Around the World in 40 Years

By Michael Pound

Throughout their lives, there have been two constants for Steve Miller and Pat Meyer: change and Carnegie Mellon University.

After all, CMU is how they found careers, colleagues and, more than four decades ago, each other.

“Every full-time job I've had, either directly or indirectly, has a thread back to relationships and contacts from Carnegie Mellon,” Steve says. “All the way through, I still retain strong friendships, colleagues and professional relationships with CMU people.”

Those connections took Pat and Steve from their days as CMU graduate students to locales on the other side of the globe and back again. And they’re why the couple continues to support the university after all these years.

“Some decades ago we formally sat down and looked at our trust and wills and said, ‘What are the educational institutions that we want to remember?’” Pat says. “Certainly CMU was one of them.”

Those seeds were planted when Steve, a native of Miami Beach, Florida, and Pat, who grew up in Pittsburgh, both were graduate students in CMU’s College of Engineering. Although they were in different programs, they had friends in common, which led to them meeting at lunch in the faculty dining room of Skibo Hall.

The initial meeting was unremarkable — “This guy comes to join us, and he is interrupting our lunchtime conversation,” Pat says, shrugging — but it opened the door for things to come. A few months later, on a cold morning in January 1982, Steve stopped by Pat’s apartment on a whim to say hello and see if they could walk to campus together.

“We decide we will have some breakfast together, and I’m going to walk my bike into the university,” Pat recalls “Steve was really sure that I should not be bringing my bike. And I thought, ‘This guy is really interesting, but he's such a blockhead about some things.’”

Steve had just ended a relationship a month before and thought he would try to gauge whether Pat had any interest in him.

“I thought, ‘Let's not give up on life after the sad dissolution of this other thing — we're going to move forward,’” he says. “So it's like, ‘What the hell? Knock on her door.’”

They had breakfast together, and then headed to their respective campus offices. Pat indeed rode her bicycle back home that evening while Steve got a ride home from his housemate. But a relationship was born.

Steve earned his doctorate in 1983 and was appointed as an assistant professor at CMU in both the Department of Engineering and Public Policy and what is now the Tepper School of Business, enabling him to remain in Pittsburgh while Pat finished her doctoral studies in chemical engineering.

In 1989 — five years after they got married — they left Pittsburgh for a new journey. Thanks to CMU connections, Steve was able to create a 30-month apprenticeship in Japan with Fujitsu Limited, working in a Fujitsu factory in Oyama, a small town near Tokyo.

The experience could have been isolating, as there were very few English speakers in the area and they were moving with their newborn. But they found the small town’s local community to be welcoming and supportive.

“It was indeed a challenge to manage the baby’s needs in such an unfamiliar environment and with my very limited Japanese language capability,” Pat says. “At the same time, the baby’s presence created many opportunities for us to get to know families in this small town.”

Asia continued to be a draw for Pat and Steve, even after they returned to the United States so Steve could work at Fujitsu’s telecom equipment operation near Dallas. After several years at that facility, Steve transitioned to a new job and company in Maryland, but they had a feeling that there would be another chance to live and work overseas.

That opportunity arose five years later when another CMU connection gave Steve a call and asked him if he would like to work for IBM Consulting in Singapore.

“I knew nothing really about the details of working internally with IBM, especially on their consulting side,” he says. “And I knew nothing about Singapore. But we knew we wanted to go back to Asia.”

“We're thinking, ‘Maybe it's going to be something like our Japanese experience’ — a couple years, two or three years, something like that,” Pat says.

A couple years turned into 23. After a few years with IBM, Steve was asked to establish a school of information systems at the relatively new Singapore Management University. He was soon appointed as the school’s founding dean, starting an 18-year full-time stretch at the university, continuing as dean and then as vice provost for research.

Pat immersed herself in life in Singapore as well. After the December 2004 earthquake and tsunami that devastated much of the region, she was part of a 10-year volunteer effort to provide “pocket money” to school-aged children who were left as orphans following the disaster.

“Over those years, I made repeat visits to many schools in the area, meeting with school headmasters and visiting the students and their guardians,” she says. “We tracked the students through the years, and the project even had sufficient funds to provide support to some students when they went on to college.”

The imminent birth of their first grandchild drew Pat back to the United States in early 2023. Steve followed a few months later after wrapping up a special project with SMU. They now live in Connecticut, and Steve continues to serve as a consultant on applications of artificial intelligence.

And they continue to support Carnegie Mellon with annual donations and have included CMU in their estate.

“It's just our values to do this for an institution that’s meant so much to us,” Steve says.

“CMU really opened a lot of doors and opportunities to me,” Pat adds. “It just broadened my horizons greatly. So the network of people and the opportunities that I had through CMU has meant quite a lot to me.”