Biography | Satya Nadella — The Cramer Street Labs Where a Master's Student Left a Sleeping Bag

People treat Microsoft's cloud chief as if he trained on a coastal research campus.

The American degree was earned in this brick engineering block on Milwaukee's East Side.

Nadella entered the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee after the 1988 electrical-engineering degree from Manipal.

He took a master's in computer science in the College of Engineering and Applied Science and finished in 1990.

The department sat in the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences building at 3200 North Cramer Street.

K. Vairavan, then a professor and later chair, told campus reporters in 2014 that the student from Hyderabad completed a demanding programme faster than many classmates who already held computer-science first degrees.

Vairavan also said he once found a sleeping bag on the seventh-floor laboratory and was told Nadella had spent nights there finishing research.

The building still carries the college's name on the lintel.

After Milwaukee he worked on the technology staff at Sun Microsystems, then based in the Chicago area, before Microsoft hired him in 1992.

He later gave the campus a Chancellor's Innovation Award visit in 2013 and, with his wife, a two-million-dollar fund for diversity in tech education in 2021.

The first American paper in the file is the 1990 master's from this address.

Photo: EMS building, Caelb375, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, 2024. Portrait: Satya Nadella, Brian Smale, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.