Sung-Mo (Steve) Kang received his B.S. (Summa Cum Laude) degree from Fairleigh Dickinson University, Teaneck, NJ in 1970, M.S. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972, and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1975, all in electrical engineering. Since March 1, 2007, he has been Chancellor and Professor of Engineering at UC Merced. He serves on the UC President's Science and Technology Board, Central Valley Higher Education Consortium Board, MentorNet Advisory Board, and as chairman of the Board of the Great Valley Center.

   From Jan. 2001 to Feb. 2007, he was Dean of Baskin School of Engineering and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. At UC Santa Cruz, he initiated several interdisciplinary programs such as the Department of Biomolecular Engineering, Information Systems and Technology Management programs, NSF Engineering Research Center for Biomimetic Microelectronic Systems in collaboration with the University of Southern California and California Institute of Technology, and collaborated with partner campuses for California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research (QB3) which includes bioinformatics, California Institute Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS), and NASA's University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) which has $330M budget over next ten years. He also attracted a $2M NSF program for Developing Effective Engineering Pathways (DEEP) for community college students in Silicon Valley region. He also initiated and established several international programs including KT Executive Program for KT managers from Korea, and exchange programs with Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL), Hokkaido Information University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Yonsei University, and Konkuk University. He served as Chair of the Chancellor's Education Partnership Advisory Committee at UC Santa Cruz, and also served on advisory committees of National Youth Leadership Forum (NYLF) and the Silicon Valley Engineering, Manufacturing and Technology Alliance (EMTA). From July 2002 to June 2003, he served as President of Silicon Valley Engineering Council (www.svec.org), the alliance for engineering leaders in Silicon Valley. From 2002 to 2004, he was a Chaired Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

   From August 1995 to December 2000, he was Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering which ranks one of the best in the nation. From August 1985 to December 2000, he was Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Research Professor of Coordinated Science Laboratory and Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was named the first Charles Marshall Senior University Scholar, an Associate in the Center for Advanced Study, and has served as the Founding Director of Center for ASIC Research and Development, and Associate Director of NSF Engineering Research Center for Compound Semiconductor Microelectronic at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne in 1989, at the University of Karlsruhe in 1997 and at the Technical University of Munich in 1998.

   Until 1985 he was with AT&T Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill and Holmdel, and also served as a faculty member of Rutgers University. He led the development of world's first full 32-bit CMOS microprocessor chips and their peripheral chips as supervisor of high-end microprocessor design group. These chips were manufactured for AT&T's high-end switching machines such as 3B5 and 3B20 and also AT&T computers. For his outstanding leadership in both development and later manufacturing of these chips, he was awarded an exceptional contribution award. In early phase of his Bell Labs career, he designed satellite-based private networks using statistical traffic analysis and nonlinear optimization.

   He has served as a member of Board of Governors, Secretary and Treasurer, Administrative Vice President, and 1991 President of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society with more than 15,000 members. He was the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems. He has also served on the program committees and technical committees of major international conferences which include DAC, ICCAD, ICCD, ISCAS, ISPD, MCMC, Microelectronics Systems Education Conference, International Conference on VLSI and CAD (ICVC), Asia-Pacific Conference on Circuits and Systems, LEOS Topical Meeting, SPIE OE/LASE Meeting. He has served on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications, and Journal of Circuits, Signals and Systems, and currently serves on editorial board of Proceeding of the IEEE.

   Dr. Kang is Fellow of IEEE, ACM and AAAS, a Foreign Member of National Academy of Engineering of Korea, and listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Technology, Who's Who in Engineering and Who's Who in Midwest. He is recipient of the Chang-Lin Tien Education Leadership Award (2007), IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award (2005), UC Santa Cruz Chancellor's Stellar Service Award (2003), Outstanding Alumnus Award in Electrical Engineering, UC Berkeley (2001), IEEE Third Millennium Medal (2000), SRC Technical Excellence Award (1999), IEEE CAS Society Golden Jubilee Medal (1999), KBS Award in Science and Technology (1998), IEEE CAS Society Technical Achievement Award (1997), Humboldt Research Award for Senior US Scientists (1996), IEEE Graduate Teaching Technical Field Award (1996), IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Meritorious Service Award (1994), SRC Inventor Recognition Awards (1993, 1996, 2002), IEEE CAS Darlington Prize Paper Award (1993), and best paper awards such as the 22nd EOS/ESD Best Paper Award (2000), ICCD Best Paper Award (1986), and Myril B. Reed Best Paper Award (1979).

   He served as a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society and the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. He holds fourteen US patents, published over 350 papers and co-authored nine books, Design Automation For Timing-Driven Layout Synthesis (1992), Hot-Carrier Reliability of MOS VLSI Circuits (1993), Physical Design for Multichip Modules (1994), and Modeling of Electrical Overstress in Integrated Circuits (1994), Electrothermal Analysis of VLSI Systems (1999) from Kluwer Academic Publishers, CMOS Digital Circuits: Analysis and Design (3rd ed. 2003) from McGraw-Hill, and Computer-Aided Design of Optoelectronic Integrated Circuits and Systems (1996) from Prentice Hall.

   His current research interests include low power VLSI design; optimization for performance, reliability and manufacturability; mixed-signal mixed-technology integrated system; modeling and simulation of semiconductor devices and circuits; high-speed optoelectronic circuits and fully optical network systems, and nanobioelectronics.