Richard Egan

Richard John Egan (February 28, 1936 – August 28, 2009) was an American business executive, political fundraiser, and United States Ambassador to Ireland (2001–2003). Career Egan was born in Milton, Massachusetts, and attended high school in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston. He was a helicopter crewman in the United States Marine Corps during the end of the Korean War, then received a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Northeastern University in 1961 and a master's at M.I.T. He later was on the team that helped develop Project Apollo memory systems for NASA, and worked at Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, and Intel before founding EMC Corporation. In 1979, he founded EMC with Roger Marino, who had been a classmate at Northeastern. The two initially sold office furniture in order to raise money to build the company with only a handful of employees. EMC eventually became Massachusetts' largest technology company and had more than 40,000 employees by 2009. In the 2005 list of the Forbes 400, Egan was ranked as the 258th richest American, with a net worth of approximately $1.3 billion. Philanthropy Egan was a leader in numerous educational, business and technology groups, serving as director of the Massachusetts High Technology Council and Business Roundtable, director of the New York Stock Exchange Advisory Board, and founder of the Hopkinton Technology for Education Foundation in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, where EMC was based. He donated part of his fortune to the Boy Scouts of America as well as health and education groups. He played critical role in the creation of the Maureen and Richard J. Egan Engineering/Science Research Center, dedicated in October 1996 at Northeastern University, his alma mater.