History

 Two Faculty, 75 Students and a Dream

Nestled in the heart of Southern California, UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering is home to a vibrant campus community. It’s hard to imagine that in 1965, the school began with just two faculty members and 75 students. We were, and are, one of only two University of California campuses to open with a school of engineering. This distinctive beginning set in motion the school’s many decades of dynamic growth.  

Our initial emphasis was in electrical engineering, so the campus recruited the department chair from UC Berkeley, Robert M. Saunders, to be the founding dean, and David Isaacs, an assistant professor from UCLA. Saunders' graduate student, Roland Schinzinger, willingly followed to help the fledgling program. He became the first to receive a Ph.D. at UCI, graduating with the inaugural Class of 1966, and then became the third engineering faculty member. 

The Samueli Legacy

The UCI School of Engineering was renamed The Henry Samueli School of Engineering on Oct. 19, 2000, after the philanthropist and co-founder of Broadcom Corp. made a generous donation in December 1999. Samueli is a prolific inventor who holds more than 75 U.S. patents. He earned a bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree in electrical engineering at UCLA. In 1991, while he was a faculty member at UCLA, he co-founded Broadcom with one of his students. Based in Palo Alto, California, it’s now one of the world’s largest semiconductor and infrastructure software companies. Samueli is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Inventors, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering. 

Shaping the Engineers of Tomorrow

Six decades later, we have more than 150 faculty members who are leaders in their disciplines and have achieved worldwide recognition for their research and dedicated teaching. We are educating more than 4,000 students (undergraduate and graduate) and offer degrees through six academic departments: biomedical engineering; chemical and biomolecular engineering; civil and environmental engineering; electrical engineering and computer science; materials science and engineering; and mechanical and aerospace engineering. 

Today, the UCI Samueli School is poised to advance engineering discovery through the creation of original scholarship and research and to educate and train the next generation of global engineering innovators, and to provide a technological edge to industry by facilitating technology transfer and talent acquisition.