Mr. Phil Naecker (BS'76 ENG)

Phil is currently in his sixth career. He evidently gets bored easily. After obtaining his B.S. in Environmental Science from Caltech, Phil joined an international consulting engineering firm lead by two Caltech alums, working as a Registered Civil Engineer focused on mathematical modeling of large civil and environmental systems. He next became the firm's CIO and led its 750 employees into the world of modern engineering computing. After bailing out of grad school without a degree, Phil left corporate life to become a consultant on high performance computer systems and databases, moonlighting as a technology writer covering computing trends. After ten years of consulting, Phil founded Gatekeeper Systems, a small software company that delivers a unique spatial data fusion application for large utility companies and municipalities. For the last 15 years, Phil has been the CTO for a large private hedge fund where he has fun applying his engineering background to build novel large computer clusters and industrial-scale datacenters. At Caltech, Phil was among that minority of techers who "had a great time". He has remained continuously involved with the Institute as a volunteer through the Caltech Y, the Gnomes, and most recently working with CMS and the Career Development Center on student mentoring. Phil is married (he met his wife at Tech) and has two grown sons, both of whom work in high-tech fields and teach Phil new things every day.