Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang is an electrical engineering scientist, professor, author, inventor, entrepreneur and 15th 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. Biography Background and education Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. Kang is the first in his family to attend college. Kang’s grandfather, who have fought for Korean independence and experienced Japanese occupation, helped him to immigrate to the U.S. and study electrical engineering to become a college professor. As a distinguished scholar and a leader in engineering education, Kang has gone beyond this dream. Kang received his B.S. from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1970, his M.S. from State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972 and his Ph.D. from University of California at Berkeley in 1975. All his academic degrees are in electrical engineering. Career After his graduation, he has taught at various universities in the U.S., Germany and Switzerland, and worked as a technician and supervisor at AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey. He was a visiting professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the University of Karlsruhe and the Technical University of Munich, and a chaired visiting professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has also taught at Rutgers University. Dr. Kang joined