MEMBER PROFILE — March 2007

Manny Ratafia has been a member of IACT for 12 years. He

is currently a member, in an advisory capacity, of IACT’s Board of Directors.

After speaking briefly with Manny and reading some of his biographical materials, we realize that we will barely be able to scrape the surface of Manny’s many accomplishments and interesting connections.

He was born in Israel and at the age of three his family moved to the lower east side of Manhattan. He lived there until just before high school and then moved to Brooklyn. He has lived in Connecticut for 23 years.

After graduating from Cooper Union’s Engineering School he went on to receive three masters degrees two of them “ABT” (with “all but the dissertation” he would have been needed to receive his PhD.) The two “ABTs” were at MIT in mechanical engineering and at Harvard in engineering and applied physics. He also holds a MBA from Dartmouth.

He published a paper in the Journal of Applied Physics on Thermionic Energy Converters. When he was an undergraduate he published a paper on fluid dynamics in the journal, Physics of Fluids.

He says, “I haven’t done much work in the areas of my graduate studies but I suppose the experience changed me for the better.”

Among his inventions is a patented plastics process he developed while at Dow Chemical. He says, “For my efforts I got a dollar, a plaque, and a smoked turkey and that is one of the reasons I decided to go to business school.”

He also invented several software and hardware items related to broadcast faxing and started a venture related to these items.

As well, he started a software company where he designed the interface for software that allows searching on the web and searching on Local Area Networks.

Also, he developed software for “voting” Optical Character Recognition – a way of dramatically reducing errors in recognition by have several recognition processes work at once.

Manny says “Of course IACT has been a good force in my life. I’ve met some very creative, interesting people.”

When asked what he is doing now he states that he is looking at an orthopedic venture and another venture he is not talking about now. We at IACT have no doubt we’ll be reading about this venture soon!

By Mary Ellroy 3/07