Alumnus Gregg Zehr to speak at College's commencement

Gregg Zehr, an Engineering at Illinois alumnus and president of Amazon Lab126 will be the featured speaker at this year’s College of Engineering commencement ceremonies on Sunday, May 17.

Zehr (BS 1976, MS 1977, Electrical Engineering) has been at the forefront of the computer hardware industry since graduating from Illinois. Initially, Zehr worked as a hardware design engineer and manager at several smaller companies before joining Apple. He eventually became the vice president of PowerBook Engineering, managing the design group responsible for all new laptop products. After nine years at Apple, Zehr left to establish the engineering group at VA Linux, a start-up company that combined open-source software and low-cost servers. In 2002, he joined Palm as vice president of hardware, managing the development team that invented Tungsten and Zire handheld products.

In September 2004, Zehr formed a small team in a start-up environment that became Amazon's secret hardware skunkworks, Lab126. There, he led the team that researched and developed the first Kindle e-reader over the course of three years until its launch in 2007. Since then, he has led the company through massive growth; the product line has expanded beyond e-readers to Fire tablets, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and more.

Zehr—who currently holds 15 patents—received the Innovation Award for Consumer Products from The Economist in 2011. He has also provided an oral history to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View about his work in Silicon Valley.

To accommodate the large number of graduates and their families, the College will hold two commencement ceremonies on Sunday, May 17, in Huff Hall (1206 South Fourth Street, Champaign.) The 4:30 p.m. ceremony will include the following departments/degrees: Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering (Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering (Industrial Engineering and General Engineering), and Materials Science and Engineering.

The 7:15 p.m. ceremony will include the following departments/degrees: Aerospace Engineering, Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Bioengineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering (Civil Engineering, Environmental Engineering in Civil Engineering, and Environmental Science in Civil Engineering), Mechanical Science and Engineering (Mechanical Engineering, Engineering Mechanics, Theoretical and Applied Mechanics), Nuclear, Plasma and Radiological Engineering, and Physics (Engineering Physics).