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The Utah Technology Council this week is inducting two native Utahns into its Hall of Fame for a range of contributions, from developing artificial organs and the fountains at The Bellagio casino in Las Vegas to establishing various ongoing companies.
Stephen Jacobsen, a distinguished professor at the University of Utah, and Mark Fuller, a founder of a renowned design firm and, like Jacobsen, a U. alumnus, will be inducted at a banquet Friday at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.
Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle Corp., is set to address the formal dinner and awards ceremony.
Stephen Jacobsen
Jacobsen, 70, grew up in Salt Lake City and graduated from East High School and the University of Utah with a master's in engineering. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before returning to Utah.
He worked with Willem Kolff to develop a wearable artificial kidney. Jacobsen also was a founder of Sarcos, a company he ran from 1983 until its acquisition by Raytheon in 2007. Today, he operates Sterling Technologies, a company he also founded.
In his career, Jacobsen has led more than 359 projects in industries that include medical devices, entertainment and defense. He and his teams also have been awarded more than 200 patents.
Among them are the Utah Arm artificial arm, created in the early 1980s, and robots that were developed at Sarcos for Disney and Honda. An exoskeleton device, an exterior skeleton of metal that gives the user greatly increased strength, was created at Sarcos.
"We developed a company that works in entertainment and medicine and the military, and [that] combined art and science and engineering and design," he said. "We took projects nobody had ever done before."
His company also developed and manufactured robots in Salt Lake City that brought to life Fuller's designs for the waterworks at The Bellagio.
"The robot we built for Bellagio weighed 700,000 pounds and in there were 125 individual robotic fountains that collectively had 1,130 motions that were under control," he said.
Mark Fuller
Fuller, 60, is a Salt Lake City native who grew up in the 17th South and 15th East area of Salt Lake, where as a kid he built projects in his backyard that involved water and constructed ice dams in the winter.
He graduated from Highland High, and his interest in water followed him to the University of Utah, where he earned a civil engineering degree. He also studied the arts, focusing on theater set design. Fuller later earned a master's degree in engineering and product design from Stanford University.
After college, Fuller went to work for Disney, supervising more than 300 special-effects and water projects. In 1983, he co-founded WET, a company that develops water features by combining science and engineering.
The California-based company's projects include the Revson Fountain at New York's Lincoln Center and the fountain at The Gateway in Salt Lake City and the 2002 Olympic Games Cauldron. City Creek Center, the retail portion of the multi-use City Creek development in downtown Salt Lake that is set to open in March, also has WET-designed waterworks.
"We're on the final, final edges of the new City Creek features, which are going to be just incredibly cool," he said.
Fuller received the Themed Entertainment Association's Thea Lifetime Achievement Award and the University of Utah Distinguished Alumni Award. He was named one of Fast Company's Most Creative People in 2010. The New Yorker called him "the closest thing the world has to a fountain genius."
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If you go
Tickets are still available through Wednesday for the Utah Technology Council Hall of Fame banquet at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City (reception at 6 p.m., dinner and awards program at 7 p.m.), with a keynote address by Oracle Corp. CEO Larry Ellison. For information go to, utahtech.org/halloffame.aspx