A Spartan graduate who was an early contributor to Gmail and Android mobile phones has committed $1 million to Michigan State University to establish an endowed faculty position in the College of Engineering.
The Douglas E. Zongker Endowed Professorship will be used to support a renowned technology scholar in MSU’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Zongker, who graduated from MSU with a bachelor’s degree in computer science in 1996, said he remembers more about his opportunities at MSU than just his classwork.
“The things I got to do outside of classes had more impact than anything else on my development as a working software engineer,” Zongker explained. “The problems were a lot more open-ended and required balancing more competing priorities, not just understanding a single particular concept.”
Zongker said he remembers building tools for managing the large intro programming classes while working for faculty member Mark Urban-Lurain, building a genetic algorithms framework with faculty member Bill Punch's GARAGe group, and contributing to the system that hosted an Association for Computing Machinery contest.
Working on handwriting recognition with faculty member Anil Jain remains among his best memories.
“I hope that the professorship can help attract and retain the kind of extraordinary faculty members that can create those kinds of opportunities for undergrads,” Zongker added.
Anil Jain has been appointed as the first to serve in the Douglas E. Zongker Endowed Professorship. Jain is a University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State. Jain said Zongker was one of the best undergraduate students he ever taught during his 50 years at MSU.
“After his outstanding performance in my graduate course on pattern recognition (CSE 802), which he took in his junior year at MSU, I recruited him as an undergraduate research assistant in my Pattern Recognition and Image Processing lab,” Jain said. “As an undergrad, he wrote two papers which were published in the top journal in pattern recognition/machine learning/computer vision field, namely the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (Journal Impact Factor of 20).
“One of the two papers, "Feature Selection: Evaluation, Application, and Small Sample Performance", by Jain and Zongker, published in 1997, has received 3,095 citations (Google Scholar). The second paper also published in PAMI in 1997 has received 266 citations.
“I am grateful to Doug for establishing this endowment, which will support my research in pattern recognition. It means a lot when our former students appreciate the education they received and give back to MSU in the form of such a generous endowment,” Jain concluded.
Abdol-Hossein Esfahanian, professor and chairperson of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, called Zongker a prominent computer scientist.
“In addition to his many technical contributions, his work playfully explores the nuances of communication, often using humor to highlight the potential for misinterpretation and the importance of clarity. He satirizes the overuse of jargon and technical language, demonstrating how it can obscure meaning rather than enhance it.
“Zongker’s endowed professorship provides sustained funding to attract and retain world-class faculty who drive groundbreaking research in computer science and its emerging technologies,” Esfahanian added. “It also enhances student learning through innovative teaching and mentorship.”
Endowed professorships and chair positions are the highest level of faculty distinction. The support from an endowment provides a dependable, perpetual source of funding to support the position, as well as the ability to conduct research and scholarship as new opportunities arise.
Douglas E. Zongker
After graduating from MSU, Zongker enrolled at the University of Washington, where he published a number of papers on computer graphics and graduated with a Ph.D. in 2003.
He then joined Google and was among the first engineers to work on Gmail online services and an early spam-detection system. Beginning in 2007, he worked on the Android mobile phone operating system, specifically for remote device management and over-the-air system updates. Today, Zongker is a senior staff software engineer at Waymo and lives in Seattle, Washington.
For more information about making a gift, contact the College of Engineering Advancement Office at GIVE.
Written by Patricia Mroczek.
MSU College of Engineering Media and Public Relations page