Alumni Spotlight - Donn Lobdell (ME 58)

From Slide Rules to Silicone Valley: Donn Lobdell's Journey from Mines to Medical Innovation

The slide rule came with bragging rights—and a story Donn Lobdell (ME 58) would never forget.

After winning the West River Mathematics Contest as a high school senior in 1954, he stopped by the hospital to show his prize to his father, who was recovering from a heart attack. “It’s better than mine,” his dad said, admiring the built-in magnifier. That slide rule didn’t just mark a math competition win—it marked the first step in a career that would take Donn from a one-room schoolhouse to Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the cutting edge of medical engineering.

Lobdell’s path to South Dakota Mines (then South Dakota School of Mines) felt almost inevitable. His grandparents had ties to the school dating back to the early 1900s—his grandfather had been an instructor, and his grandmother a student. Still, he didn’t apply until just two weeks before classes started.

He entered Mines in the fall of 1954 as a mining major but quickly began exploring other fields. After trying civil engineering and physics, he ultimately found his place in mechanical engineering. A turning point came after taking thermodynamics from Professor Milan Javonovich. “I was impressed by his approach to both the subject and the broader aspects of its applications,” Donn recalled. With guidance from Professor Elden “E.R.” Stensaas, he managed to graduate on time despite the change in major, taking the maximum course load each quarter.

One of the most formative experiences of his undergraduate years came in his senior year, when he traveled to Milwaukee for an American Society of Mechanical Engineers student conference. Driving there with classmates and Professor Stensaas, Donn remembered learning just as much from the conversations during the long car ride as from the event itself.

After graduating in 1958, Donn completed his ROTC service with the Corps of Engineers. He then began work with Sperry Gyroscope in Salt Lake City, thanks to a connection from a fellow Mines graduate. There, he started a master’s program at the University of Utah, which eventually led to a faculty position and work toward a PhD in physics.

When his dissertation advisor left for another university, Donn’s PhD plans stalled. That’s when fate intervened. A former student he’d once taught—now working at Hewlett-Packard—encouraged Donn to consider HP. The result was a move to Palo Alto and enrollment in Stanford’s prestigious Honors Cooperative Program, which allowed him to pursue graduate studies while working full-time at HP.

At HP, Donn worked on groundbreaking projects in medical imaging, thermal devices, and early calculators. He contributed to the HP 9100, one of the first programmable desktop calculators, and played a role in the development of the HP-35—the company’s first pocket calculator. Though he initially intended to return to academia, Donn discovered deep fulfillment in product development.

He continued pursuing his PhD at Stanford, writing a dissertation under renowned scholar J.N. Goodier. The work stemmed from his experiences at HP, and he completed much of it during evenings and weekends, using HP's own computers.

Eventually, Donn helped develop a promising new method for measuring blood oxygen levels in real time. But when HP leadership chose a different development path, Donn and two colleagues left the company to pursue their approach independently. Although their product was eventually acquired by a larger company, it wasn’t widely adopted due to the need for direct blood vessel access—a limitation that still challenges the field today.

After that venture, Donn joined Cobe Laboratories in Denver. As chief technical officer, he helped lead the company to the forefront of technologies supporting open-heart surgery, dialysis, and blood component harvesting. “We made substantial contributions to the practice of physicians who managed the patients and their care,” he said.

In 1990, Cobe merged with a European company, and Donn stepped away, later consulting before being recruited by Alcon Laboratories, a global leader in eye care. As vice president of Alcon’s medical instrument division, he helped develop a series of successful products for eye surgery and laser treatment.

A decade later, Donn retired. But the impact of his work lives on—he even experienced it firsthand. “Five years after I retired from Alcon, I had cataract surgery,” he said. “I experienced the use of some of the products that were developed under my management.  I am pleased to report that they worked flawlessly.”

Now a major donor to Mines, Donn continues to give back to the institution that gave him his start. “I think that SDM does a superb job of educating and training engineers,” he said. “I feel gratitude for the opportunities I’ve had as a result of my South Dakota Mines education.”

His advice for today’s students? “Learn the fundamentals of your field. Follow those fundamentals. Strange as it seems, when things go wrong, it is because somehow the fundamentals have been forgotten or ignored or bypassed.  One of the best pieces of advice I had as a graduate student was from a professor who said, ‘The best way to learn a subject is to write your own book on it.’”