Keith E. Schaefer and John A. Swanson Nominated to Serve on Pitt's Board of Trustees, Robert M. Hernandez Nominated to Serve as Board Vice Chair, and Marlee S. Myers Nominated to Board's Executive Committee

PITTSBURGH-The Nominating Committee of the University of Pittsburgh Board of Trustees today named as new candidates for membership on the board alumni Keith E. Schaefer, president and chief executive officer of BPL Global, Ltd., and John A. Swanson, president of Swanson Analysis Services, Inc. The committee also nominated trustee Robert M. Hernandez, chair of RTI International Metals, Inc., to serve as a board vice chair, and trustee Marlee S. Myers, managing director of the Pittsburgh office of Morgan Lewis & Bockius LLP, to be a member of the board's Executive Committee. Both Hernandez and Myers were elected to the Pitt board in 2002.

Pitt's Board of Trustees has two vice chairs. Hernandez has been nominated to succeed outgoing vice chair Thomas Bigley, retired managing partner of Ernst & Young, and to serve with fellow trustee and current vice chair Suzanne W. Broadhurst, director of corporate giving for Eat 'n Park Hospitality Group.

The full board of trustees will act on the nominations at its June 23 annual meeting.

Biographical information on the nominees follows.

Internet communications pioneer and BPL Global President and CEO Keith E. Schaefer of Indian Wells, Calif., is the founder of that company and also serves as a member of its board. BPL Global is a leading service provider to consumers worldwide of broadband and Internet content via standard power lines.

Schaefer earned the Bachelor of Science degree in Pitt's College of Arts and Sciences in 1971, concentrating in political science and economics. Following his graduation from Pitt, Schaefer served three years as a naval officer and attended the University of California at Los Angeles Graduate School of Business.

Schaefer began his career in sales and marketing at Procter & Gamble, and then at Clorox and Atari. He went on to hold presidential and CEO positions at Computer Curriculum

Corporation, Worlds of Wonder, and NEC Technologies. He then was named Senior

Vice President of Technology at Paramount Communications, Inc., where he established the Paramount Technology Group, which set up early initiatives and strategic alliances with Microsoft and AOL, and where he also was responsible for Paramount's Venture Capital Fund. He went on to cofound Cybernautics, Inc., an Internet communications company specializing in design and audience development; he transformed Cybernautics into a leading customer relationship management company that was acquired by USWeb and promptly went public with a market cap of $2.2 billion.

Prior to establishing BPL Global, Schaefer was a senior partner at Constellation Partners, a professional service and venture capitalist firm serving small and midsize companies, and before that he was founder, chairman, and CEO of The Liquid Group, a private firm focused on mentoring entrepreneurs and investing in their early-stage enterprises. Between his years at Cybernautics and his position at the Liquid Group, he was executive partner of USWeb/CKS' worldwide business development, that company's largest and most profitable unit, generating more than $400 million in annual revenue.

Schaefer is a coauthor of the bestselling book Net Results: Web Marketing That Works (Hayden, 1998), which is used as a course text at many university business schools in North America and is considered to be a standard reference for Web marketing. He is a member of the advisory board of College Track, a nonprofit organization that assists disadvantaged high school students by providing practical work experience. He also serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the Socrates Society at the Aspen Institute.

Schaefer is actively involved in the Pitt Alumni Association (PAA). He is the PAA's immediate past president, a volunteer for the Pitt Career Network, and the host for University on the Road programs for alumni in California. He also is a member of the University's capital campaign steering committee and has established the Keith E. Schaefer Undergraduate Scholarship Fund at Pitt. He was named a Distinguished Alumni Fellow at the University's 2000 Honors Convocation.

John A. Swanson, president of the finite-element consulting firm Swanson Analysis Services, Inc., is recognized internationally as an authority and innovator in the application of finite-element methods to engineering. In 1970-only four years after he graduated from the Pitt School of Engineering with the Ph.D. degree in applied mechanics-Swanson founded ANSYS, Inc., to develop, support, and market the ANSYS program, a finite-element software code he created that is used by a broad spectrum of industries employing computer-aided engineering, among them the aerospace, automotive, biomedical, manufacturing, and electronics industries. Swanson served ANSYS as president, chief executive officer, and director; at his retirement from ANSYS in March 1999, he was the company's chief technologist. Headquartered in Canonsburg, Pa., with more than 40 sales locations worldwide, ANSYS and its subsidiaries today employ approximately 1,400 people and distribute products through a network of channel partners in more than 40 countries.

Prior to founding ANSYS, Swanson was employed at Westinghouse Astronuclear Laboratory in the stress analysis group in reactor design, the core analysis and methods group, and the structural analysis group. It was at Westinghouse that Swanson realized the significant resources companies could save by using integrated general-purpose finite-element software code to do the complex calculations engineers were then doing manually.

In May 2004, Swanson was given what is considered to be the highest award in the engineering profession, the American Association of Engineering Societies' John Fritz Medal. Prior awardees of the Fritz Medal include, among others, Orville Wright, Alexander Graham Bell, Alfred Nobel, Thomas Edison, and George Westinghouse.

Swanson has received many other prestigious honors throughout his career, among them being named in 1986-87 Pittsburgh Engineer of the Year by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), winning in 1990 the Computers in Engineering (CIE) award for outstanding contributions to the engineering and computing industries, selection by Industry Week as one of the Top 5 of the Top 50 R&D Stars in the United States in 1994, election as an ASME Fellow in 1994, and receipt of the ASME Applied Mechanics Award in 1998 and ASME Honorary Membership in 2003.

A loyal and generous Pitt alumnus, Swanson has created at the University the John A. Swanson Institute for Technical Excellence, which houses the John A. Swanson Center for Micro and Nano Systems; the John A. Swanson Center for Product Innovation; and the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) Center for Excellence. He also has established the John A. Swanson Embedded Computing Laboratory in Computer Engineering and the John A. Swanson Fund in Pitt's School of Engineering. In 1998, Swanson was named a Pitt School of Engineering Distinguished Alumnus and, in 2002, was inducted into the Cathedral of Learning Society, which recognizes individuals who have donated $1 million or more to the University.

Robert M. Hernandez retired as vice chair and chief financial officer of USX Corporation prior to becoming chair of the board of directors of RTI International Metals, Inc., which specializes in delivering metal products and services through the use of advanced technology. Hernandez began his career at USX in 1968, holding various other senior leadership positions there over the years, including executive vice president, accounting and finance, and senior vice president, finance and treasurer.

Hernandez earned his undergraduate degree in economics and mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh's College of Arts and Sciences in 1966 and the Master of Business Administration degree at the University of Pennsylvania.

Marlee S. Myers' practice at Morgan Lewis & Bockius focuses on initial and follow-on public offerings, venture finance, mergers and acquisitions, securities compliance, strategic alliances, international business transactions, and general corporate counseling. She also represents companies in growth industries, such as e-commerce, information technology, and computer networking.

Myers earned undergraduate degrees in history and English literature at Pitt's College of Arts and Sciences in 1974 and the J.D. degree at Pitt's School of Law in 1977.

###

06/15/06 jdh