Awards Gala Honorees

Sulman Ahmed, DMD, BA’01 is founder, chairman and CEO of DECA Dental Group. Under his leadership, DECA Dental has become one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States, recognized by the Dallas Business Journal as one of the top 100 companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and the 21st fastest-growing company in the region. Ahmed was named Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year in 2017, was recognized as one of Glassdoor’s Top CEOs in 2021 and in 2023 was named one of the most admired CEOs by the Dallas Business Journal. He currently serves as president of the Association of Dental Support Organizations, a member of the board of advisors of Tufts University School of Dental Medicine and a trustee of the Hockaday School.

Navzer Engineer, MD, MS’02, PhD’04 is co-founder, chief scientific officer and vice president for medical affairs at MicroTransponder, a medical device company that developed the Paired Vagus Nerve Stimulation (Paired VNS) platform to improve the lives of patients suffering from chronic neurological conditions. Engineer’s research on neuroplasticity and the VNS system laid the foundation for the company’s stroke therapy. He has received grants from the National Institutes of Health and published research in leading journals, including Nature and The Lancet, and holds over 40 patents.

Richard Kurjan MA’82 has over 30 years of experience in financial services with an emphasis on cards, risk and core banking products. Now retired, he was formerly a product management consultant at Tata Consultancy Services and previously worked in sales, presales, consulting- or managing-related banking and transformational projects at IBM, Deloitte, CSC (Hogan), EDS, BearingPoint, Kurjan Consulting and TRW. Kurjan has orchestrated or contributed to more than 50 IT sales and consulting projects at leading global and regional banks. This work took Kurjan around the globe, where he led projects in Australia, Japan, Korea and South Africa.

Derrick D. Morgan BA’99 is the executive vice president of The Heritage Foundation, where he oversees the foundation’s policy and advocacy departments. Previously, Morgan was senior vice president of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. He worked in all three branches of the federal government, serving as assistant, special counsel and staff secretary for Vice President Richard B. Cheney under President George W. Bush, and held numerous roles under four senators and one member of the U.S. House of Representatives. In his legal career, Morgan worked at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, clerked for Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater of the Northern District of Texas and worked at the Department of Justice.

Elaine R. Padovani PhD’77 was one of the first female PhD graduates from The University of Texas at Dallas and is currently retired from a pioneering four-decade career in geological science. Most recently, she served as scientist emeritus for the United States Geological Survey, where she had previously worked as coordinator for southwestern strategy, science advisor for disaster information, program scientist in the Earthquake Hazards Program Office and assistant chief for plans, programs and budget in the Office of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Engineering. Over the course of her career, Padovani also worked for the U.S. Department of the Interior and the National Science Foundation. She has published over 40 research papers and given numerous keynote addresses, invited lectures and conference presentations.

Charmaine Solomon BA’01 is a licensed professional counselor and a registered play therapist based in Plano, Texas. Her professional experience includes working with at-risk youth at CITY House and in private practice with Fletcher and Associates. Solomon is also the founder of My Possibilities, a nonprofit organization serving adults with special needs in Collin County, Texas. Her areas of focus include play therapy, adolescents, special needs, adults and family therapy. Solomon is a member of both the American Counseling Association and the Association for Play Therapy.

Sejal Desai MBA’99 is the executive director of the Akanksha Education Fund, a nonprofit that runs 26 public-private partnership schools in India for children from low-income communities. She has been a passionate advocate and supporter of initiatives in the U.S. and India focused on education, hunger relief and women’s issues. Previously, Desai led CFT for Business, an initiative of the Communities Foundation of Texas, where she engaged over 400 North Texas companies to support the region through corporate and employee giving, strategic philanthropic consulting and volunteer engagement. In 2019, Desai received the Greater Dallas Asian American Chamber of Commerce’s Woman of the Year Award. She is a co-founder of the Orchid Giving Circle and the Be the Change South Asian Youth Giving Circle, which have raised significant funds to support the North Texas Asian community. Desai also serves on the boards of The Senior Source, talkSTEM, SMU’s Women of the Southwest and the North Texas Food Bank’s Indian American Council.

The Hoblitzelle Foundation supports capital projects of Texas nonprofit organizations, primarily in the Dallas area. The foundation makes grants to benefit education, medicine, social services, civic need (including neighborhood revitalization, museums, exhibits, parks, trails and gardens), arts and culture, the environment and disabled individuals. Since its formation by Karl Hoblitzelle in 1942, the Hoblitzelle Foundation has given more than 3,400 grants and $258 million to these causes.

During UT Dallas’ early years, the foundation, alongside the now-dissolved Texas Research Foundation, donated nearly 300 acres of land to the University, upon which residence halls and apartments, core campus infrastructure support, multistory academic and research facilities, Hoblitzelle Hall and Synergy Park North now stand. For more than a half-century, the foundation has been a major contributor to UT Dallas, supporting early scholarship drives to attract the University’s first classes of freshman, as well as research at the Center for BrainHealth and the Callier Center for Communication Disorders.