Dr. Bruce DeRuntz has spent seventeen years solving the problem most engineering programs ignore: the gap between academic achievement and workplace readiness. As Director of the Leadership Development Program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a Professor in the College of Engineering, he has built a program with a singular measure of success: graduates who are work-ready from day one and advance into leadership roles faster than their peers.

Drawing on a decade of frontline experience as a quality engineer and manager in the automotive and defense industries, Dr. DeRuntz witnessed firsthand how technically brilliant people fail in the workplace, not for lack of knowledge, but for lack of leadership. That insight drove him to transform technical education, producing a program with a 94% pre-graduation placement rate, a 100% graduation rate, and graduates who advance 20% faster than their peers.