Alumni Achievement Award
2009 David Baggett (’92), Software Developer and Entrepreneur
If you have used Orbitz to book a flight while your child plays Crash Bandicoot on the PlayStation, your family has shared a Maryland family moment. Both software programs come from the imagination of David Baggett. At Maryland, he studied computer science and linguistics to find out how humans learn to communicate. While pursuing a doctorate at MIT in the mid-90s, Baggett helped create Bandicoot—an adventure game that took computer-based graphics to a new level. Switching gears, he co-founded ITA software, revolutionizing the travel industry by allowing industry partners and everyday consumers to search for travel packages and filter them by price and convenience. Baggett, a trustee of the University of Maryland College Park Foundation and a member of the University of Maryland Computer Science Department Alumni Hall of Fame, has endowed linguistics fellowships and scholarships, which encourage Terps to engage in the same kind of interdisciplinary research that made his own undergraduate experience so rewarding.
Past Alumni Achievement Award Winners:
- 2008 Yuriko Yamaguchi (M.F.A. '79), Artist
- 2006 George P. Pelecanos (’80), Writer, Story Editor, and Producer, HBO Films
- 2004 Gail Berman-Masters (’78), Former Broadway Producer and Television and Film Executive
- 2003 Donald Miller (Ph.D. ’72), Author of City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America
- 2002 Maria Otero (’72, M.A. ’74), President and CEO, ACCION International
- 2001 Brent F. Blackwelder (Ph.D. ’75), President, Friends of the Earth