Department History

From Engineering to EE, ECE, and EECS

Fig. 1: Bob Saunders - Founding Chair of Electrical Engineering
 Bob Saunders

In the beginning, there was just the general Engineering program.  A set of faculty was split from the Engineering program to form the Department of Electrical Engineering.  The founding Chair was Bob Saunders (Fig. 1), who was brought from Berkeley to UCI by founding chancellor Daniel G. Aldrich.

The EE Department was small at the beginning and was located in the Engineering Tower building.  

 

Computer Engineering

Computer Engineering component was added to the EE Department after Jack Sklansky started looking to bring someone in Computer Engineering, but the Department was still called Electrical Engineering.  He contacted C.V. Ramamoorthy at UC Berkeley, who recommended Kane K. H.  Kim, his former Ph.D. and then Professor at University of South Florida, to come to UC Irvine.  Kane Kim hired the first several hires in the late 80s, including Fadi Kurdahi, Nohbyung Park, Nader Bagherzadeh, ...  However, it was still called Electrical Engineering at the time.

The name change to include Computer Engineering was initiated by Nader Bagherzadeh, who got the support of Jose Cruz, Chair at the time.  After some research into comparable programs, the name of the Department was changed into Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).   In fact, the domain name www.ece.uci.edu still exists.

Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

The Department went through another round of name change in the early 2000, when the Department of Information and Computer Science (which was under no School) was to be promoted into the School of ICS with four departments.  The name change to EECS was initiated by then Chair Nader Bagherzadeh after more search into comparable departments, including those at MIT and Berkeley.

Former Chairs

The Chairs of the department have been

  • H. Kumar Wickramasinghe 2014-present
  • Michael M. Green 2009-2014
  • Jean-Luc Gaudiot 2003-2009
  • Nader Bagherzadeh 1999-2003
  • Allen R.  Stubberud 1994-1999
  • Leonard A. Ferrari 1990-1994
  • Jose B. Cruz 1986-1990
  • Chen S. Tsai 1985-1986 

Photos

Here are some photos of people who have (and may still be) in the department. (in no particular order)

Al Stubberud Chen Tsai
Al Stubberud Chen Tsai Gene Hostetter Harry Tan
Hideo Gamo Jim Mulligan Neil Bershad Rowland Schinzinger
Hodeo Gamo Jim Mulligan Neil Bershad Rowland Schinzinger

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