ANDREW GROVE

As the person most responsible for harnessing the power of the microchip, Andrew Grove revolutionized the way we work and live today.

Grove came to the United States as a refugee from Soviet-occupied Hungary and earned his PhD in chemical engineering from UC Berkeley in 1963. After working for Fairchild Semiconductor, he participated in the founding of Intel Corporation in 1968, became president in 1979, and later served as CEO and chairman. Under his leadership, Intel grew to be the seventh most profitable company in the world, producing over 90 percent of all microprocessors used to build personal computers. As TIME Magazine put it when naming him Man of the Year in 1997, “more than any other person, Andy Grove has made real the defining law of the digital age: the prediction … that microchips would double in power and halve in price every 18 months or so. And to that law Grove has added his own: we will continually find new things for microchips to do that were scarcely imaginable a year or two earlier.”

Grove also shares his insights and experiences as a writer and teacher. His first book, Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices, has been used at many leading universities. He has written dozens of technical papers, a newspaper column and several books on management, as well as an autobiography, published in 2001. He taught a graduate course at the University of California, Berkeley and currently is a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

In addition to his business leadership, Grove has applied his determination and energy to medical causes.  He has served at the University of California, San Francisco as patient advocate and as national chair of the institution’s capital campaign. He was a member of the board of the Prostate Cancer Foundation, is an advisor to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, and heads the Grove Foundation, a private philanthropy that supports research on Parkinson’s Disease.