Irwin Mark Jacobs (born October 18, 1933) is an American electrical engineer and businessman. He is a co-founder and former chairman of Qualcomm, and chair of the board of trustees of the Salk Institute. As of 2019, Jacobs has an estimated net worth of $1.2 billion.
Jacobs was assistant and associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT from 1959 to 1966 and professor of computer science and engineering at University of California San Diego (UCSD) from 1966 to 1972. With John Wozencraft, he co-authored a textbook entitled Principles of Communication Engineering in 1965, which is still in use today. UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering is named for him and his wife.[5]
In 1985, Jacobs went on to co-found Qualcomm Inc. along with Viterbi, Harvey White, Adelia Coffman, Andrew Cohen, Klein Gilhousen, and Franklin Antonio. Qualcomm developed the OmniTRACS system that was deemed one of the world's most "technologically advanced two-way mobile satellite communications and tracking systems". He pioneered these systems which use the communication bandwidth more efficiently than the older fixed time-sliced TDMA technology. Its Code-Division Multiple Access (CDMA) has been adopted as one of two digital standards (the other being Global System for Mobile Communications [GSM]) used in the next generation of cellular telephones in North America at the time. Jacobs announced in March 2009 that he had stepped down as chairman of Qualcomm and that Paul E. Jacobs, his son, would succeed him.[5]
Irwin Jacobs receiving his honorary doctorate of engineering (honoris causa) from National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, 2014
In 1980, Jacobs was the co-recipient, with Andrew J. Viterbi, the 1980 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) biannual award. In 1992, Jacobs was awarded the Entrepreneur of the Year Award in High Technology by the Institute of American Entrepreneurs, and in May 1993, he was awarded the American Electronics Association (AEA) "Inventing America's Future" award.[5]
In 1994, he was also awarded the "Cornell University Entrepreneur of the Year" Award.
In 1995, Jacobs won the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal – For outstanding contributions to telecommunications, including leadership, theory, practice, and product development.[5]
In 2000, Jacobs was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame for his role in the cellular industry.[7]
In 2001, Jacobs was awarded the Bower Award for Business Leadership in 2001. [5][8]
In 2004, Jacobs and his wife Joan Jacobs are contributors to public arts and education in San Diego. For this, Jacobs was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Award for Corporate Citizenship in 2004.
In 2005, Jacobs delivered the 2005 commencement speech at MIT,[9] and the 2008 commencement speech at the Jacobs School of Engineering.[10]
In 2007, Jacobs and Viterbi received the 2007 IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award, for "fundamental contributions, innovation, and leadership that enabled the growth of wireless telecommunications".[11]
In 2009, he was named a Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science).[12]
In 2013, he received the Medal of Honor from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which is the highest honor an engineer can receive from his or her peers. The IEEE said he was receiving the award not just for his innovations but for "the ability to translate innovation into industry applications, time after time after time."[17]
In November 2013, he was conferred the title of "Distinguished Honor Chair Professor" of National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.[18][19]
In 2014, Jacobs was elected to the Computer History Museum as a Fellow – for "his pioneering work in digital mobile telephony, data and communications, and technology".[23]
In 2015, Jacobs received the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.[24]
In 2017, Jacobs received an honorary Doctor of Engineering and Technology degree from Yale University. [25]
In 2017, Jacobs and Viterbi received the IEEE Milestone Award for their CDMA and spread spectrum development that drives the mobile industry.[26]
In February 2018, he was appointed an honorary advisor to the president of National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan.
In March 2018, he was named the winner of IMEC Lifetime of Innovation Award.[27]
As the co-founder and chairman of Qualcomm, Jacobs has contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the field of education through donations and grants to several schools and organizations. His donations have gone mostly towards fellowships and scholarships for students in the fields of engineering and computer science, as well as the arts, and are focused in the San Diego area.[30][31]The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2011 dubbed him the "Philanthropist in Chief".[32]
As of September 2009, Jacobs had donated a total of $31million to his post graduate degrees school, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had donated $15million and another $110million to the University of California San Diego where he was a professor of computer science and engineering for several years. Additionally, he has donated $62million total to the American Society for Technion, his alma mater Cornell University, and KPBS Radio and Television.[30] His KPBS donation was in the sum of $1million, and the multi-year gift is designed to strengthen the station's local journalism and news collaboration with NPR. The Jacobs have donated funds to build studios for KPBS and have supported the station for decades.[33] In 2010, he funded an engineering study on how to fulfill a proposal to remove automobiles from the Plaza de Panama in San Diego's Balboa Park and agreed to chair a committee to study the proposal and develop private funding for it.[34]
Irwin and Joan Jacobs donated $5 million in 2002 to the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego downtown location for the renovation of the former train station baggage building which was named in their honor.[35]
Jacobs has pledged $120million for the San Diego Symphony, a similar amount for the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego, $100million for UCSD's future specialty hospital and $20million to replace the central library in downtown San Diego. Also in 2005, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Center for La Jolla Playhouse was named after Jacobs and his wife in honor of their philanthropic contributions towards the institution's development.[31][36] In April 2013, the Jacobs donated $133 million to the joint Cornell Tech campus development on Roosevelt Island in New York City.
The Joan and Irwin Jacobs TIX Institute at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, was sponsored by Jacobs with the mission of encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship.[37]
The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation announced in January 2022 that it was renaming its list of pending United States Supreme Court cases the "Joan and Irwin Jacobs Supreme Court Docket" in honor of the couple's $20 million gift, the largest one-time endowment gift in the organization's history.[38]
The Giving Pledge
In August 2010, Irwin and Joan Jacobs joined the Giving Pledge, pledging to give away most of their fortune to philanthropy.[36]
Personal life
In 1954, Jacobs married a New York City native, dietician, and fellow Cornell graduate (1952), Joan Klein.[39] They reside in La Jolla, California, and have four sons.[40] Their son Paul E. Jacobs succeeded Irwin as CEO of Qualcomm until stepping down in March 2014. Jeff Jacobs was the chief marketing officer of Qualcomm. Hal Jacobs, the second oldest, played on the 1985 USA Maccabiah Games volleyball team, and is a co-producer of the musical Jersey Boys. Their eldest son, Gary E. Jacobs, is the head of the board of the Gary and Jerri-Ann Jacobs High Tech High Charter School.[5] His granddaughter, Sara Jacobs, a Democratic politician, is the representative for California's 53rd congressional district.[41] His wife, Joan Jacobs, died on May 6, 2024 at the age of 91, following a lengthy illness. Her celebration of life included a public memorial that was held at The Rady Shell on May 13, 2024.[42]
Andrew James Viterbi is an Italian Jewish–American electrical engineer and businessman who co-founded Qualcomm Inc. and invented the Viterbi algorithm. He is the Presidential Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering, which was named in his honor in 2004 in recognition of his $52 million gift.
Henry Samueli is an American businessman, engineer, and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Broadcom Corporation, owner of the National Hockey League's Anaheim Ducks, and a prominent philanthropist in the Orange County, California community. He is chairman of Broadcom Inc. He is also a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UCLA, and a distinguished adjunct professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at UC Irvine.
Jacob Ziv was an Israeli electrical engineer and information theorist who developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms alongside Abraham Lempel.
George David Forney Jr. is an American electrical engineer who made contributions in telecommunication system theory, specifically in coding theory and information theory.
Jeanne Ferrante is an American computer scientist active in the field of compiler technology. As a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering, Ferrante has made important contributions regarding optimization and parallelization.
R. C. T. Lee, also known as Richard C. T. Lee, received his B.Sc. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering of National Taiwan University and Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley.
Jack Keil Wolf was an American researcher in information theory and coding theory.
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2, previously Cal(IT)2), also referred to as the Qualcomm Institute (QI) at its San Diego branch, is a collaborative academic research institution of the University of California San Diego (UC San Diego), the University of California, Irvine (UCI), and University of California, Riverside. Calit2 was established in 2000 as one of the four UC Gray Davis Institutes for Science and Innovation. As a multidisciplinary research institution, it is conducting research and educational programming to leverage emerging technologies to improve the state's economy and citizens' quality of life, while addressing large-scale societal issues. Calit2 also develops and deploys prototype infrastructure for testing new solutions in real-world environments.
The Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering is an undergraduate and graduate-level engineering school offering BS, BA, MEng, MS, MAS and PhD degrees at the University of California, San Diego in San Diego, California. The Jacobs School of Engineering is the youngest engineering school of the nation's top ten, the largest by enrollment in the University of California system, as well as the largest engineering school on the West Coast and the ninth-largest in the country. More than thirty faculty have been named members of the National Academies. The current dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering is Albert P. Pisano.
Paul E. Jacobs is an American businessman. He is the CEO of Globalstar and the former executive chairman of Qualcomm.
Yu Hsiu Ku or Gu Yuxiu was a Chinese-American electrical engineer, musician, novelist, poet, and politician. A polymathic academic, he was one of the first Chinese people to earn a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1928, and became a leader in higher education in China until the fall of the Republic of China in 1949. Afterwards, he worked for many years as a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
Connect is a non-profit serving the San Diego and Southern California region. Connect elevates innovators and entrepreneurs throughout their growth journey by providing educational programming, mentorship, networking events, and access to capital. The current CEO is Mike Krenn.
Linkabit Corporation was a computer networking company founded in 1968 by Irwin M. Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi and Leonard Kleinrock. Linkabit alumni have created a large number of technology companies, most notably, Qualcomm.
Chen Wen-tsuen is an ethnic Taiwanese computer scientist, a distinguished research fellow at the Academia Sinica and a lifelong national chair of the Ministry of Education, Taiwan. From 2006 to 2010, he was the president of the National Tsing Hua University, a premier research university in Taiwan.
Rajesh K. Gupta is a computer scientist and engineer, currently the Qualcomm Professor in Embedded Microsystems at University of California, San Diego. His research concerns design and optimization of cyber-physical systems (CPS). He is a Principal Investigator in the NSF MetroInsight project and serves as Associate Director of the Qualcomm Institute. His research contributions include SystemC and SPARK Parallelizing High-level Synthesis. Earlier he led NSF Expeditions on Variability in Microelectronic circuits.
Robert W. Conn was president and chief executive officer of The Kavli Foundation from 2009 to 2020, a U.S. based foundation dedicated to the advancement of basic science research and public interest in science. A physicist and engineer, Conn was also the board chair of the Science Philanthropy Alliance, an organization that aims to increase private support for basic science research, and dean emeritus of the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. In the 1970s and 1980s, Conn participated in some of the earliest studies of fusion energy as a potential source of electricity, and he served on numerous federal panels, committees, and boards advising the government on the subject. In the early 1970s, he co-founded the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), and in the mid-1980s he led the formation of the Institute of Plasma and Fusion Research at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). As a university administrator in the 1990s and early 2000s, Conn served as dean of the school of engineering at UC San Diego as it established several engineering institutes and programs, including the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, known as Calit2, the Center for Wireless Communications, and the Whitaker Center for Biomedical Engineering. While at UC San Diego he also led the effort to establish an endowment for the school of engineering, which began with major gifts from Irwin and Joan Jacobs. Irwin M. Jacobs is the co-founder and founding CEO of Qualcomm. While Conn was dean, the engineering school was renamed in 1998 the Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Conn's experience in the private sector includes co-founding in 1986 Plasma & Materials Technologies, Inc. (PMT), and serving as managing director of Enterprise Partners Venture Capital (EPVC) from 2002 to 2008. Over the years he has served on numerous private and public company corporate boards. Conn joined The Kavli Foundation in 2009. He helped establish the Science Philanthropy Alliance in 2012.
Ramesh R. Rao is currently the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, a division of the University of California, San Diego. He was appointed as the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Telecommunications and Information Technologies in 2004 in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the Jacobs School of Engineering at University of California, San Diego where he has been a faculty member since 1984.
Ephraim Zehavi was an Israeli engineer received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), in Haifa, Israel, in 1977 and 1981, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1986.
Alon Orlitsky is an information theorist and the Qualcomm Professor for Information Theory and its Applications at University of California, San Diego. He received a BSc in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering from Ben Gurion University in 1981, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1986. He was a member of Bell Labs from 1986 to 1996, and worked for D. E. Shaw from 1996 to 1997. He joined UCSD in 1997.
Duygu Kuzum is a Turkish-American electrical engineer who is a professor at the University of California, San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering. She develops transparent neural sensors based on single-layer materials. She was awarded a National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award in 2020.
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