Biography | Satya Nadella — The EMS Building Where Milwaukee Gave Him a Computer Science Master's

People treat Microsoft's chief executive as a product of Hyderabad classrooms and a Redmond campus.

The computer-science degree that moved him into American labs was taken in this building.

Satya Narayana Nadella finished a master of science in computer science at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1990.

He was about twenty when he entered the graduate program in the College of Engineering and Applied Science, after an electrical engineering bachelor's from the Manipal Institute of Technology in 1988.

The college sits in the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences building at 3200 North Cramer Street.

The EMS block opened in 1985, three years before he arrived, and still houses computer science on the west quad.

UWM's own alumni notices record him as a 1990 M.S. graduate and a former graduate teaching assistant.

A 2014 campus article published the day he became Microsoft chief executive remembered him as one of the Indian graduate students drawn by the computer-science program.

After Milwaukee he joined Sun Microsystems in the Chicago area, then Microsoft in 1992.

He returned in 2013 to receive the Chancellor's Innovation Award, a year before the Redmond appointment.

With his wife he later funded scholarships at this college for Milwaukee high-school graduates entering computing fields.

The pin is the EMS building, not a later laboratory and not a private rooming house.

Photo: Caelb375, Engineering and Math Building, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, 21 September 2024, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Satya Nadella, LeWeb Paris, 10 December 2013, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.