University of Florida engineering alumnus and Texas Instruments Fellow Alan Hastings has added another donation for a new Faculty Fellow within the College of Engineering’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).
Faculty Fellow endowments honor faculty members who inspire students and work to solve society’s most challenging problems. The endowment will provide additional funding for the exploration of new and creative concepts in the lab.
This year, ECE Associate Professor Navid Asadi was selected as the Faculty Fellow. Asadi — the third Faculty Fellow — also serves as the associate director of the Florida Semiconductor Institute.
In 2017, Hastings gave $50,000 with another $50,000 from his employer, Texas Instruments, to establish the Alan Hastings Faculty Fellow. This year, Texas Instruments matched another $50,000 from Hastings to add $100,000 to fund the Faculty Fellow.
The inaugural three-year fellowship was awarded to Toshikazu Nishida, Ph.D., of UF’s Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering (ECE). In 2020, ECE’s Roozbeh Tabrizian, who now teaches at the University of Michigan, was named as the Alan Hastings Faculty Fellow for his work with radio frequency micro- and nano-electro-mechanical resonators and transducers.
Hastings, a 1985 Electrical Engineering graduate, started with Texas Instruments in 1986.
“The UF ECE program really did prepare me for a successful career, right from the very first day,” Hastings recalled.
“When I reported to work, the first technical question my boss asked me was if I could draw a cross-section of a bipolar transistor on his whiteboard,” he recalled. “I drew an accurate depiction of a standard bipolar NPN, complete with buried layer and deep-N+ sinker. ‘Where’d you learn that?’ he asked. ‘I took a class in IC design at UF,’ l replied.”
He was named Member Group Technical Staff (MGTS) at Texas Instruments in 1995, going on to become a Senior Member Technical Staff (SMTS) and Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff (DMTS). He has been a Texas Instruments Fellow since 2005 and was re-elected to the position in January 2015.
Texas Instruments offers a program in which the tech company matches philanthropic donations from current and retired employees.
Hastings has served on the ECE External Advisory Board for at least 15 years, and he remains senior member of the International Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.