The Tennessee Tech Alumni Association announced the winners of the 2004 Outstanding Young Alumnus awards this week as part of the series of awards given annually during Homecoming festivities.

The Distinguished Alumnus, Outstanding Young Alumnus and Outstanding Service awards are the highest bestowed by our alumni association, recognizing those who have demonstrated professional excellence and achievement or outstanding service to the university.

The awards reception and ceremony begins at 4 p.m., Friday, Nov. 5, in the Tech Pride Room, and everyone is invited to attend.

Micro Metals CEO Scott Edwards and Whitwell Middle School teacher David Allen Smith are this year’s Outstanding Young Alumnus award winners.

Scott Edwards. Micro Metals CEO Scott Edwards (business management, ’87) is a young alumnus with a long history of giving his time, attention and resources to Tennessee Tech and showing his appreciation for his family’s generous nature.

MicroMetals has become an industry leader and global supplier of powder metal components to automotive, appliance and garden equipment industries. Edwards joined the company, along with his wife, Mary Alice (accounting, ’89), after graduation. His first role was sales manager and director of quality.

Edwards and his wife, along with his family, received the Tennessee Board of Regents’ Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Philanthropy in 2004 for making significant monetary contributions and being a catalyst for encouraging others to support and attend TTU.

Based on his deep affection for TTU, Edwards has established numerous endowments, scholarships, and projects including the Richard K. Edwards Industrial Engineering Scholarship Endowment, Richard K. Edwards Faculty Development Endowment, and the Micro Metals Inc. Business Management Endowment.

In honor of his father and mother who established and nurtured the family business, he set up the Carl and Virginia Edwards Physiology Lab Endowment. The Virginia L. Edwards Nursing Scholarship honors his mother, a nurse. The Sue and Rick Edwards Education Lab pays tribute to his sister-in-law, Sue, a teacher, and Scott's brother, Rick, who served as vice president of the company until an automobile accident took his life.

Edwards serves on the College of Business Administration Board of Trustees and the Board of Advisors of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies and Extended Education. In his community, he is a member of the Allardt Elementary Advisory Council, and in 2001, adopted the school to provide equipment and supplies to its science department. Additionally, he has set up giving programs for the local library and animal shelter.

David Alan Smith. Few Tennessee Tech graduates can claim to have started a worldwide phenomenon, but alumnus David Alan Smith (education, ’93) continues to be recognized around the world for his creation of a project to honor Holocaust victims.

In 1998 Smith started the Holocaust Group at Whitwell Middle School, where he's a teacher and assistant principal. After learning that Norwegians wore paperclips on their lapels in silent protest during the Holocaust, he led about 500 Whitwell students in a project collecting paper clips to represent and honor the six million Jewish victims.

As publicity grew, millions of paper clips began pouring in from around the world. The project then struck a chord with two White House correspondents for a group of German newspapers who eventually donated an authentic German rail car that was used to transport victims to concentration camps. In Whitwell’s schoolyard, the paper clips and rail car are now on display as the Children’s Holocaust Memorial.

To date, the group has collected more than 32 million paper clips from all 50 states, more than 50 foreign countries, and six of the seven continents.

Smith was featured in a Miramax documentary called “Paper Clips,” which won several awards at film festivals around the world and was nominated for an Academy Award. It also aired on Nickelodeon News, Odyssey Channel, HBO News, Channel One News, CNBC, and the NBC Nightly News. Smith has given interviews for radio stations around the world and was most recently a guest on Jane Pauley’s new television talk show. He also appeared in a National Education Association ad in Newsweek.

At Whitwell, Smith is a football coach, head boys’ and girls’ track coach, head baseball coach and leader of an after-school tolerance education course. In his community, he is a member of the planning commission and the Marion County Leadership program and serves as commissioner of the Sequatchie Valley Conference and president of the park board.