Episode 21

Greg Quist and David Drake

Greg Quist is one of the original inventors and co-founder of SmartCover. He served as President & CEO of SmartCover since founding for over 16 years. A long-time member of the water community, Greg was elected to the Rincon del Diablo Municipal Water District Board of Directors in 1990, where he has served for the past 32 years in various roles including President, Vice President, and Treasurer. Rincon’s Board appointed Greg to the San Diego County Water Authority Board in 1996 for 12 years where he led a coalition of eleven agencies to achieve more than $1M per year in water delivery savings. With a background in the areas of metamaterials, numerical analysis, signal processing, pattern recognition, wireless communications, and system integration, Greg has worked as a technologist, manager and executive at Alcoa, McDonnell-Douglas, and SAIC and has founded and successfully spun off several high technology start-up companies, primarily in real-time detection and water technology. He holds 17 patents with several pending. Greg earned his undergraduate degree in astrophysics with a minor in economics from Yale College where he played football and baseball. He earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has held top-level government clearances and is Chairman Emeritus of the Urban Water Institute.

David Drake has served in engineering and management roles since 1974. He was a Member of the Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Manager of Engineering at Oak Industries, Software Unit Manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, CIO and VP at Mitchell International, Internet Service Architect at SAIC, and Co-founder and Enterprise Architect of SmartCover Systems in Escondido, CA. He holds 14 US and five foreign patents. He won a First Place Design Award from the Electrical Engineering Times. He is active in the AWWA, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a past Chair of the Escondido Planning Commission and served as the City of Escondido’s representative to the San Diego County Water Authority, where he was a member of the Administrative/Finance and Engineering committees. He graduated from Caltech in Electrical Engineering and is a Life Member of the Caltech Alumni Association. In 2017 he was named  a Life Member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and was awarded his Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering from USC. In 2020, he was named as the Industry Icon of Water and Wastes Digest.

To learn more about Smart Cover, please visit https://smartcoversystems.com/