Biography | Sundar Pichai — The Durand Building Where Materials Science Replaced Metallurgy

People treat a Google chief executive as someone who trained in computer science on this farm.

Sundar Pichai's Stanford degree was in materials science and engineering, finished in 1995.

He arrived from IIT Kharagpur on a scholarship after the 1993 B.Tech. in metallurgy.

The department's administrative home is the Durand Building at 496 Lomita Mall.

That is the pin.

The work sat with metals, ceramics, and the physics of solids, not with search ranking or a browser.

Stanford and later profiles both give 1995 as the year of the M.S.

The School of Engineering still lists Durand as the address for Materials Science and Engineering.

It is a working academic building.

Visitors are pointed to the campus visitor center on Galvez Street, not to a drop-in tour of the labs.

After the degree he stayed in the Valley as an engineer.

Applied Materials was the named employer in later profiles before the Wharton MBA.

The photograph is a December 2016 view of the Stanford campus from above the historic core.

Huang Engineering Center, the glass hall that now dominates the engineering quad, opened in 2010 and did not exist when he was a student.

The 1995 classrooms are not separately marked.

Pichai is a living executive.

This memory marks a documented graduate degree at a published departmental address.

It does not mark a present office, a private room, or a later commencement speech.

Photo: Stanford University campus in 2016 by Frank Schulenburg, 16 December 2016, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Sundar Pichai, 26 February 2014, Maurizio Pesce, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.