2018 Hall of Fame Inductees

Haroun is business vice president and client account manager for Jacobs, a Fortune 500 company that delivers solutions for a more connected, sustainable world. He joined Jacobs in 2017 through the acquisition of CH2M HILL, where he served for 16 years in multiple leadership positions, most recently as client account manager for Southern California infrastructure clients. Haroun's experience includes performance and delivery of significant highway, rail, aviation and ports transportation projects in Southern California, with a constructed value exceeding $5 billion. He has completed projects for transportation agencies including the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the San Diego Association of Governments and the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority.

Haroun has served as a national committee member for the ASCE Diversity and Women in Civil Engineering (CDWCE) committees, and as co-chair of the Calmentor San Diego A&E Small Business Mentoring Program, which helps to increase the pool of small businesses in the transportation field. Through this program, he has overseen the mentoring of seven small businesses. He has received a number of technical awards from his peers and has been involved in leadership positions with the American Society of Civil Engineers and other professional groups in Southern California. Haroun earned a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from UC Berkeley and a master's in civil engineering from UCI. He is a State of California Registered Civil Engineer.

Miller began her career in 1994 as an assistant engineer in the Water Resources Group with RBF Consulting. Throughout her 23 years of employment with RBF, she was promoted to project engineer, project manager and eventually vice president, responsible for managing the Irvine office's water resources department. In 2017, Miller joined Hazen and Sawyer, where she is currently vice president and operations manager specializing in planning, design and construction of water supply, treatment, storage and conveyance facilities. She also manages and oversees a team of environmental engineers and scientists for Hazen's Irvine office.

An active member of the UC Irvine Affiliates Group since 2003, Miller has served as the organization's president for two consecutive terms, and also is a member of AWWA, ASCE, AMTA, CA-NV AWWA and the CA Water Reuse Association. Additionally, she served on the Board of Directors for the Orange County Branch of ASCE and has participated in the ASCE Orange County Report Card since 2005. She won an ASCE Engineer of Merit award 2011.

In her free time, Miller enjoys running, hiking, road cycling and mountain biking. She has hiked Yosemite's Half Dome, Clouds Rest and the High Sierra Loop, and this past year, she hiked the Grand Canyon, Rim-to- Rim.

Sanchez is the senior director of product development at Glaukos, where he is working on new minimally invasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS) implants. He is a subject-matter expert for risk analysis and human factors/usability, with over 17 years of ophthalmology research and development focused on glaucoma and retina surgical therapies, from standalone MEMS-based implants to surgical consoles. He has been awarded 22 patents in the field.

His graduate work under Professor David Reinkensmeyer in passive and active robotic, position- tracking systems for use by stroke survivors has led to an awarded patent and has been licensed by Hocoma and marketed as Armeo Spring (https://www.hocoma.com/us/solutions/armeo-spring/). Sanchez is a former UCI Samueli School adjunct faculty member.

Vakhshoori is founder, chairman and CEO of Pendar Technologies, which develops sophisticated spectroscopic platforms for diverse markets, including life sciences, standoff detection and gas analysis. Previously he was founder and CEO of Ahura Scientific, a high-tech venture-backed company that he grew to $70 million in revenue, and which was acquired by Thermo Fisher Scientific in 2010. Prior to Ahura Scientific, he was co-founder of Coretek Inc., a venture-backed company, later bought by Nortel Networks, which brought a new class of tunable lasers based on microelectromechanical (MEM) technologies to the fiberoptic telecommunication market. He also was a scientist at Bell Laboratories.

Vakhshoori has more than 60 granted patents and 50 scientific publications. He has appeared on the cover of Bell Lab News and in several articles in national newspapers for his invention of the Z-laser in 1993. In September 2017, his work was highlighted on the cover of Science Translational Medicine, a high-impact scientific journal. His honors include the Laser Focus World's Commercial Technology Achievement Award; Time Magazine Tech Pioneers; Entrepreneur of the Year/Ernst & Young Hall of Fame inductee; and Inc. Magazine's top-100 companies in the U.S. Vakhshoori earned his UCI engineering degree with minors in physics and biology, then earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley in electrical engineering. He and his wife, Julia Simms Holderness, have two young children and reside in Cambridge, Mass. For the last 10 years, he and his brother have managed the Vakhshoori Scholarship Foundation for promising Zoroastrian youth.