Who is Alfred E. Mann?

Alfred E. Mann was born in Portland, Oregon in 1925 and has possessed a propensity for business since he was only 5 years old when Mr. Mann began his first business: a lemonade stand. Lemonade sales were good and soon Mann entered into his second venture: selling magazines door to door.

He earned an early graduation from high school at age 15 and attended Reed College and Oregon State College before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He served 2.5 years as a B-29 navigator during World War II. In 1946, he moved to Los Angeles, California, where he earned B.S. and M.S. Degrees in Physics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Mr. Mann also holds honorary doctorate degrees from the University of Southern California, The Johns Hopkins University, Western University and the Technion Institute (Israel).

This entrepreneurial sprit continued when he developed electro-optical technology while working with Technicolor. When Technicolor determined they did not want to entertain military contracts, the U.S. Army persuaded Mr. Mann to establish a new business in electro-optical technology, and thus Spectrolab was born.

After Spectrolab, Mr. Mann founded over a dozen successful biomedical and aerospace companies. He has taken two companies public and has sold seven of the companies for more than $8 billion dollars.

Alfred E. Mann’s commercial interests have covered a wide range, including insulin pumps and inhalers, glucose sensors for diabetes, cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, retinal prosthetics for the blind, cancer vaccines, cochlear implants, implantable hearing aids, drug delivery devices for tinnitus and neuromodulatory devices to relieve pain, reduce spasticity, and restore function to arms and legs, and much more..

In the spirit of his unwavering passion for improving the quality of life of others, he has principally endowed the Alfred E. Mann Institutes (AMIs) at the University of Southern California, Purdue University and the Technion Institute in Haifa, Israel with plans to endow 10–12 additional commercialization institutes. AMIs are nonprofit development organizations devoted to accelerating the commercialization of advanced biomedical technologies to benefit patients and society.

Mr. Mann is married to Claude Mann and has 7 children as well as 8 grandchildren. He maintains homes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.