Igor Alvarado is the Business Development Manager for Academic Research at National Instruments (www.ni.com) where he develops collaborations and strategic partnerships with leading universities in the U.S. in such areas as Energy, Cyber-Physical Systems, Medical Imaging/Devices and RF/Wireless Communications to improve engineering education, advance scientific research and accelerate innovation with support from NSF, NIH, DoD, DoE and other funding agencies. Mr. Alvarado is a Mechanical Engineer (Kansas State University, ’84) and has been with NI since 1999. He is a NSF Innovation- Corps mentor and has more than 30 years of practical experience in successfully developing and growing markets for high-technology products and services in the U.S. and Latin America. He has led the design, development and deployment of real-time, measurement and intelligent control systems that involve advanced numerical methods and algorithms using high-performance embedded platforms. He is an active member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the International Society of Automation (ISA), the American Physical Society (APS), the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Organization of Research Development Professionals (NORDP) and the Ibero-American Science and Technology Education Consortium (ISTEC). Mr. Alvarado has published technical papers and has taught courses to engineers and scientists on instrumentation, control and automation applications in industry and academia; he has also been an invited keynote speaker at leading at national/international meetings, and has served as a consultant and advisory board member for academic institutions, corporations and research laboratories. In 2017, Mr. Alvarado received the prestigious Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association’s (ECEDHA) Industry Award for his contributions to the ECE discipline and to engineering education, making a positive impact on countless students.