Mario Cardullo

“When you solve a problem, it’s not because the sky suddenly opens up. Solutions come from putting ideas together.” So says Mario Cardullo [he/him], a Brooklyn-born, Tandon-trained engineer who’s put more than a few ideas together. The son of Italian immigrants, Cardullo leveraged a natural curiosity about how things work, an immigrant’s hustle (he put himself through college by selling shoes), and a gift for making connections, to help engineer technologies that are today so ubiquitous that it’s hard to imagine life without them.

Dr. Cardullo is, for starters, considered the father of RFID—that’s “Radio Frequency Identification,” the technology responsible for your EZ-Pass. He had a flash of how such a system could operate when a chance conversation with an IBM executive reminded him of a museum exhibit he’d seen as a kid about allied-plane identification methods. (There’s that knack for making connections.) RFID might be at the top of Cardullo’s greatest-hits list, but he also laid the groundwork for commercial GPS with his work, in the late 60s, on maritime satellites. Oh, and Cardullo’s variable-thrust rocket-engine designs served as a blueprint for the Apollo lunar lander. His work has, time and time again, changed the world and made us safer.

At 91, Cardullo is still writing and working on his designs, including a patented nano-RFID device, which is smaller than a human cell. He’s started and helmed multiple cutting-edge technology companies, and published nearly 200 scholarly papers, books and articles. And while his RFID patent expired well before the technology took the world by storm (Cardullo never saw a dime from the EZ-Pass revolution, now a multibillion-dollar industry), he has no regrets. “I’ve been told,” he says, “that my work has saved a hundred thousand lives. How do you monetize something like that?”