More than 100 of the top minds in the private sector have participated in the Presidential Innovation Fellowship (PIF) program since it began in 2012, and the 11 new fellows who joined this year include three with Carnegie Mellon University ties and two who are alumni of the School of Computer Science.

Eric Daimler, who earned master's and doctor's degrees from the Institute for Software Research and helped found CMU's Silicon Valley campus, and Erren Lester, who earned a bachelor's degree in computer science before getting an MBA from the Tepper School, will spend the year embedded in the federal government, tackling some of the government's most challenging technical problems.

The PIF assignments of Daimler, Lester and Mitchell Sipus, a Ph.D. student in the School of Design, are explored in a Carnegie Mellon Today article.