Chancellor Sung-Mo "Steve" Kang

Sung-Mo “Steve” Kang (pronounced “Kahng”) became the second chancellor of the University of California, Merced, on March 1, 2007. UC Merced opened Sept. 5, 2005 as the 10th campus in the University of California system and the first American research university of the 21st century.

Having served most recently as dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, Kang is an experienced educator, researcher and administrator with valuable insights from one of the UC system’s newer campuses. In his six years as dean of engineering, he took a nascent program to significantly higher levels of achievement during its second phase of development.

Born and raised in South Korea, Kang earned a scholarship to a university in the United States and became the first in his family to attend college. It’s particularly fitting, then, that he assumed the leadership of UC Merced, which has an extremely diverse student population, almost half of which is composed of first-generation students. He strongly advocates making sure that tradition continues.

Kang’s educational background includes time at East and West Coast schools. He earned his bachelor of science degree, graduating summa cum laude, from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J.; his master of science from the State University of New York at Buffalo; and his doctorate from UC Berkeley. All his academic degrees are in electrical engineering.

He brings a wealth of experience from a long and distinguished career in private industry and higher education. Kang served as a department head (1995 – 2000) and a professor (1985 – 2000) in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, he was honored as the first Charles Marshall Senior University Scholar and directed several research organizations. He was a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at 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.

While at UC Santa Cruz, Kang chaired the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor’s Education Partnership Advisory Committee. He also served on advisory committees for the National Youth Leadership Forum and the Silicon Valley Engineering, Manufacturing and Technology Alliance. Kang has forged important partnerships with the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3), the California Institute for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and NASA's University Affiliated Research Center.

He attracted a $2 million National Science Foundation program for Developing Effective Engineering Pathways (DEEP) for community college students in the Silicon Valley region. He has also served on the advisory boards for UC’s COSMOS and MESA programs.

Kang initiated and established several international programs at UC, including executive programs for managers from Korea and exchange programs with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), Hokkaido Information University, KAIST, Yonsei University, Konkuk University Seoul National University, POSTECH, and the Catholic University of Daegu.

Prior to his career in education, Kang worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he led the development of the world’s first 32-bit microprocessor chips as a technical supervisor and designed satellite-based private communication networks as a member of technical staff.

His leadership in industry is evidenced by his earlier appointment to the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology, a joint federal-state venture to promote California as the premier center for nanotechnology research, development, and commercialization. He served from July 2002 to June 2003 as president of the Silicon Valley Engineering Council, the alliance for engineering leaders in Silicon Valley, with more than 60,000 engineers.

He serves on the UC Merced Foundation as President, the Great Valley Center as Chairman of the Board, and the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium as an executive board member.

Kang holds 15 U.S. patents in electrical engineering and has written or co-authored 11 books and more than 350 technical papers and won numerous awards and fellowships for his work and publications. His current research interests include design of lower-power, very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits; modeling and simulation of semiconductor devices and circuits; and nanoelectronics.

Kang is a Foreign Member of National Academy of Engineering of Korea, a fellow of IEEE, ACM, AAAS, and is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Technology, Who's Who in Engineering and Who's Who in Midwest. In 2009, Kang was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame. He won the Distinguished Korean-American Award (2008), ISQED Quality Award (2008), Distinguished Yonsei Alumnus Award (2008), Chang-Lin Tien Education Leadership Award (2007), Ghandi, King, Ikeda Community Builder Award from Morehouse College (2007), IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award (2005), Chancellor's Stellar Service Award (2003), Outstanding Alumnus Award in Electrical Engineering, UC Berkeley (2001), IEEE Third Millennium Medal (2000), Alexander von Humboldt Award for Senior US Scientists (1997), IEEE Technical Field Award for Graduate Teaching (1996), and many other accolades.

Kang and wife, Mia, live in the chancellor’s residence in Merced. They have two grown children.


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