But his biggest concern is the loss of his summer intern.
His nephew, Michael Tatalovich, was planning to work at Ross' company, Virtus Advanced Sensors.
"I was going to have him here, then kind of set him up in a second year to study in Japan," Ross said. "He had the ability to go anywhere, to study anywhere and do really well."
The Robert Morris University student and a friend were killed in a shooting in January. A gunman burst into his girlfriend's apartment in Moon, found the two men there studying with her and shot all three. She survived her wounds, and the killer received two life sentences this month.
While mourning his nephew and his mother, who also died this year, Ross must pilot his company into a novel technology market -- designing tiny motion sensors while trying to stay ahead of bigger chip manufacturers.
A former quarterback who led Aliquippa to a championship in Three Rivers Stadium in 1985 despite standing only 5-foot-9, Ross has faced challenges before. The son of a former Aliquippa mayor, Ross, 40, has followed an improbable arc from his Rust Belt roots to Washington, Tokyo, New York and now back to the 32nd floor of Pittsburgh's landmark skyscraper.
He blushes when asked, then explains that his company's name derives from the Roman word for courage. It's a value Ross wears on his sleeve, in the form of silver logo cufflinks.
"I want to be a Renaissance guy, which means knowing a lot about a lot of different topics and specializing in some," he said.
After college, Ross interned at the Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington and worked at the Nasdaq stock market before deciding his future was in Asia. He spent eight years in Japan, mostly as a strategist for Merrill Lynch, where he specialized in emerging technology, particularly microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS.
Motion-detecting MEMS chips started hitting the market as the activators for vehicle airbags. Now the gyroscopes and accelerometers in MEMS devices are what allow the Apple iPhone to spin a displayed photograph to correspond to how you're holding it. They keep a Segway scooter standing upright, and let gamers play the Nintendo Wii by waving a controller.
Ross bought the licensing rights for several MEMS devices and began Virtus in 2005. He owns 90 percent of the company, which he says already is profitable because of its licensing agreements.
Virtus sensors animate Paro, a baby seal robot plush toy developed in Japan. Paro is given to elderly hospital patients, who derive therapeutic benefits by having something to "care for."
The company is developing other applications for robots, medical products, the automotive industry and the military. He pitches ideas one after the other: a pen that remembers what it wrote, personal airbags the elderly can wear on their belts, bridge-embedded sensors that detect excessive vibration.
Ross is betting Virtus will be the first company to market a single MEMS chip that can detect five degrees of motion: forward and backward, sideways, up and down, turning and rolling.
He hired Mark Boysel this year to be his chief scientist. Boysel has 23 years in the industry, including work at Texas Instruments and a New York MEMS foundry.
Ross is securing $3 million from institutional investors, with a larger funding round soon to follow. He plans to hire 10 more people in the next year to help populate his now-quiet office space.
Marlene Bourne, a MEMS industry analyst based in Phoenix, met Ross at a conference and said she was impressed by his involvement with the Paro toy.
"There are plenty of areas where a company like Virtus could easily, maybe not crack $100 million (in sales), but be a very comfortable company. He's onto something very real, and clearly he's got the technology behind him to support it," she said.
Next month Ross will travel to Hong Kong and Tokyo for news conferences at the company's Asia offices to announce new Virtus products.
Then he'll come back home. Ross said he always missed Pittsburgh and returned partly to be with his family.
"Last summer was the first time in 20 years that I played golf with my dad four weekends in a row. That was worth it," he said.
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