LEWIS M KOPPEL

We received an email from Lew:

"Unlike most of the brothers, I was one of the (then) few undergraduates to be honored by being invited to join ΑΧΣ. I was at the university from 1960-63 and lived at the house for the academic year 62-63. This had certain advantages for an undergraduate, such as being freed from restrictions relating to the ingestion of a certain organic molecule.

"After graduating, I went on to Columbia to study chemical physics, and began my thesis research with Martin Karplus. A graduate of Harvard, he heeded the siren call of his alma mater in 1967, and moved there; I of course followed, and so completed my degree in 1971 (awarded by Columbia) although resident at Harvard. I then did a two-year postdoc at Boston College.

"After having thoroughly exhausted my interest and abilities for becoming an academic (which is about all that theoretical chemists were suited for in those days, although, ironically, many are now employed by pharmaceutical firms doing quantum-mechanical drug design work), I supported myself doing free-lance computer programming work around the Cambridge area until, in the fall of 1974, I began getting retooled at the Harvard Business School. Upon graduating, I went to work in corporate planning for the (then) American Cyanamid Company in Wayne, NJ.

"In 1979, I married Dorothy (blind dates can work out) and began work at (then) Kennecott Copper Corp. in New York City, again in corporate planning. In 1981, I moved to the suburbs of Buffalo, as I began working for (then) The Carborundum Company, a Kennecott subsidiary, where I was Director of Corporate Planning and Strategy for the next 9 years. We had our three boys while we were there, and then in 1990, seeking to get out of corporate life, I moved to a small (~20 people) consulting firm in Chicago (living in Naperville), doing mostly valuation of intangible assets, mostly intellectual property. I was certified as a CPA in 1993 and have also been doing expert witness work on damages since then. After some intermediate steps, our firm was sold to Charles River Associates in May.

"I completely failed in getting any of my three children into the sciences. The oldest majored in computer science (well...) at U of Chicago and has been working at a Final Four consulting firm as a systems analyst. The middle one is finishing his accounting degree at Northern Illinois U, and the youngest one just started at Drake U this year (maybe political “science”)."