Since March 1, 2007, Sung Mo "Steve" Kang has served as Chancellor of the University of California, Merced, the first American research university of the 21st century.

Kang is an experienced educator, researcher and administrator. Previously, he was dean of the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz. He now serves on the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium Board, MentorNet Advisory Board, the UC President's Advisory Council on Science and Innovation, Business-Education Alliance of Merced County, and the Board of the Great Valley Center as its Chairman. He also serves on international advisory boards for institutions in Canada, Korea, Switzerland, and Taiwan.

He brings a wealth of experience from a long and distinguished career in private industry and higher education. Kang served as a department head (1995-2000) and a professor (1985-2000) in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a visiting professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, the University of Karlsruhe and the Technical University of Munich, and a Chaired Visiting Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has also taught at Rutgers University.

Prior to his career in education, Kang worked for AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he led the development of the world's first 32-bit microprocessor chips as a technical supervisor and designed satellite-based private communication networks as a member of technical staff.

His leadership in industry is evidenced by his earlier appointment to the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Nanotechnology, a joint federal-state venture to promote California as the premier center for nanotechnology research, development, and commercialization. He served as president of the Silicon Valley Engineering Council, the alliance for engineering leaders in Silicon Valley, with more than 60,000 engineers.

Kang holds 15 U.S. patents in electrical engineering and has written or co-authored eleven books and 400 technical papers and won numerous awards and fellowships for his work and publications. His current research interests include nanoelectronics, lower-power, very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits; modeling and simulation of semiconductor devices and circuits.

Kang is a fellow of IEEE, ACM and AAAS, Foreign Member of National Academy of Engineering of Korea, and is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Technology, Who's Who in Engineering and Who's Who in Midwest. He received the Alexander von Humboldt U.S. Senior Scientist Award (1996), IEEE Millennium Medal (2000), Chang-Lin Tien Education Leadership Award (2007), Korean-American Leadership Award (2008), IQ Quality Award (2008), and many other accolades. Most recently (2009), Kang was inducted into the Silicon Valley Engineering Hall of Fame.

He earned his bachelor of science degree, graduating summa cum laude, from Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck, N.J.; his master of science from the State University of New York at Buffalo; and his doctorate from UC Berkeley. All his academic degrees are in electrical engineering.

Kang and wife, Mia, live in the chancellor's residence in Merced. They have two grown children.