Dear OmniQuest™ Community:
It is with much sadness that I write this letter to let you know that Dr. Garret N. Vanderplaats “Gary” has recently passed away. Gary chose to dedicate his professional life to enabling anyone’s design efforts to be made better through numerical optimization, enabling computers to synthesize designs. As a tenured professor at UC Santa Barbara, Gary could have stayed on the academic path teaching theory and conducting applied research in the design synthesis field. While he was an award-winning academician, Gary’s life may not have touched so many others’ lives if he had not taken the leap into entrepreneurship. We have Gary to thank for many things and especially for creating the company that transformed theory into practice – that took his dreams and those of his friend and mentor, Dr. Lucien A. Schmit, Jr. and turned them into reality.
Through Vanderplaats Research & Development, Inc., now OmniQuest™, thousands of designing engineers have been empowered to create more economically and ecologically efficient designs of products that are used every day by hundreds of millions of people. Through OmniQuest™, Gary virtually touched hundreds of millions of people helping to improve the way that they live, work, and play through products used every day from automobiles and aircraft to energy generation and transmissions systems, to medical devices to pharmaceuticals each made better by engineering design synthesis, the product of the mind of Dr. Garret N. Vanderplaats.
Our work at OmniQuest™ will be complete when we have realized Gary’s vision of engineering design optimization being commonplace. Gary, more than anyone else, appreciated that this is a long journey requiring dedicated, passionate customers and colleagues, business, and financial partners. We want you to know that we are committed to delivering on Gary’s vision and will maintain his passion, work ethic, common sense, brilliant intellect, and intellectual honesty as key ingredients for OmniQuest™ success.
Thank you for sharing your life with Gary helping to realize his vision and we look forward to creating a vibrant, brilliant, positive future made even better through engineering design that can achieve its greatest potential through the technology and tools brought to life by Dr. Garret N. Vanderplaats.
There will be a Memorial Service at First Presbyterian Church of Colorado Springs on Thursday, December 9th at 2 p.m.
219 E Bijou St, Colorado Springs, CO 80903/ (719) 884-6100
On behalf of,
Everyone at OmniQuest
and
Stewart A. Skomra
Chief Executive Officer