Mung Chiang

On December 9, 2019, Chiang was named The Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State (STAS). Starting December 16, 2019, he took a leave of absence from Purdue University and directed the Office of the Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State. He was the first engineer to become the chief scientist and technologist at the United States Department of State. Ranked as an Assistant Secretary of State, he is also among the most senior officials currently serving in the U.S. government while on leave from academia.

In 2017, he was named Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University. At age 40, he is among the youngest in modern history to become the leader of a major college in an American university.

On May 1, 2017, Purdue University announced that it has chosen Chiang as the next dean of its College of Engineering. He assumed office on July 1, 2017 as the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University. Under his leadership, Purdue Engineering became the largest top-10 engineering college in the United States and reached milestones in education, research, fund-raising, physical infrastructure, online learning, industry partnership, economic development, global engagement, diversity and visibility.

He is a founding board member of "OpenFog Consortium, a global, non-profit, industry-academia consortium launched in 2015 to develop and promote fog computing and fog networking technologies, based off on concept developed by Chiang, alongside IEEE ComSoc CIO Tao Zhang and Cisco executive Helder Antunes. The consortium was co-founded by Chiang's Princeton Edge Lab, ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel and Microsoft, and currently has over 60 member companies and universities from around the world. It merged with Industrial Internet Consortium in 2019.

In 2014, he was selected as a Guggenheim Fellow, in the category of Natural and Social Sciences.

During 2014-17, he was the Director of the "Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education" at Princeton University. In 2014, he was named a New Jersey (non-profit) CEO of the Year by New Jersey Technology Council.

He was the Chair of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Advisory Committee "(PEAC)" in 2014 to make recommendations on the vision, structures, and mechanisms of entrepreneurship at Princeton University. In 2015, he created and was named the inaugural Chairman of the "Princeton Entrepreneurship Council", part of the Princeton University Provost's Office in charge of entrepreneurship and innovation programs. In 2015-17, Princeton University rolled out the first incubator, the first seed investment fund, a New York and Silicon Valley engagement strategy, a certificate program in entrepreneurship, and the Princeton Innovation Center.

In 2013, Chiang became the 38th recipient of the Alan T. Waterman Award, the highest honor to young scientists in U.S. and administered by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Science Board (NSB). He is the only researcher in the field of networking to receive the Waterman Award.

He has also received other awards on research and education, including Frederick Emmons Terman Award in Engineering Education (ASEE) in 2013, INFORMS Information Systems Design Science Award 2014, IEEE SECON Best Paper Award in 2013, IEEE INFOCOM Best Paper Award in 2012, IEEE Fellow in 2012, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (OSTP) in 2008, Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator Award in 2007 (Technology Review), ONR Young Investigator Award in 2007, NSF CAREER Award in 2005 (NSF), Princeton University H. B. Wentz Junior Faculty Award in 2005, and Hertz Graduate Fellowship in 1999.

He was the Chairman of founding Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering in 2013-14. He co-edited the National Information Technology Research and Development Program's report on Complex Engineered Networks in 2013, and co-chairs the first Fog World Congress Research Program and the IEEE/ACM Symposium on Edge Computing in 2017.

In 2012, he received the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is the youngest recipient of an IEEE-wide Technical Field Award.

Chiang co-authored a technical undergraduate textbook: Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and a popular science book The Power of Networks: Six Principles That Connect Our Lives (Princeton University Press, 2016). The first book received the PROSE Awards in Science and Technology Writing in 2013 (AAP). The second book was mentioned in various popular media, such as the (TIME Magazine).

He created an undergraduate course at Princeton University: Networks: Friends, Money, and Bytes in 2011, which led to a Massive Open Online Course in 2012 with about 400,000 enrolled students since 2012. He received the 2016 Distinguished Teaching Award at Princeton University Engineering School.

He became an Assistant Professor at Princeton University's Electrical Engineering Department in 2004, an Associate Professor with tenure in 2008, a Professor in 2011, and the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering in 2013. He is among the youngest faculty at Princeton University to become an endowed chair professor.

Chiang's Ph.D. dissertation in 2003 made contributions to information theory and optimization theory. Since then he has contributed to many areas in networking research, including wireless networks, the Internet, broadband access, content distribution, network function optimization, network economics and social learning networks. In 2009, he founded the Princeton EDGE Lab, which bridges the theory-practice divide in networking research by spanning from proofs to prototypes and is the nation's first laboratory dedicated to edge computing.

Mung Chiang received the B. S. (Hons.) in both Electrical Engineering and Mathematics in 1999, M.S. in Electrical Engineering in 2000, and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from Stanford University.

Mung Chiang (born 1977) is an American engineering researcher/educator, technology entrepreneur, university leader, and foreign policy official. He is the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University. Previously he was the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, and an affiliated faculty in Applied and Computational Mathematics and in Computer Science.