San Jose State University's Department of Electrical Engineering recently announced that it has exceeded its goal of $1.8 million and raised $2.5 million in a campaign to build an endowment fund to recruit junior faculty.

Several high tech companies in the Silicon Valley have donated to this fund, including: Atmel, Maxim, Xilinx, National Semiconductor and Synopsys. Individual donations were also received from Wu-Fu Chen, famed entrepreneur in networking, Sang Wang of Nassda, Pehong Chen of BroadVision, David Lin, Joseph and Betty Axline, Richard Tarver, C. Y. Chen, and Jaw-Min Chang.

The Faculty Development Fund, part of the College of Engineering's Teaching Excellence Fund, provides start-up funds to new professors to develop curriculum, laboratory and research activities.

Background

The Electrical Engineering Dept. is one of the largest departments at San Jose State University, with 880 undergraduate and 290 graduate students. It was recently rated by U.S. News and World Report as one of the top 12 best undergraduate EE departments without Ph.D. programs in the United States.

The department has 20 full-time faculty and 31 part-time industry professors.

Because of the current high cost of housing in the Bay Area, the department has had difficulty recruiting and retaining junior faculty. Young full-time faculty are needed to teach daytime courses and develop course materials and laboratories in critical technology areas. Built upon the department's strong partnership with industry, the faculty endowment fund is one of the solutions created to support these goals.