Chairman of the Board, Broadcom Inc. and Chair of the Broadcom Foundation, Dr. Henry Samueli takes Broadcom Inc.’s commitment to inspiring middle-schoolers to pursue their passions for science and engineering very personally. His own inspiration to become an electrical engineer came from his seventh-grade teacher giving him the green light to tackle an ambitious project of building a vacuum-tube short-wave radio called the Graymark 506B.

The son of immigrants, Dr. Samueli attended public school in Los Angeles, where he first encountered electrical engineering in his school’s shop class. Tackling the engineering of a short-wave radio, he went beyond his grade level to garner information and skills that allowed him to meet an exciting challenge on a project he was passionate about, as he assembled and soldered the radio in his living room. Dr. Samueli has said one of his most powerful memories is the expression on his teacher’s face when he brought the radio to class and turned it on. “Nobody ever gets it to work the first time!” the teacher exclaimed.

From that moment on, Dr. Samueli was hooked. “That became my mission in life — to find out how radios work,” he said. Dr. Samueli has gone on to become a preeminent electrical engineer, academic, inventor and widely acclaimed innovator. Broadcom Inc., which he co-founded, is a Fortune 500® company that transforms how the world connects and communicates. A global innovation leader, Broadcom Inc. is changing the world by connecting everything®. Consumers might never see Broadcom Inc.’s products, but they rely on its technology every day when using a smartphone, a wireless network at home or at work, streaming music or movies, or connecting to content that has passed through a data center in the cloud.