Biography | Brian Krzanich — The Chemistry Degree This Campus Handed Him Before the Fab

People treat Intel's sixth chief executive as a Santa Clara product who walked from campus into a clean room.

The chemistry degree is the part that line skips.

Brian Matthew Krzanich was born on 9 May 1960 in Santa Clara County, California.

He took a bachelor's degree in chemistry at San Jose State University in 1982.

The department sat then, as it still does in part, in Carl D. Duncan Hall of Science, the 1967 tower on the south edge of this campus along San Salvador Street.

A process engineer in a wafer fab is a chemist by another name.

The work is baths, gases, masks and yields, not a podium.

San Jose State has long sent that kind of graduate into the valley's plants.

Krzanich joined Intel the same year he finished here.

The first posting was not this city.

It was a New Mexico factory Intel had opened two years earlier on a former sod farm in Rio Rancho.

The university is a public campus at One Washington Square.

Duncan Hall is still the science high-rise.

A later interdisciplinary science building now takes some of the chemistry load, but the 1982 degree was earned on this ground.

Photo: San Jose State campus view, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Intel, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.