Awards Gala Honorees

Charles D. Davidson MS’80 is a partner at Quantum Capital Group, a private equity firm based in Houston and has more than 50 years of experience in the energy industry. Previously, he was chairman of the board of Noble Energy, having also served as its CEO from 2000 to 2014.

Before joining Noble Energy, Davidson was chairman, president and CEO of Vastar Resources Inc., a publicly owned subsidiary of ARCO which merged with BP in 2000. Prior to the formation of Vastar, he held a number of engineering, operations and executive assignments at ARCO.

Davidson is a member of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the All-American Wildcatters. He has served in various positions in numerous professional, industry and community organizations, including the Independent Petroleum Association of America, American Exploration & Production Council, Gas Technology Institute, National Petroleum Council, Spindletop International, Sam Houston Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, Performing Arts Houston, the Houston Food Bank and the Houston and Southwest Region boards of the American Heart Association. He also currently serves as a director of the Loews Corp.

Davidson holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University and an MBA from UT Dallas. He and his wife, Nancy Gundy Davidson BS’80, were named Naveen Jindal School of Management Distinguished Alumni in 2002 and UT Dallas Distinguished Alumni in 2008.

In 2011, the couple joined with Lifetime Achievement Award winner Naveen Jindal MBA’92 to donate $30 million the Naveen Jindal School of Management, having already established four endowed faculty research positions in the school in 2006 and supported the Jindal School building’s construction in 2001. In 2016, the couple contributed $15 million toward the construction of the Davidson-Gundy Alumni Center at UT Dallas, which opened in fall 2017.

V. Paddy Padmanabhan MS’87, PhD’90 is the Unilever Chaired Professor of Marketing at INSEAD in Singapore. At INSEAD, he directs the Leading the Effective Sales Force Program, the INSEAD Leadership Program for Senior Executives – India and the Certificate in Business Acumen Program.

Padmanabhan’s current research focuses on business opportunities and challenges in developing economies, economic crises and their implications, pricing and supply chain management. His research has revolutionized the way organizations approach supply chain management, providing a simple explanation for the way in which small changes in customer demand can result in large swings in orders further up the supply chain. This work has helped save companies billions of dollars a year while forming the basis for dozens of new areas of research.

Padmanabhan has received numerous awards for his scholarship, including recognition among the 10 most influential papers published in the first 50 years of Management Science, one of the most prestigious journals in management today. He is among the top 250 most highly cited scholars in the world in the field of economics and business.

Shelly Fust Schofield MS’79 is senior client partner for utilities, renewable energy and infrastructure and global co-lead for environmental, social and governance (ESG) and sustainability with Korn Ferry, a global consulting firm. She is a member of the firm’s Energy and Infrastructure Practices, where her clients include public and private energy and water/wastewater utilities, renewable energy development and technology companies, PE infrastructure and engineering, procurement and construction companies.

Schofield is also a co-founder and leader of Korn Ferry’s global Sustainability and ESG Practice, where she works with corporations, private equity, NFP and NGO clients worldwide to identify, recruit and develop leaders to deliver robust energy decarbonization strategies and urgent and transformative climate solutions.

Schofield holds a master’s degree in environmental science from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) at UT Dallas and a bachelor’s in zoology (biology and environmental science) from Miami University. At UT Dallas, she is a member of the NSM Executive Council.

Raghu Yarlagadda MS’07 is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of FalconX, one of the largest and fastest-growing digital asset trading platforms.

Yarlagadda started his career at Motorola Mobility, where he pioneered technical developments that laid the foundation for many popular video streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube. Later, he became the general manager at MIC Electronics before joining Google in 2014 as lead product manager for the Chrome OS team, where he led efforts to scale Chromebooks to more than $3 billion revenue. In 2017, he became the product lead at eightfold.ai.

In 2018 Yarlagadda co-founded FalconX, a cryptocurrency and digital asset trading platform now valued at over $8 billion. FalconX serves a diverse set of institutions, including some of the world’s largest hedge funds, asset managers, retail aggregators and crypto native funds.

Yarlagadda also co-founded Sarada Educational Institutions, a group of intermediate colleges in Vijayawada, India, where he currently serves as chief technology officer. He has served as a board member of multiple organizations, including Fyndo, Dramatize and JoyUp.

Yarlagadda holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a master’s degree in electrical engineering specializing in signal processing and machine learning from UT Dallas. He was named to the Top 25 Cryptocurrency Executives for 2022 by The Financial Technology Report.

Fern Yoon BS’07, MS’08 is an engineer who turned her passion for math and science into business and executive management roles that scale new technologies broadly into new markets and new applications. She is vice president of worldwide quality at Texas Instruments, where she has worked since completing her master’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering — alongside minors in music and business — at UT Dallas in 2008.

As a McDermott Scholar at UT Dallas, Yoon cultivated a passion for elevating women in STEM and carried that passion to Texas Instruments. As a technology executive at TI, she spearheaded educational programs that encourage more females in STEM, including “Introduce a Girl to Engineering Day,” a program she helped run for over 10 years to provide young women in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with exposure to STEM fields.

Yoon is a member of the board of High-Tech High Heels, a nonprofit working to achieve equitable representation for women in the STEM workforce. Outside of work and STEM, Yoon coaches her son’s soccer team.

State Farm is the largest property and casualty insurance provider and the largest auto insurance provider in the United States, ranked 39th in the 2024 Fortune 500. Founded in 1922, the company operates as a mutual insurance company owned by its policyholders and operating on a set of core values: quality service and relationships, integrity and financial strength.

State Farm has been one of UT Dallas’ most engaged corporate partners since 2014. Through a combination of financial support and employee volunteerism, State Farm has positively impacted students and programs across the University. The company has donated more than $2.7 million to UT Dallas, endowing scholarships, boosting student success programming, increasing access to higher education for veterans and students from underrepresented backgrounds and helping prepare future leaders in engineering.