Ex-student donates $400k to MSU to honor Prof. Jain

BY A STAFF WRITER

EAST LANSING, MI — A former student of Anil K. Jain, the University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University (MSU) in East Lansing, Mich., has made a $400,000 anonymous gift to honor the Indian American, who is one of the world’s foremost authorities on pattern recognition, computer vision, and biometric recognition.

The Anil K. Jain Endowed Graduate Fellowship was endowed by “an international businessman who was a visiting scholar in computer graphics and image processing in Jain’s laboratory in the early 1980s,” MSU said in a statement.

The fellowship will support Ph.D.-level research on pattern recognition, computer vision and biometric recognition and MSU’s Computer Science and Engineering Department will select recipients of the Jain Fellowship.

Jain has conducted trailblazing research in data clustering, fingerprint recognition and face recognition. His articles on biometrics have appeared in Scientific American, Nature, IEEE Spectrum, Scholarpedia, and MIT Technology Review.

“I am so very grateful that a former student has chosen to honor me by establishing this endowment,” Jain said in the MSU statement.

“I am flattered that our time together at MSU was so meaningful to him. Ultimately, this endowed fellowship will enhance our mutual scientific interests through new generations of graduate students.”

Leo Kempel, dean of the MSU College of Engineering, said.

“We are delighted someone has chosen to honor Dr. Jain’s long and meritorious service in this way.”

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The gift is part of MSU’s Empower Extraordinary Campaign. Jain and his family will donate an added $100,000 to augment the endowment.

Jain received a bachelor’s in technology from IIT-Kanpur (India) in 1969 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Ohio State University.

He was a consultant to India’s Aadhaar program which provides a 12-digit unique ID number to Indian residents based on their fingerprint and iris data. He is currently serving as an advisor to the Brazilian National ID project.

Jain also currently serves as a member of the Forensic Science Standards Board and is co-organizing a program on Forensics at the Statistical and Mathematical Sciences Institute.