|
Office
of News and Information Johns Hopkins
University 3400 N. Charles Street Baltimore,
Maryland 21218-2692 Phone: (410) 516-7160
Fax (410) 516-5251 | February 16,
1999 For Immediate Release CONTACT: Dennis
O'Shea dro@jhu.edu Pager: (410)
512-1903 |
Kim Pledges $1 Million to Johns
Hopkins Jeong H. Kim, founder of the successful
telecommunications startup Yurie Systems Inc. and now
president of carrier networks for Lucent Technologies, has
pledged $1 million to The Johns Hopkins University.
Kims gift will be divided equally between an endowment
for undergraduate financial aid in the universitys
Whiting School of Engineering and research on high-tech
telemedicine in the Wilmer Eye Institute. Kim, 38, of
Potomac, Md., who was consulting firm Ernst & Youngs
1998 emerging entrepreneur of the year, came to the United
States from Korea with his family at 14. In 1982, he graduated
from the Whiting School at Johns Hopkins after only three years,
then served as an officer in the Navy nuclear submarine fleet.
After returning to civilian life, he earned a
masters degree from the Whiting School in 1989 and then
a doctorate at the University of Maryland in 1991, a year before
founding Yurie Systems, which he named after his elder daughter.
The company specialized in very high-speed communications
technology, including the "Yurie box," which
transmits voice, video, and data over phone lines as well as
satellite and wireless networks. Yurie ranked No. 1
on Business Week's "hot growth" list in 1997 and led
the world in 1996 and 1997 in sales of wide-area network
access equipment using ATM, or asynchronous transfer mode,
technology . Last year, Lucent Technologies bought the company
for $1 billion. Lucent also appointed Kim president of carrier
networks within its Data Networking Systems Group.
William R. Brody, president of the university, said Kim is
"a tremendous role model for our students."
"Jeong Kim's scholarship gift will help the Whiting
School of Engineering attract talented students who otherwise
could not afford a Hopkins education," Brody added.
"This kind of support is critical to the future of the
university and we are very grateful." Endowment for
scholarships and fellowships was adopted last year as a top
priority for the last two years of the Johns Hopkins Initiative
fund-raising campaign. The other half of Kims
gift will support initiatives in telemedicine at the Wilmer
Eye Institute in the universitys School of Medicine.
Projects there include evaluation of the Digiscope, a new tool
developed at Wilmer that allows local doctors offices to
capture digital retinal images of patients and transmit them to
specialists for evaluation. "Ultimately,
technology such as the Digiscope will allow us to practice global
medicine," said Ingrid Zimmer-Galler, the faculty member
who heads the Wilmer telemedicine program. "Such
instruments can be placed in primary-care settings anywhere in
the world, linking patients directly to a retinal specialist at
Hopkins, but sparing them the time, cost, and possible
hardship involved in traveling to Baltimore."
Kim said the Wilmer program is "very much in line with my
own interests" at Lucent, where he hopes to help
"influence the way telecommunications technology gets
used in the next century." "This is the next
revolution in how medicine will be practiced," Kim said.
Kims gift counts toward the $1.2 billion goal of the
Johns Hopkins Initiative, the campaign for the Johns Hopkins
Institutions. The campaign passed its original goal of $900
million in April 1998, nearly two years ahead of schedule. So
far, more than $1.126 billion has been raised, of which 58
percent has been for endowment and capital purposes.
Johns Hopkins University news releases can be found on the
World Wide Web at
http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/
Information on automatic e-mail delivery
of science and medical news releases is available at the
same address.
|
Go to
Giving and Alumni News Home Page
Go to
Headlines@HopkinsHome Page
|