You can take the Gator out of Gainesville, but you can\u2019t take Gainesville out of the Gator. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Or so it goes with Wally Rhines, a wildly successful businessman, engineer and philanthropist who grew up shadowing his professor father and savoring every aspect of University of Florida culture. And while Gainesville-bred Rhines attended college elsewhere, he remains heavily invested in UF, monetarily and emotionally. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy parents believed that moving away from home is part of the value of a college experience,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the end, my father concluded that Michigan had the best undergraduate engineering program in the U.S., and I concluded that it was right for me.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But make no mistake, Rhines is as much a part of Gator Engineering as Weil Hall, where his engineer father, Frederick, worked and eventually founded the college\u2019s department of Materials Science and Engineering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2016, UF presented Rhines with an honorary doctorate degree of technology \u2013 UF\u2019s highest honor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI come to Gainesville a couple times a year for the Dean’s Advisory Board and the ECE (Electrical and Computer Engineering) advisory board, of which I\u2019ve chaired,\u201d he said from his office in Dallas. \u201cI have a bunch of friends from Gainesville High School. We get together on a call about once a month, so they’re always full of discussion about Florida football.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rhines, now the president and CEO of Texas-based Cornami, Inc., went to Gainesville High School shortly before Tom Petty and earned his Eagle Scout rank in Gainesville. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy challenge on becoming an Eagle Scout was passing the personal fitness merit badge,\u201d he recalled, laughing. \u201cI was a little bit chubby back then. I just trained at the track at the University of Florida, which was right where the end zone is today.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In addition to roaming the halls of Weil Hall as a teen, Rhines held several local jobs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy first paid job at UF was in the Computer Science Department,\u201d he recalled. \u201cWe were based in a small building on Archer Road with an IBM 709 mainframe computer (the last of IBM’s vacuum tube-based computers before moving to solid state switching) along with an IBM 1401. The next summer (1966), I worked for Professor Robert Walker in the Chemical Engineering Department doing differential thermal analysis of materials. My final summer job during my undergraduate years was at the General Electric Battery Business in Alachua, north of Gainesville.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn 1962, for the summer, I worked in the stacks for 80 cents per hour looking for books that were incorrectly filed by Dewey Decimal Number,\u201d he added. \u201cIn 1963, also as a summer job, I graduated to $1 per hour and worked on the UF Library inventory audit.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
He loved technical things and also worked at UF\u2019s chemical engineering department. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe had science fairs, which usually meant you worked with somebody at the university because they had labs and experts and so on,\u201d he recalled. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
After Rhines graduated from UM, he earned a master\u2019s and doctorate at Stanford, and then an MBA from Southern Methodist University. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
At Stanford, Rhines co-invented a blue light-emitting diode that served as a building block for another scientist\u2019s Nobel Prize in Physics. After college, he worked at Texas Instruments for 21 years, leaving as executive vice president in 1993 to become CEO of Mentor Graphics for 24 years (chairman of the board for 17 of those years). During his tenure at Mentor, revenue nearly quadrupled and market value increased more than 10-fold, according to the company. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rhines joined Cornami in 2020. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Cornami is a software\/semiconductor company focused on intelligent computing for fully homomorphic encryption and machine learning. Homomorphic encryption\u202fallows computations on encrypted data without decrypting.\u202fExample: Data can be encrypted and sent to a server for processing without access to the original data or decryption key.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2021, the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) awarded Rhines its highest honor, the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhile he may be best known as a champion of the Electronic Design Automation industry, Wally\u2019s ability to turn around companies and make them not only profitable, but leaders in our industry is no small feat,\u201d said Jodi Shelton, co-founder and CEO of GSA, upon granting the award to Rhines.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As his career progressed and his accolades mounted, Rhines never forgot about UF, particularly the College of Engineering. He established the Walden C. Rhines Endowed Professor for Quantum Engineering, which was given to Philip Feng, PhD. In 2023, and the Rhines Professorship in Hardware Security, given to UF\u2019s Farimah Farahmandi, Ph.D., in 2024 for her hardware security research. Additionally, the Walden and Paula Rhines Endowed Professorship in Semiconductor Photonics was awarded to Volker Sorger, Ph.D. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat gave us a lot of leverage because Dr. Feng was able to hire two additional professors and start a program in quantum engineering,\u201d Rhines said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In ECE, Rhines established the Rhines Professorship I Semiconductor Photonics.\u00a0 And in MSE, Rhines\u2019 foundation also supports the Frederick N. Rhines Chair Professorship and two Rhines Rising Star Faculty Development Funds: the Larry Hench Fund and the Robert DeHoff Fund.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When former College of Engineering dean Cammy Abernathy was looking to expand hardware security studies at UF, she reached out to Rhines because of his experience as CEO of Mentor Graphics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cShe wanted to know who the leaders were in the hardware security because she had decided that was going to be one of her thrust areas,\u201d Rhines recalled. \u201cI put her in contact with Mark Tehranipoor because he was the world leader in hardware security.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tehranipoor arrived at UF and, in 2015, became the founding director of UF\u2019s Florida Institute for Cybersecurity Research, which became the largest operation of its kind in the nation, Rhines said.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tehranipoor considers Rhines a visionary leader in the semiconductor industry. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHis unwavering support and passion for the Gator Nation have been extraordinary,\u201d Tehranipoor said. \u201cHis generosity toward the College of Engineering is evident in his establishment of multiple professorships, which serve as a testament to his lasting impact on UF. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tehranipoor also praised Rhines for his time and expertise on the College of Engineering and MSE advisory boards, as well as his work as chair of the ECE advisory board.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rhines, 78, also serves on five corporate boards \u2013 two public companies, three private. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don’t take much time off,\u201d he said. \u201cI’m pretty well occupied full time, and that’s my intention.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Retirement? Not any time soon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI think my wife would go crazy if I had all that free time,\u201d he said, laughing. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You can take the Gator out of Gainesville, but you can\u2019t take Gainesville out of the Gator.\u00a0\u00a0Or so it goes with Wally Rhines, a wildly successful businessman, engineer and philanthropist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":37041,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"single-templates\/single-sidebar-none.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"featured_post":"off","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[433,447,55],"tags":[427],"class_list":["post-37001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-2025issue","category-alumni-news","category-magazine","tag-alumni"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n