Sung Mo Kang

Sung Mo Kang

Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang is an electrical engineering scientist, professor, author, inventor, entrepreneur and fourteenth president of KAIST. Kang was appointed as the second chancellor of the University of California, Merced in 2007. He was the first department head of foreign origin at the electrical and computer engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Kang teaches and has written extensively in the field of computer-aided design for electronic circuits and systems; he is recognized and respected worldwide for his outstanding research contributions. Dr. Kang has led the development of the world’s first 32-bit microprocessor chips as a technical supervisor at AT&T Bell Laboratories and designed satellite-based private communication networks as a member of technical staff. Dr. Kang holds 15 U.S. patents and has won numerous awards for his ground breaking achievements in the field of electrical engineering.

He was president of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, founding editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, and an IEEE distinguished lecturer. He was also president of the Silicon Valley Engineering Council and continues to serve on advisory committees for projects in the U.S. and internationally. Also as an entrepreneur, he co-founded a fabless mobile memory chip design company named ZTI, originally in Sunnyvale, now in San Jose.