MSOE Regent Dwight Diercks '90 serves as senior vice president at NVIDIA, a California-based technology company and global leader in AI, supercomputing and visual computing, and inventor of the GPU. Diercks began his career at NVIDIA in 1994 as a senior software engineer. He was employee number 22. In 1999 he was promoted to vice president. Today, the computer hardware and software giant employs more than 10,000 people; 3,500 of whom report to Diercks in his role as senior vice president of software engineering.

Diercks' engineering team is one of the largest at the company and builds software for all of NVDIA’s products, ranging from PC and workstation graphics cards, Deep Learning Accelerators, autonomous automobile solutions, artificial intelligence, cloud computing and gaming appliances.

Prior to NVIDIA, Diercks was a systems software engineer at Pellucid Inc., a PC graphics company, and a multimedia software engineer at Compaq Computer Corp.

Diercks graduated from MSOE in 1990 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering, and received an Honorary Doctor of Engineering degree from the university in 2014. He feels MSOE prepared him well for his career and said, “The learning and education at MSOE was a good foundation for me. The focus on the lab work pushes you to get your hands dirty on all projects, whether you’re an engineer or a manager. It also helped me to form connections. I have worked with many great engineers at previous companies and at NVIDIA who went to MSOE.”     

He became a member of the MSOE Corporation in 2002, a Regent in 2005, and was inducted into MSOE’s Alumni Wall of Fame in 2006. He received MSOE’s Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2015. In his free time, Diercks enjoys spending time with his wife Dian and their dogs Foxy and Dottie.

In 2017 the Diercks' provided a $34 million gift to MSOE to fund the Dwight and Dian Diercks Computational Science Hall.