Strobel hopes the researchers can engineer better performance from the fungus.

FORBES: Energy & Genius

Jones gives a wonderfully moving performance as the African neighbor, an engineer named Alemu.

WSJ: Review: 'The Call' is a touching adoption saga

In the late '70s, when 24-track recording was possible but there was no reliable way to automate mixing, mixing records was a live performance, with the producer, the engineer and half the band called in to push faders up and down as the track was bounced to the master tape.

ENGADGET: Music Thing: Frontier Alphatrack

Roth, 57, is an engineer who owns four high-performance cars because he is addicted to speed.

FORBES: Lighting up Nortel

When it encounters an outage, bottleneck or other performance issues, it will flag the problem to an engineer and then monitor the steps the engineer takes to remediate the issue.

FORBES: Outage Prevention: Taking Humans Out Of The IT Equation

In 2005 Lankford ditched a comfortable salary, hired away an engineer from Reuters and went hunting for consulting gigs optimizing speed performance for trading firms and hardware vendors.

FORBES: Picking The Fastest Black Boxes