An Engineer, an Innovator and an Entrepreneur: Meet NCE Alumni Alex Khowaylo, Class of 1963

Alex Khowaylo spent his childhood living in a displaced person’s camp in Germany.  During World War II, his father joined the Ukrainian underground and fought against the Soviet Army. But when the Soviet’s won, his family had to flee.  Either leave the Ukraine, or his father might have been killed by the Russians.

Alex and his parents travelled through Europe for almost a year, looking for a new homeland. They wound up in Germany in 1945, where they lived for five years in a camp for people like them who had been uprooted and displaced by the war.  He was 4 years old when they arrived, and 9 when his family was finally able to leave the camp. An ocean liner sailed them across the Atlantic and into the Hudson River, past the Statue of Liberty and into Ellis Island. They came to America, which in Alex’s young eyes and mind seemed paradisal — a promise land.

They lived first in Queens, then later moved to Passaic, N.J., where Alex’s father, opened a book binding and picture framing shop.  Alex helped him in the store, and liked to work with his hands on the books and frames, especially the mechanical tasks.

His family briefly moved to Buffalo, N.Y., then returned to Paterson, N.J., where he attended Paterson’s East Side High School. He later enrolled at the Newark College of Engineering and majored in mechanical engineering. Though he says he was an “an average student,” he excelled as a goalie on the NCE soccer team. His tenacious goal-keeping and talent for shutouts helped his team, in 1960, win the NAIA National championship.  But this self-proclaimed “average student” would go onto have a prominent career in engineering, design, manufacturing and business.

After graduating from NCE, he took a job with a consumer hard goods company, where he learned elements of design and manufacturing as well as how to work well with people — his colleagues. In 1968, he took a job at Howmedica, a company that was part of the fledging orthopedic implant industry.  It was the right job at just the right time – a time when the implant industry was beginning to grow.  Back then, mechanical engineers designed and made implants and Alex had a knack for it.  So much so that he,  along with another NCE grad working then at Howmedica, developed a number of novel implant devices, including a design for a knee replacement that earned them a patent.