Gift from Iowa State University Alumni Couple Establishes Professorship for Faculty in STEM
AMES, Iowa – – Iowa State University alumni Jun Ye and Huiqing Wang of Palo Alto, California, have provided a gift to establish the Harmon-Ye Endowed Professorship in Iowa State’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The professorship will support the work of outstanding faculty members in science, technology, engineering or math and honors Bruce Harmon, who is a distinguished professor emeritus of condensed matter at Iowa State and served as Ye’s adviser.
A medallion ceremony will be held this academic year, formally installing John Lajoie, professor of physics and astronomy, as the inaugural holder of the Harmon-Ye Endowed Professorship.
“This gift celebrates what makes Iowa State and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences a preeminent home for innovation," said Beate Schmittmann, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. "Our faculty engage students in groundbreaking research and create a collaborative learning environment for them from where they can launch their own success.”
Lajoie, who received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Iowa State and his doctorate from Yale, joined the Iowa State faculty in 1997. He is a national leader in the study of heavy ion and nucleon-nucleus collisions, conducting his experiments as part of an international collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
“I’m deeply humbled by this honor, and I’d like to express my appreciation for Jun Ye and Huiqing Wang’s generosity,” Lajoie said.
Ye earned his master’s degree in physics and astronomy from Iowa State in 1991 and earned a doctorate in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Wang received her master’s degree in botany from Iowa State in 1994. The couple met as graduate students in Ames.
Ye is co-founder, president and CEO of Sentieon Inc., a bioinformatics company established in 2014. From 2001 to 2015, Ye served as a consulting professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, where he mentored graduate student research in microlithography and other areas. During his career, he has authored more than 50 U.S. patents covering algorithm, software, hardware and system architecture. Ye received the Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences John V. Atanasoff Discovery Award in 2014 for his work to advance scientific knowledge and was a member of the college’s dean's advisory council. Ye and Wang are members of the Iowa State University Foundation’s Order of the Knoll. The couple made their charitable gift for the professorship through the ISU Foundation, a private, nonprofit organization committed to securing and managing gifts that benefit the university.
During his time at Iowa State, Ye said Professor Harmon was a wonderful teacher and mentor to his students.
“Professor Harmon was my adviser and is my lifelong mentor, who showed me a wonderful life in my first few years at Iowa State and in the U.S.,” said Ye of his former professor and adviser. “It is my great honor to celebrate Professor Harmon’s achievements and honor our teacher-student relationship through this professorship.”
In addition to his role as professor and adviser, Harmon served as a senior scientist and deputy director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory and was a reviewer for several international computational programs. His research interests include nanoscale magnetism, X-ray magnetic dichroism, phonons and computational materials discovery. Harmon received his doctorate in physics from Northwestern University.
“Jun Ye was a pleasure to work with, and once he took aim at a project, he pursued the science passionately,” said Professor Harmon of his former student and mentee.
Contact:
Amy Juhnke, senior manager of communications, Iowa State University College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, 515.294.0461, ajuhnke@iastate.edu
Elaine Watkins-Miller, director of communications/public relations, Iowa State University Foundation, 515.294.1005, ewmiller@foundation.iastate.edu
September 13, 2022