Entrepreneurial Inspiration Award

Ping Fu
President & CEO
Raindrop Geomagic

Description

Ping Fu co-founded Raindrop Geomagic in 1996. The company’s software is helping to redefine product design, inspection and manufacturing for custom-made products. Fu’s current passion is to develop and market technology that enables mass customization.

Reasons for winning the award

Switching from Chinese literature to computer science, living half of her life in China and half in the United States, Ping Fu blends art with science and appreciates cultural diversity. Born in China in 1958, Fu worked to support herself from a very early age during the Cultural Revolution. Shut out from school from age 7 to 18, Fu passed the competitive national entrance exam and earned a post-graduate degree in Chinese literature. Fu moved to the United States in 1984 and took odd jobs to pay for her computer science education at the University of Illinois. Fu went back to Hong Kong in the early 1990s and started SuperNet, one of the largest Internet service providers in Southeast Asia. She returned to the United States to start Raindrop Geomagic in 1996 with Herbert Edelsbrunner. Fu took over as president and CEO in early 2001 when the company faced numerous challenges. In the nine quarters since Fu took over as president and CEO, product sales have tripled under difficult economic conditions.

Quote

"It’s a great honor to receive this award from CED. I accept it with recognition of those who inspire me every day – my family and the great people at Raindrop Geomagic who put their intelligence, hearts and souls into the company." -- Ping Fu, President and CEO

History

Before starting Raindrop Geomagic, Ping Fu served as technical program manager at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). In the early 1990s, she managed the Mosaic browser project that led to Netscape and Internet Explorer. Her achievements included initiating the well-publicized software NCSA Mosaic, managing the implementation of the Alpha Shapes™ software, and developing animation software used in the movie Terminator II. Prior to NCSA, Fu served as a technical lead for ISDN software development at AT&T Bell Laboratories. She also worked for Research Systems Group in San Diego, a start-up company that developed one of the first relational databases on UNIX operating systems. Fu holds MS and BS degrees in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She also has a PhD in Chinese literature from Nanjing University, China, and an MA in Chinese literature from Suzhou University, China.

Photo courtesy of BP Studios.

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