A New University of California Campus is Established

Since its founding in 1960, the University of California San Diego -- one of the campuses in the world-renowned University of California system -- has rapidly achieved the status as one of the top institutions in the nation for higher education and research. Nestled along the Pacific Ocean on 1,200 acres of beautiful coastal city-granted property in La Jolla , CA , UC San Diego is a powerful magnet for those seeking a fresh, next-generation approach to education and research.

Naming of the School

In 1982, UC San Diego decided to create a more cohesive engineering education program and brought the two engineering departments under the umbrella of a Division of Engineering led by the first dean, Lea Rudee. About a decade later, the division was renamed the School of Engineering to reflect the national prominence of the faculty. Robert Conn, an expert in plasma physics and semiconductors was recruited from UCLA in 1994 to lead the new School. And in 1997, the School went through a final name change when QUALCOMM founder and former UC San Diego engineering professor Irwin Jacobs and his wife Joan Jacobs provided a $15 million endowment for the School, leading to the current name in their honor. The couple later added to the endowment in 2003 with a $110 million gift for scholarships, fellowships, and faculty support.

The Jacobs School Today

The Jacobs School currently encompasses six academic departments: Bioengineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, NanoEngineering, and Structural Engineering. Our family tree how the school has continued to reinvent itself to take advantage of new opportunities. For example, the NanoEngineering Department, which was established in 2007, is capitalizing on a growing trend throughout public and private research-funding organizations to focus on nanoscience and nanotechnology approaches that have the potential to make valuable contributions to biology, medicine, energy, and much more.

Although the School is relatively young, its influence is felt well beyond the campus walls. The UCSD Pascal programming language and operating system developed in the 1970s and early 1980s, made microprocessors accessible to the masses and led to the PC revolution. UCSD Pascal established UC San Diego early on as an innovator in information technology and computer science, and the Jacobs School continues to lead this field. Founding faculty member Y.C. Fung established the first biomedical engineering program in the nation, and to this day is considered the father of biomechanics. The Jacobs School's top-ranked Bioengineering Department, formed in 1994, continues to serve as an international model for biomedical engineering education. The Structural Engineering Department, founded as the first department of its kind in 1999, has become the world's leading program for large-scale structural testing and earthquake safety engineering. Jacobs School faculty and alumni have started up hundreds of companies, and have helped build the wireless communications, biotechnology, software and electronics hubs in San Diego.

The Jacobs Legacy

Dr. Irwin Mark Jacobs is Founding Chairman and CEO Emeritus of QUALCOMM Incorporated, pioneer and world leader of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology. Dr. Jacobs has led the commercialization of CDMA technology and its success as the world's fastest-growing, most-advanced voice and data wireless communications technology. Dr. Jacobs was a founding faculty member of UCSD, and served as a professor from 1966 to 1972. He began in UCSD's Department of Applied Electrophysics, which was renamed the Department of Applied Physics and Information Science in 1968. Today's departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) grew out of this Department of Applied Physics and Information Science. In 1997, he and his wife Joan Jacobs provided a generous endowment gift to UCSD, when the UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering was named in their honor.

Irwin M. Jacobs Video Biography prepared on the occasion of his 70th birthday (2003)