Shu-Park Chan

Shu-Park Chan (1929–February 22, 2013) was a Chinese-born electrical engineer who served for many years as a professor at Santa Clara University and went on to found International Technological University and serve as its first president.

Chan grew up in Canton, China, where his father, Chen Jitang (a Hakka of Bobai, Guangxi ancestry), was a warlord and the leader of Canton province from 1929 to 1936. His father had three wives; Shu-Park Chan was the tenth of the 18 children born to the family. Like his father, Shu-Park Chan served in the Chinese Nationalist army in the late 1940s. After China came under Communist control, his father fled to Taiwan and sent the 19-year-old Shu-Park to the United States to obtain an education. His father hoped that his son could use the fruits of his western education to benefit the education system of his native country. In the U.S., Chan studied engineering at Virginia Military Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, receiving a Ph.D. at Illinois in 1962.

After obtaining his Ph.D., Chan joined the faculty of Santa Clara University in California. He went on to become a U.S. citizen in 1965 and he taught electrical engineering at Santa Clara for over 30 years, serving for a time as interim dean of the university's School of Engineering. At Santa Clara University, he was a mentor to many Ph.D. candidates and personally taught more than 10,000 students. His work as an educator contributed significantly to the growth of Silicon Valley as a center for technology. His research specialty was in the area of graph theory and network topology, a field that connects electrical engineering with computer science, and Ph.D students he mentored were to become founders or co-founders of companies such as Cadence Design Systems, Atmel, Microelectronics Technologies, and Oak Technology. In 2009, an article in AsianWeek stated that "over 80% of all microprocessors designed and developed within the last 20 years have been created or touched by technology generated from Professor Chan’s students." Chan was the author or co-author of several engineering books. He wrote the 1972 textbook Analysis of Linear Networks and systems: A Matrix-Oriented Approach with Computer Applications (Addison-Wesley) together with his brothers Shu-Yun and Shu-Gar Chan; they dedicated the book to their father.

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