Qualcomm co-founder Franklin Antonio is giving UC San Diego $30 million to expand the university's huge engineering school, which provides the company with a lot of the talent it needs to compete in the global chipmaking industry. The donation will help underwrite a $180 million research complex at the Jacobs School of Engineering, whose nearly 9,000 students make it among the largest engineering programs on the West Coast.
The school is named after fellow Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, who gave the program $110 million in 2003, enabling the campus to become a leader in everything from chip design to robotics.
Antonio's $30 million gift is the second-largest donation ever made by one of the university's alumni. It comes nine months after alumnus Taner Halicioglu, who helped to create Facebook, gave the school $75 million for a data science institute. The two gifts are part of UC San Diego's 10-year effort to raise a record $2 billion in private donations. The school is roughly halfway through the campaign, and has raised about $1 billion.
"I have been setting aside money every year for years and have been looking for good opportunities," said the 65-year-old Antonio, who is semi-retired but remains chief scientist of San Diego-based Qualcomm. "I was thinking of doing something smaller, maybe support a little research here and there. But then Al showed me the opportunities with the new building, and I jumped on it."
Antonio was referring to Albert Pisano, dean of the Jacobs School of Engineering. Pisano is pushing to construct a 200,000-square-foot research and education building that would be partly divided into 11 so-called "collaboratories." The campus wants to place groups of scientists and engineers from different disciplines in the same area to encourage collaboration.
The campus just received $3 million from Sanjay Jha, a former Qualcomm executive, and his wife, Fiona Mackin-Jha, to support one of the collaboratories.
(c)2017 The San Diego Union-Tribune
