Following more than three decades of hard work and success, Ming Hsieh, a USC trustee and alumnus, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, one of the highest professional honors accorded an engineer.
“I am very humbled and excited to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering," said Hsieh. "It is a great honor to be recognized by the highest national engineering organization. I deeply appreciate and would like to share this recognition with my beloved USC, industrial colleagues and family and friends for the education, inspiration and support provided to me during the past 35 years.”
Hsieh is a self-made entrepreneur from China. His life in this country began with a dream, planted long before he ever left his mainland China hometown of Shenyang, in the northeastern province of Liaoning, to seek a better education and make a difference in the world.
His uncle, P.Y. Hsieh, had left China and earned an M.S. in mechanical engineering at USC in 1952, fueling Hsieh's aspirations to follow. In 1980, after two years of college at the South China Institute of Technology, now known as the South China University of Technology, in Guangzhou, Hsieh used the inheritance that his grandparents in Taiwan had left him to emigrate and enroll in USC’s engineering program. He was a 24-year-old transfer student. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1983 and a Master of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1984.
Soon after graduating, Hsieh founded AMAX Information Technologies, a computer server and storage systems company, in 1985. Five years later, he founded the Pasadena-based Cogent Inc., which revolutionized automated fingerprint identification. He is currently the president and founder of Fulgent Therapeutics, which focuses on cancer drug research, personalized cancer treatments and genetic diagnostics.
In 2006, Hsieh endowed the USC Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering, the USC Viterbi School's largest and oldest department. Additionally, in 2010, Hsieh established the Ming Hsieh Institute for Engineering Medicine for Cancer, that supports research at the intersection of engineering, medicine and science in the quest to cure cancer.
“It is really wonderful to see that Ming Hsieh’s technological and engineering impact is aptly recognized through his election to the NAE,” said USC Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. “All of us at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering — and particularly in electrical engineering, the department which carries his name — are thrilled by this recognition.”
The Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering has flourished with the generous support of Hsieh. Today, its work is vitally important and critical to the advancement of the information age, defining the forefront of research in a number of important areas: circuits; antenna networks; bio-signal processing; computer architecture; very large-scale integration and computer-aided design; computer networks; control systems; high-speed switching architectures; signal, image and multimedia processing; nanotechnology; optical communications; photonics; and quantum information processing.
Additionally, the endowment has focused on enhancing academic and research programs within the Ming Hsieh Department by supporting innovative activities, hosting top research visitors, and positioning the Department at the forefront of leadership in the study of emerging fields within electrical engineering.
Assets
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USC trustee and alumnus Ming Hsieh (Credit: USC Viterbi) |
About the USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Engineering Studies began at the University of Southern California in 1905. Nearly a century later, the Viterbi School of Engineering received a naming gift in 2004 from alumnus Andrew J. Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm now key to cell phone technology and numerous data applications. Consistently ranked among the top graduate programs in the world, the school enrolls more than 6,500 undergraduate and graduate students, taught by 180 tenured and tenure-track faculty, with 62 endowed chairs and professorships.http://viterbi.usc.edu
Contact
Megan Hazle - 213-821-1887 or hazle@usc.edu
