Biography|Cristiano Amon — The Electrical Engineering Halls Where He Graduated in 1992

People who meet Cristiano Amon as Qualcomm's chief executive tend to place him in San Diego.

The training that put him there happened on this campus in Campinas, at the Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de Computação of the Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

The faculty sits at Avenida Albert Einstein 400, inside Cidade Universitária Zeferino Vaz in the Barão Geraldo district.

Amon enrolled in electrical engineering here in 1988 and took the bachelor's degree in 1992.

Unicamp's own records and later university notices agree on those two years.

He had grown up in Campinas. His father was an electrical engineer, and he chose the same course at the public university that already ranked among Brazil's strongest in the field.

First-generation analog cellular service was just arriving in the country while he sat in these lecture rooms.

After graduation he went to NEC do Brasil, then spent nearly a year at NEC's headquarters in Tokyo, then worked with Ericsson and the Brazilian operator Vésper before joining Qualcomm as an engineer in 1995.

The pin is the faculty building, not a childhood house and not the Qualcomm campus on Morehouse Drive.

Stand on Avenida Albert Einstein and the later keynotes look less surprising: the same radio problem, first framed here.

The attached photograph shows the main FEEC facade as it stood in 2006.

The original concrete block Amon walked in the early 1990s is the same complex; later renovations did not move the faculty off this street.

Photo: Renato M. E. Sabbatini, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.