Wise honored with 2022 Grainger alumni award

3/28/2022

MechSE alumna Melonee Wise (BSME '04, MSME '06) is one of six highly accomplished leaders receiving the 2022 Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from The Grainger College of Engineering.

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Melonee Wise
Melonee Wise

MechSE alumna Melonee Wise (BSME ’04, MSME ’06) is one of six highly accomplished leaders receiving the 2022 Alumni Award for Distinguished Service from The Grainger College of Engineering.

Wise is currently the Vice President and General Manager of Robotics Automation at Zebra Technologies, a developer of products and automated solutions that optimize performance and delivery across industries which respond in real-time. She joined Zebra Technologies through the acquisition of Fetch Robotics where she was Founder and CEO from 2014 until 2021. Fetch Robotics specializes in Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) for warehousing and logistics.

She serves as the chair of the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) service robotics group, as a robotics board member for Advancing Automation Association (A3) and sits on the Material Handling Industry (MHI) board roundtable. She has received the MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award, has been featured as one of eight CEOs changing the way we work by Business Insider, and named Supply & Demand Chain Executive’s 2021 Supply Chain Woman of the Year.

Wise was honored with a Distinguished Alumni Award from MechSE in 2016. She is also a member of MechSE’s alumni board and participates in events with University of Illinois’ Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC).

She will receive her 2022 award at a celebration on April 7, joining fellow honorees Joseph C. Geagea and Damon Williams from CEE, Mary T. McDowell (CS), Sundari Mitra (ECE), and Philip K. Ryan (ISE).


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This story was published March 28, 2022.