Alumnus Helped Popularize Mickey Mouse Watch
Across his long and storied career, alumnus Gordon Cooper, PE (B.S. Mechanical Engineering ’50) played a leading role in helping major manufacturers grow their global operations. Among the highlights of his career was his contributions toward expanding the iconic Mickey Mouse watch line first introduced in 1933.
Mr. Cooper is now retired and living in Palm Beach, Florida, where this octogenarian still enjoys hitting the golf links under sunny skies whenever possible.
But during his working career, he was a focused, ambitious achiever who contributed to the expansion of three companies that still exist today: Timex, Shuron Optical and Broan/Nutone.
As a student at Leavenworth High School in Waterbury, Mr. Cooper recalls, one of his teachers had a second job as an engineer at the Brass City’s Waterbury Clock Company. Admiring Mr. Cooper’s skillful drafting work, the teacher suggested he apply to work at the clock company. That recommendation commenced a long relationship between Mr. Cooper and the company that would become Timex. At 16, he began work as a junior drafter translating the engineers’ designs into exact, scale models of the mechanical parts that enable a watch to function. Those were the days before the advent of computers, when everything from architectural drawings and car designs to small devices were painstakingly designed on large pads of paper using a T-square, to be faithfully reproduced by the production team.
As he graduated from high school, World War II dominated global events, and like so many young men, he enlisted in the Air Corps. He explains that back then, aviation cadets had to have two years of college. To help young men fulfill this requirement, they were sent to one of two universities offering intensive, compressed college courses for cadets. He attended Xavier University in Cincinnati, which provided two years’ worth of education in just six tightly choreographed months. “We students were in school seven days a week, day in and day out, without a break,” he recalls. Next up was pilot training in Biloxi, MS and then cadet training in Enid, OK. Mr. Cooper was a pilot until the war ended in 1945.
After returning home to Connecticut, Mr. Cooper attended UConn on the GI Bill and focused intently on his engineering studies with the ambition of building a successful engineering career.
Meanwhile, in his native Waterbury, as the Waterbury clock company struggled during the war, it was bought by two Norwegian families, who expanded the operation and renamed it United States Time Corp. (renamed Timex in 1969).
Storied Career Years
With his freshly minted degree in hand, in 1950 Mr. Cooper returned to his former employer to work full-time as an engineer. Through hard work, he ascended to Chief Engineer and later Plant Manager. One of his fondest memories from his years at U.S. Time Corp./Timex is his work with Walt Disney, the visionary, on the design of the company’s iconic Mickey Mouse watch series. He still has a prototype Mickey Mouse watch among his collection of 200 watches and notes 
that the Mickey Mouse watches were very popular with children. Another dearly-held memory was his role in presenting Timex watches to two of the original seven astronauts, John H. Glenn and L. Gordon Cooper, shortly after their historic Mercury spacecraft flights in 1962-63.
Intent on climbing the career ladder, he left for Rochester, NY, where he joined Shuron Continental Optical, a manufacturer of lenses and optical equipment for the eyeglass industry, in the role of Vice President of Manufacturing. After ascending to President and CEO, he was lured back to Connecticut by Timex to serve as Vice President and later President of Timex Industries.
Like a ping-pong ball being volleyed across the net, in 1976, he was recruited away by another big company, Energy Products Group/Gulf & Western in Illinois, which he left two years later to assume the role of President and CEO of Broan Manufacturing Corp. (now Broan-NuTone) in Hartford, Wisconsin. Cooper remarks that he took the company – the leading manufacturer of kitchen range hoods, trash compactors and built-in household fans – from a small company to a very large corporation. When the company was sold to Nortek, he remained President until his retirement in 1989.
Despite the demands of a remarkable executive career, Mr. Cooper married and helped raise two children, earned his Professional Engineer license (he was licensed in Connecticut, Florida and Arkansas) and became a Certified Manufacturing Engineer, and also managed to earn a certificate from Harvard’s Graduate Advanced Management Program. He also helped to invent two patented technologies – a vacuum die casting process and apparatus and an air-to-ground missile device.
For his accomplishments, in 1986 Mr. Cooper received the Most Distinguished Alumni Award and in 1998 the Most Distinguished Engineer Award from UConn Engineering.
An avid golfer, he moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL after retirement, where he lived next to a golf course and still – undaunted at the age of 87 – regularly enjoys golf.
Drs. 
DOE is committed to increasing the energy efficiency of turbines through the use of thermal barrier coatings, which are highly advanced material systems that are applied to insulate the metallic components of machines operating at high temperatures. For these turbines to become more efficient, however, they must operate at a temperate above current thermal barrier coatings’ limit of 1200°C. Higher temperature thermal barrier coatings would permit engines to operate more efficiently at higher temperatures, thus saving fuel and reducing greenhouse emissions. Alternatively, the thermal barrier coatings can be used at the same turbine temperatures and provide improved turbine component durability.
HiFunda has established a Thermal Spray Facility within the technology incubator at UConn’s Depot campus, moved a senior researcher to UConn, and is providing funds for capital equipment and supplies. The company’s intention is to license this UConn-patented technology and to establish a new company at UConn to further develop and market the SPPS technology.
Dr. Wei Sun, associate professor of Mechanical Engineering. In recent years, four graduate students working in Dr. Sun’s laboratory received prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships, Department of Education Graduate Assistantships in Areas of National Need (GAANN) fellowships, American Heart Association fellowships, and Ruth L. Kirchstein National Research Service Awards. Dr. Sun’s students have garnered numerous Best Paper awards and other honors.
Professor in Sustainable Energy (Mechanical Engineering) has been invited to serve on the Editorial Board for physics topics, for the journal 
Dr. Robert X. Gao, the Pratt & Whitney Chair Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and colleagues have received a three-year National Science Foundation GOALI (Grant Opportunities For Academic Liaison With Industry) grant to support collaborative research aimed at improving spare parts inventory management in the aircraft industry. UConn shares this three-year, $450,000 award with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Pratt & Whitney is the industry partner on the project. NSF developed the GOALI program as a means to catalyze industry-university partnerships and thus help to ensure that “intellectual capital and emerging technologies are brought together in ways that promote economic growth and an improved quality of life.” Dr. Gao explains that the goal of the project is to develop the basic science and practical tools to transform sensor measurements collected from a large number of distributed machines (such as jet engines) in the field into forecasting methodologies – along with inventory policies – for the spare parts required to maintain the equipment. To achieve this goal, the researchers, aided by their colleagues at Pratt & Whitney, will conduct research along four pathways:
health status of specific engine parts before they require replacement (versus the prevailing techniques that indicate the overall health of an engine only);
Leila Ladani joins the Mechanical Engineering Department. Dr. Ladani received her PhD at the University of Maryland in 2007. Her research expertise spans additive manufacturing, manufacturing of nanomaterial and micro/nanoelectronics, material characterization and mechanics, and multi-scale modeling and simulation. Most recently, she was an assistant professor at the University of Alabama.
Department. He received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 2011 and brings expertise in thermal transport physics at the micro- and nano-scale, and engineering of materials at the nanoscale for energy conversion and storage applications. Dr. Pettes was a post-doctoral researcher at UT Austin prior to joining UConn. Earlier, he served as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps.
David Pierce joins the Mechanical Engineering Department and the Department of Mathematics. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 2007. Dr. Pierce’s research expertise includes computational and experimental solid (bio)mechanics, finite element methods, biomechanics of cartilage and arteries, reliability prediction and design tools for MEMs. He was an assistant professor and Vice Head of the Institute of Biomechanics at Graz University of Technology, Austria.
Dr. Barber has served as a professor-in-residence in the Mechanical Engineering Department since joining UConn in 2000. He enjoyed a distinguished career with Pratt & Whitney and the United Technologies Research Center prior to joining UConn. Dr. Barber is an Associate Fellow of AIAA and a member of ASME, and he has served as an Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal for Propulsion and Power. His induction into CASE recognizes his contributions to computational fluid mechanics, his leadership in expanding and managing the professional Master of Engineering (MENG) degree program and oversight and expansion of the Mechanical Engineering senior design program.
to understanding micro- and nano-structure induced transport phenomena in energy, photonics and semiconductor materials. Dr. Chiu’s honors include the Rutgers University School of Engineering Medal of Excellence Award for Distinguished Young Alumni, the ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer, the U.S. Army Research Office Young Investigator Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. He is an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer and the International Journal of Thermal Sciences.
UConn Engineering was well represented during the Second Annual Celebration of Innovation, presented by the UConn Office of Economic Development on April 10th. The gala event (see event photos 
D.E. Crow Innovation Prize at UConn, which helps engineering students turn their entrepreneurial inspirations into marketable products through seed funding. Dr. Crow joined Pratt & Whitney in 1966 and rose to the position of Senior Vice President of the company’s Engineering, where he oversaw 6,600 engineers responsible for the design, development, validation and certification of all Pratt & Whitney large commercial engines, military engines and rocket products. Earlier, he se