RCEL Ethics Panel

Panel includes:

Peter Buckley is Vice President of Sales for Sulzer Pumps (US) Inc. and is responsible for the sales, marketing, and tendering of Sulzer’s engineered pumping solutions in the Americas Region. He has global responsibility for Sulzer’s Oil & Gas segment activity.  Peter has been with Sulzer for 30 years in various roles of Sales Management, Sales, Applications, and Engineering. He began his career in Sulzer’s engineering department in Portland, OR prior to moving to Houston, TX in 1991. Peter holds a B.S.M.E from the University of Washington, Seattle and earned his Professional Engineers License in Mechanical Engineering in Texas.

Melissa Peterson, J.D. is the Energy Business Unit Counsel-Americas for the Pumps Equipment Division at Sulzer – a Swiss-based conglomerate.  As leader of a small in-house legal department, she supports subsidiaries in the US, Canada, and Mexico in global sales of engineered pumps, supply chain matters, trade compliance, IP collaborations and dispute resolution. Before joining Sulzer, Ms. Peterson was Director of Operations of Strategic Analytics in Santa Fe, New Mexico – a software and consulting startup specializing in “big data” forecasting software for financial institutions.  Ms. Peterson is a Houston native and holds a BA from Rice University, and a JD from The University of Texas at Austin School of Law.

Mark Hoffman ’11 is the Director of Design and Engineering at the Houston Zoo. Mark joined Walter P. Moore and Associates in 2011, where he worked as a civil engineer on commercial, institutional and infrastructure design and planning projects.  In 2016, Mark became a Team Director, managing revenue, backlog, quality and design concepts for a team of ten engineers and drafters. Mark has worked at the Houston Zoo since the fall of 2017, and is responsible for creating and executing the Zoo’s capital construction program. He attended Rice University, where he was a member of Chi Epsilon, the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, and KTRU Rice Radio. He graduated in 2011 with a B.S. in Civil Engineering. Mark is President-Elect of the Greater Houston Chapter of the Texas Society of Professional Engineers and was selected as TSPE’s 2017 Young Engineer of the Year for the state of Texas.

C. Fred Higgs III, Ph.D. is the Faculty Director for the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership, as well as Vice Provost of Academic Affairs and the John and Ann Doerr Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Rice University.  He also conducts research at the Particle Flow & Tribology Lab (PFTL) at Rice University, researching new methodologies to predicting the behavior of granular, powder, and slurry flows in sliding contacts.  Dr. Higgs is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of InnovAlgae, a start-up company that bio-manufactures algae-based consumer goods and products.  A Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), he has published over 100 archival papers while serving  as research advisor to over 100 undergraduate, 30 masters, and 12 doctoral students since 2014.