Love and a passion for nuclear engineering brought Karl Stahlkoph to Hawaii, around the world and back again.

As an undergraduate in college, Stahlkoph followed in the footsteps of his brother, studying electrical engineering not because it was his passion, but because he couldn’t think of anything better to do. After school, however, he went to work for the Navy on nuclear submarines and found that this was his true calling.

During his time in the Navy, Stahlkoph was stationed at Pearl Harbor on the USS Kamehameha. One week before a three-month deployment, he met the woman who would later become his wife. He asked her to marry him just two weeks after he returned home from sea. They’ve now been married more than 40 years.

After years of living and working for HP and Ariba, Inc. in Silicon Valley, local boy Kevin Kawahara got a chance to not only come home to raise his family in the islands, but also to continue a rewarding career in the technology industry. It was an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

Now he’s a part of a world-class institution, working as Punahou School’s Technical Solutions Manager. He came on board just as the school was transitioning their IT department from a basic support organization to one that develops and delivers solutions to meet the needs of the school’s board and larger community.

Technology is what Kawahara is all about. His interest in technology began in childhood when he would play home computer games and anything else he could get his hands on. A friend lent him a 300 Baud modem, which got him online at the forefront of the Internet computing craze.

A broken television set in his parents’ home is what started Thomas Lee, owner of The Audio Visual Company, on a career path in the electronics industry. Lee, at the time a high school student at Saint Louis School, had to sit at home and wait for the TV repairman to arrive.

When the young technician showed up, he took a brief look at the TV and said he had to take it in to be fixed. Two weeks went by with no television before the set was returned — along with an expensive repair bill. That’s when Lee decided he would study electronics himself.

Conventional schooling was always a chore for Lee, he recalls, so right out of high school he joined the Hawaii Air National Guard to study electronics and work with the Avionics group on F-102 fighter jets. Lee did earn an associate’s degree in science, however, and later attended New York Technical School for Electronics in Honolulu.