Angel G. Jordan

As a faculty member and later as a university administrator he has been a consultant to industry, universities, and government agencies, in the US and abroad. He has served on the board of directors of three companies, served on the Science Advisory Committee of two others, was a director or trustee of several not-for-profit organizations, and served on visiting committees or board of visitors of several universities. He is the recipient of a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Universidad Pública de Navarra and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid Spain. He is the recipient of an Enterprise Award presented by the Pittsburgh Business Times "in recognition of his foresight and leadership in bringing the Software Engineering Institute to Pittsburgh". He is a Fellow of the IEEE and Fellow of the AAAS. He is a Distinguished Fulbright Scholar and was made the 1987 Vectors Pittsburgh Man of the Year in Education. He is a member of the American Physics Society. He was elected a Member of the National Academy of Engineering with the citation, "For contributions to solid-state device research and for innovative leadership in engineering education."

In 1986 CMU attracted to its Engineering College a national Engineering Research Center block funded by NSF. It was named the Engineering Design Research Center, now Institute for Complex Engineered Systems (ICES), and was based on the Design Research Center and the Robotics Institute, both programs launched and nurtured when Dr. Jordan was dean of engineering. A second Engineering Research Center funded by NSF was later attracted. It is now named the Data Storage Systems Center, based on the Magnetics Technology Center, established when Dr. Jordan was dean of engineering.

As a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering, now Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) he was instrumental in building one of the country's first and finest university laboratories in solid state devices. In this laboratory, a large number of graduate students completed doctoral work in the period 1958-1990 while he was active in the department. He supervised many of them and launched them and numerous master students to illustrious careers. He attracted considerable funding from the government and industry. He taught many undergraduate and graduate courses. As a department head of ECE he extended areas in which this department was prominent; recognized and fostered new areas, such as computer-aided design, computer hardware, robotics, and optoelectronics; initiated new interdisciplinary programs, such as magnetic devices and electronic materials; and propelled the department to a leading position (in seven years the funded research support more than quadrupled and the level of enrollment and quality in both undergraduate and graduate programs increased substantially). He participated in the foundation of the Department of Computer Science at CMU, one of the leading departments of its kind in the nation.

At (LTIEMA), in Madrid, Spain, during the period 1952-56, he conducted basic and applied research in Servomechanisms and Electronics engineering technology for the Spanish Navy. He introduced the foundations of semiconductor devices and Electronics engineering technology in the Spanish equivalent of the United States Naval Research Laboratory. As a research fellow at Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in 1951-52, he conducted basic and applied research in semiconductor Photo-diodes and solar cells. This work resulted in technology implemented in an industrial company.

Angel G. Jordan (born as Ángel Jordán Goñi; September 19, 1930 – August 4, 2017) was a Spanish-born American electronics and computer engineer known as the founder of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and co-founder of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and served on its faculty for 55 years, since 2003 as Emeritus. He was instrumental in the formation of the School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon. He has made contributions to technology transfer and institutional development. He served as Dean of Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering and later as the provost of Carnegie Mellon University.

He was born in Pamplona, Spain, in 1930 and raised in Ansó until he was 9 years old. He then moved to Zaragoza where he did his secondary education in the Institute Goya and later his university education in the University of Zaragoza where he obtained the degree of Licenciado en Ciencias Físicas in 1952. During 1952-56 he moved to Madrid where he worked as a research engineer in the Laboratorio y Taller de Investigación del Estado Mayor de la Armada (LTIEMA). He emigrated to the US in 1956 with his wife Nieves, and enrolled at CMU as a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon in 1959.