UVA's Department of Systems and Information Engineering marked its 50th anniversary on September 18 and 19 with two days of events in Charlottesville that brought together current and emeritus faculty, staff, students, and alumni from every era since the department's founding in 1976. Hardshell's co-founders, Hunter Moore and Andrew Schoka, both took part in Saturday's alumni panels, along with Hardshell advisor John Elder.
Hunter, a 2022 graduate of the department, moderated the panel on AI, Cybersecurity and the Future of Systems Engineering. The panel brought together John Elder ('93), founder of Elder Research and an advisor to Hardshell, Mingyi Hong ('11) of the University of Minnesota, Patrick Shaw ('91, '93) of Neovera, and John Nisi ('98), now with a stealth energy startup.
Andrew, a current doctoral candidate in the department, joined the panel on Designing Systems for Impact: Product Development, Entrepreneurship and New Ventures, moderated by Norean Sharpe ('87). His co-panelists were Lu Wang ('11) of Medtronic, Steve Patek of Dexcom, and Dayna Grayson ('99) of Construct Capital.
The department also introduced its new chair, Alfredo Garcia, appointed in summer 2026, who told attendees that systems engineering will shape how humans and AI work together and that the field's tools for decision analysis and optimization under uncertainty apply to risks like skill erosion and systemic failure. That is the ground Hardshell works on. The company, headquartered in Charlottesville, secures the data layer of enterprise AI. It tests what an AI knowledge base can be made to leak, shows which documents retrieval actually returns and to whom, and hardens sensitive data before it reaches training, fine-tuning, or retrieval.
At the closing dinner, UVA Engineering announced a graduate fellowship fund honoring the late Bill Scherer, the longtime faculty member and former department chair who died in 2024. The fund began with memorial gifts after his passing, and the school plans to endow it with support from alumni and friends.
Read UVA Engineering's recap of the 50th anniversary weekend →