $20 knee prosthesis of which over 13,000 are now in operation worldwide. A similar effort is now underway at Santa Clara University to develop a very inexpensive myoelectric hand-prosthesis.

Armand set up the Portola Valley Solar Community project, which became the landmark model for community buying of solar power and helped launch SolarCity, now acquired by Tesla. Over the last nine years, he has directed a group of volunteer scientists and engineers on an innovative climate mitigation effort. In conjunction with the University of Washington, the group is doing technology research for cloud studies and Marine Cloud Brightening with seawater nuclei to cool the earth, an effort initiated with support from Bill Gates.

Degrees

[EE degree] – Louvain University [ME degree] – Louvain University Ph.D., Applied Physics – Stanford University

Awards

Silicon Valley “Inventor of the Year” (2001) Lifetime Achievement Award for Entrepreneurship – BelCham