Dean Kanelos '76

Dean Kanelos '76 graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980 with his bachelor’s degree in Metallurgical Engineering and received his master’s in Business Administration from Indiana University-Northwest. Since completing his studies, Dean has acquired 42 years of experience in the steel industry and has worked in product supervision, applications engineering, marketing, and market development. He is currently the Automotive Market Development and Product Applications Manager at Nucor Corporation, a company which he has been with for twenty-one years. Dean speaks regularly at industry conferences where he shares his automotive steel expertise. In both 2019 and 2022, he was awarded “Most Valuable Player” by the Auto SteelPartnership for his leadership and project participation within the organization.

As an alumnus, Dean has stayed in touch with several of his fraters and attended the Lambda Chapter Centennial Celebration in 2017. Dean digitized 590 black- and-white photos from his years at the TKE house for display at the centennial event. During his time as an undergraduate, the furnace room of the chapter house served as Dean’s darkroom. Here, he developed and printed these pictures from negatives he has kept for everyone’s pleasure. Now, they are kept in the chapter archives.

During his time in active brotherhood, Dean was the co-chairman for the Wisconsin Homecoming Committee and Grammateus for the Lambda Chapter. Unsurprisingly, he was also the photo editor for the Wisconsin Engineer Magazine and a photographer for the Wisconsin Badger Yearbook.