UCLA Engineering receives
$1 million to
establish graduate fellowships
The UCLA Henry Samueli School of
Engineering and Applied Science has received $1 million to establish
two fellowships that will support graduate students in electrical
engineering.
UCLA Engineering alumnus Fang Lu and his wife, Jui-Chuan Yeh,
have established the Living Spring Fellowship in Electrical
Engineering with a commitment of $500,000. The fellowship will
support graduate students with electrical engineering degrees
from National Taiwan University, National Tsing Hua University
(Taiwan) or National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan).
The Guru Krupa Foundation Fellowship in Electrical Engineering
was also established by a UCLA Engineering alumnus, Mukund Padmanabhan.
This fellowship, with a commitment of $500,000, will support
students who, like Padmanabhan and UCLA Engineering dean Vijay
K. Dhir, received their undergraduate degrees in electrical
engineering from top Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT).
"Increasing the level of endowed
funding for graduate students is a major component of our Enhancing
Engineering Excellence initiative," Dhir said. "Outstanding
graduate students enrich the academic environment, inspire,
teach and challenge our undergraduate students. Gifts like these
will help fulfill the school's mission on many levels."
The school's goal is to raise $25
million in endowed fellowship funds, enough to provide financial
assistance to all first-year doctoral students.
Both fellowships are also a part
of UCLA's Bruin Scholars Initiative, aimed at generating $500
million for graduate student fellowships and undergraduate scholarships
by 2013. The Bruin Scholars fund drive builds on the success
of the Ensuring Academic Excellence initiative, launched in
June 2004 by then-Chancellor Albert Carnesale to raise $250
million over five years to help recruit and retain the very
best students and faculty.
"The financial support I received
from UCLA during my graduate studies enabled me to thrive. I
felt I should pay my success forward to future students to enable
them to benefit from the UCLA experience as I did," Padmanabhan
said of his motivation to make the gift.
Padmanabhan received a bachelor
of technology degree in electronics and communication engineering
from IIT Kharagpur and earned master's and doctoral degrees
in electrical engineering from UCLA. At UCLA, he worked in the
areas of signal processing and analog integrated circuits and,
subsequently, in the area of statistical speech recognition
at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
Currently, Padmanabhan's primary
area of research is in statistical financial modeling for Renaissance
Technologies, a hedge fund management company. He is also president
of the Guru Krupa Foundation, a nonprofit private organization
that supports several educational, social and religious causes.
The Guru Krupa Foundation Fellowship
will support research that, like much of the work Padmanabhan
undertook as a student in the Integrated Circuits and Systems
Lab at UCLA Engineering, focuses on the areas of circuits and
embedded systems, or signals and systems.
Fang Lu and Jui-Chuan Yeh's Living
Spring Fellowship will support students who, like Lu, come from
Taiwanese universities and are studying in the areas of circuits
and embedded systems, or signals and systems. Lu received his
bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan
University in 1984 and his master's and doctoral degrees in
electrical engineering from UCLA.
"We wanted to give back to
UCLA because it had such a deep impact on my success in life,"
Lu said of his and Yeh's decision to establish the fellowship.
Lu is a fellow and technical director
at Broadcom Corp., where he has contributed more than 25 issued
or pending U.S. patents, primarily in the areas of the algorithm
and architecture of digital signal processing and high-speed
analog and digital integrated circuit designs.
Yeh earned her master's degree in public health from UCLA.
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Wileen Wong Kromhout
August 27, 2009
