About Mung Chiang
Mung Chiang has served as the 13th President of Purdue University since Jan. 1, 2023, and is the Roscoe H. George Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to being elected Purdue’s president, he was the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering and executive vice president for strategic initiatives.
Over the past four years, Purdue University reached many milestones including a record graduation rate and admissions selectivity, it reached $1 billion annual research expenditures for the first time and received the largest government research grant at the university and the largest industry research grant in the country. It had its best fund-raising year and the highest number of gifts in a 24-hour period, achieved its highest and Top-4 rankings in engineering, agriculture, patent numbers, online programs, free speech, and campus safety. The Purdue men’s basketball team had its winningest four-year span in program history and competed in a national championship game.
Under Chiang’s leadership, Purdue successfully launched four strategic pillars, including its first urban campus in Indianapolis, the Daniels School of Business, Purdue Computes, and One Health. The university invested in 27 construction or major renovation projects while freezing tuition. Purdue also contributed to attracting tens of billions of industry investments along Indiana’s new Hard Tech Corridor bookended by Purdue’s Indianapolis and West Lafayette campuses, the buildout of a new commercial airport terminal and three new hospitals in West Lafayette.
Chiang received his bachelor’s degree (1999), master’s degree (2000) and Ph.D. (2003) from Stanford University and an Honorary Doctorate in Science (2024) from Dartmouth College. Before 2017, Chiang was the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering and an affiliated faculty member in computer science and in applied and computational mathematics at Princeton University.
He founded the Princeton EDGE Lab in 2009 and co-founded several startup companies and industry consortia since the early years of edge computing. Most of his 26 U.S. patents are licensed for network deployment. He co-authored two textbooks based on his massive open online courses: “Networked Life” (2012) and “Power of Networks” (2016). For his research in communication networks, wireless technology and network optimization, he received the National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award (2013), as well as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Founders Medal (2025), the IEEE INFOCOM Achievement Award (2022), the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2012), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2014). He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the National Academy of Inventors and the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
In 2020, as the science and technology advisor to the U.S. Secretary of State, he initiated tech diplomacy programs in the U.S. government. In 2024, he was appointed by the Secretary of Energy to the inaugural board of the congressionally chartered U.S. Foundation for Energy Security and Innovation, which he currently chairs, and was elected to the board of directors of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee.