Alumni Newsmakers

Starting with a civil engineering degree from Case Institute of Technology, Joel Roth ’58 went on to become a successful manufacturer whose companies had a knack for churning out products more efficiently.

Now he’s paying it forward. In February, Case Western Reserve University announced that Roth had committed more than $20 million to launch the Roth Leadership Institute, designed to prepare students to address the world’s increasingly complex challenges.

“The problems are getting bigger and bigger, and more and more lasting,” Roth said in a press release. “The Roth Institute will provide highly motivated, quality students a broad array of experiences that will help them become leaders who solve problems and change the future.”

His commitment will provide full-tuition scholarships to up to eight students annually starting this fall. The Roth Scholars will receive mentoring and academic and practical experiences that are expected to shape them into leaders. It’s hoped they will go on to address major societal and community problems.

“We are honored by the confidence that Joel Roth has shown in us with his gift,” University President Eric Kaler said in a statement. “We are all dedicated to providing Roth Scholars learning experiences that prepare them to make meaningful change in the world.”

After Case, Roth earned an MBA from New York University and worked at Proctor & Gamble, Ernst & Ernst and Gulf and Western. In the early 1970s he began buying companies in the southeast, including Fulton Supply, headquartered near Atlanta.

By the early 2000s, Roth’s companies offered everything from conveyor belts to drill bits, janitorial supplies to safety materials, as well as a range of engineering expertise. Roth’s teams applied that expertise to help companies’ supply chains and manufacturing become more efficient.

In 2008, Roth published The 20% Solution, a guide for businesses to analyze their operations to identify and realize big savings.

As director of Cleveland’s Department of Building and Housing, Ayonna Blue Donald ’01 enforced the city’s land use ordinances and directed the razing of thousands of vacant and abandoned properties. In her new role, she expects to be way more of a builder — shaping properties into healthy homes.

In November, Blue Donald was named vice president and Ohio market leader for Enterprise Community Partners, a nationwide nonprofit that works to make homes affordable and lead-free, often through rehabilitation and building projects.

Blue Donald is responsible for advancing housing-based programs and devising solutions that help Ohioans achieve housing stability and safety. “I’ve always had an affinity for building things,” she told The Land, an online Cleveland news magazine that profiled her in January. Blue Donald described herself as an engineer and a lawyer passionate about providing safe living spaces.

“You think of your home as your castle,” she said. “There’s so much peace and serenity there. But imagine if you’re homeless. Or imagine if more than half your income is going to where you live, and you can’t afford food, healthcare and other basic needs.”

Originally from Detroit, Blue Donald came to Cleveland to earn a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Case School of Engineering, becoming her family’s first college graduate.

She went on to earn a law degree at the University of San Francisco and practiced law in Texas before returning to Cleveland with her two children. She rose through the city’s building and housing department and led the department from 2017 to 2021.

“We issued billions of dollars of construction values in permits every year and did more than 1,000 demolitions every year,” she told The Land.

Now she is overseeing Enterprise programs that will help to rehabilitate homes, seal their lead paint, and build housing for former prison inmates and former foster children.

A code enforcer is now a home builder — aiming to build them right.

Most people are aware of how Covid-19 strangled the global supply chain, stoking scarcity and inflation. A lesser-known story is the impact that travel restrictions and cost controls have had on quality control.

As the pandemic raged, U.S. companies found it harder to reach their foreign manufacturers, resulting in fewer inspections and maybe hurting the reputation of their brands.

A pair of startup savvy Case alumni think they have a solution, and deeppocketed investors seem to agree.

and Lucas Fridman ’19 are co-founders of Factored Quality, a startup that says it can connect U.S. businesses with quality control inspectors in foreign nations while updating a traditionladen field. In February, the company announced attracting $5.6 million from investors in a seed funding round led by Amity Ventures.

Ghosh, the CEO of Factored Quality, told Modern Shipper that the company can connect brands to third-party inspectors anywhere in the world with on-demand booking, and that the service is badly needed.

“Geopolitical tensions, trade wars, and logistics constraints have forced modern brands to take a decentralized and lean infrastructural approach to manufacturing,” he said. “We’re building Factored Quality to help those brands scale their quality and manufacturing operations with ease.”

Not unlike other services in the gig economy, the platform allows the company and the inspector to post reviews and ratings of each other.

“This team has the right founder market fit to deliver,” Patrick Yang, general partner at Amity Ventures, told the magazine.

Ghosh and Fridman previously founded Workbench Technologies, a supply chain management software company for the e-commerce industry. They launched Factored Quality in 2021 with Justin Seidenfeld, whom they met when they went through Y Combinator, a renowned startup accelerator.

As the men’s basketball team celebrated a magical season, some recalled another time when a Case team surprised.

In the late 1950s, Donald Knuth ’60, MS ’60, PhD, was discovering his love for computer programming at Case Institute of Technology. Knuth famously mastered the school’s early IBM 650 mainframe. At the time, the inquisitive teen was also manager of the school’s lackluster basketball team. He went to work engineering more wins.

As recounted in The Daily, CWRU’s online news source, Knuth devised a system to rank players based on scoring, steals, rebounds, and other performance factors. He fed the data into the computer via punch cards, then shared the insight with Coach Phil “Nip” Heim.

How much the new metrics helped is debatable, but the team did improve dramatically. After going 6-10 the previous season, the Rough Riders in 1958-59 achieved a 13-4 record.

What’s more, the use of an “electronic computer” tapped the public imagination, and the team and its whiz-kid manager were featured on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite.

Knuth would go on to greater fame as the author of the classic, multi-volume series The Art of Computer Programming. "This series of books," the author wrote, "is affectionately dedicated to the Type 650 computer once installed at Case Institute of Technology, in remembrance of many pleasant evenings."