Dr. John Zahorjan, P.E., Adjunct Professor of Industrial Engineering, rose through the ranks of manufacturing industry, from the 50s to the 80s, to become Vice President of Operations for Fisher-Price Toys. He began his career in 1950 as a Methods Engineer at RCA after graduating with a BS in Industrial Engineering from Columbia. From there, his career took him to Magnavox, then a promotion to Chief Industrial Engineer brought him to F.W. Sickles Company, a division of General Instruments Corporation. In 1957, he was named Plant Manager at Phillips Control Corporation. After six more years as Chief Inspector at the John Oster Company, part of Sunbeam Corporation, Dr. Zahorjan joined Fisher-Price in 1964 where he retired in 1983 as Vice President of Operations. During his tenure as vice president, Fisher-Price expanded its operations from two plants in the US to five US plants as well as two in Mexico and tho others in Europe. In its domestic plants, Fisher-Price grew to employ over 10,000 people, up from 1,200 just a few years before. As the first licensed professional engineer hired at Fisher-Price, Dr. Zahorjan was instrumental in modernizing quality control. He emphasized reliability before it was fashionable to do so, placing value on extending the functional life of products many-fold.

He has also held the positions of Executive Vice President, Assistant Secretary and Assistant Treasurer as well as a member of the board of directors of Q.O. Toys of Canada; Signing Vice President of Quaker Oats Company; Treasurer and member of the board of directors at Montron Corporation; and Chairman of the board of directors at AFI de Mexico, S.A.

But Dr. Zahorjan's career hardly ended in 1983. While at Fisher-Price, he earned a Ph.D. from UB in operations research, adding academic credentials to his already impressive industrial ones. In 1983, he joined the faculty of the School of Engineering at UB and began building an active consulting career. His list of past and current clients is extensive and impressive.

Dr. Zahorjan's industrial and academic expertise provided a basis for the department of Industrial Engineering's Master of Engineering program in Engineering Management. Dr. Zahorjan teaches four highly enrolled classes a year in this program. The positive feedback the department gets from his students and the continuing high M.Eng. enrollments mean that Dr. Zahorjan, as an industrial engineering professor Colin Drury humorously understates, "is doing his typical quality job for the school." Dr. Zahorjan gets immense pleasure from working with students. "I find that students." he says, "are generally better than they know they are, and I want to prove it to them." He believes that students learn best if they participate; he insists that they speak up in class and be prepared to ingest material and then teach it to the rest of the class. "I have a verbal contract with my students: I'll help them work to be successful; but they have to believe they are going to be successful; and they have to keep us at the school informed of their success after they leave here." Dr. Zahorjan has also run the Industrial Engineering's undergraduate internship program since 1983, soliciting projects, matching projects to student needs, and mentoring the progress of these students.

Dr. Zahorjan's management and consulting expertise was one of the foundations for The Center for Industrial Effectiveness (TCIE) at UB. Under his leadership, teams from the Schools of Engineering and Management consulted with many local industries, finding ways to help them profit by staying in or by expanding within the local area. News stories locally have touted the effectiveness of TCIE, crediting the program with saving or creating "thousands of jobs." In 1989 and 1991, TCIE received "Project of the Year" awards from the National Association of Management and Technical Assistance Centers (NAMTAC) for their work with, respectively, SKF-MRC Bearings and General Mills. Dr. Zahorjan was the leader of both projects.

Dr. Zahorjan and his wife Madeline celebrated their forty-ninth wedding anniversary last September. They have three children: Joan, a lawyer in Boston; John, professor of computer science at the University of Washington; and Irene McNamara, who has an MBA in finance management. Dr. Zahorjan and Madeline have three grandchildren.

Dr. Zahorjan wanted to be an engineer since he was a young boy. He says he has always been mechanically inclined, inheriting that quality from his father. He has always, he relates, been interested in learning, has always had a "need to know how it works."

Commending Dr. Zahorjan's service to the school and to the Industrial Engineering Department, Dr. Drury jokes, "In our department, John's 'retirement' is somewhat illusory." His so-called "retirement" has, in actuality, been a second career - a second career in which Dr. John Zahorjan has brought the lessons of a lifetime to the service of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Department of Industrial Engineering, and most especially to the hundreds, if not thousands, of students he has influenced and who now make quality their watchword.