With a recent $400,000 cash gift, an anonymous alumnus of MSU’s Pattern Recognition and Image Processing (PRIP) Lab created the Anil K. Jain Endowed Graduate Fellowship.
The international businessman and professor, who was a visiting scholar to the PRIP Lab in the early 1980’s, says that his time working in the lab under the mentorship of Dr. Anil Jain, University Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, is the reason he’s so successful today.
Honored by this gesture, Jain is supplementing the endowment with $100,000 of his own. With $500,000, there is enough to fund one PhD student, but Jain hopes the endowment can grow to support many more, so he’s made it his mission to encourage other PRIP Lab alumni to contribute, too.
Alumni of Jain’s program are all over the world, working in academia, software and technology, security, and corporate research labs; and nobody knows the value of financial support when pursuing a PhD as well as they do.
“Fellowships like this help attract high-ability students. They allow students to focus on their research and their studies without worrying where the money will come from,” Jain says.
The field of biometric and pattern recognition has advanced by leaps and bounds since Jain first came to MSU 41 years ago, and many of those advancements have taken place right here on campus, in the PRIP Lab, where Jain and his team of researchers and students are working to make this type of technology smarter, faster, and more robust.
Read more about the Jain Fellowship.
For more information on how you can support the College of Engineering and the Jain Fellowship, contact Senior Director of Development Stephen Bates at batesst@msu.edu or call (517) 355-8339.