$30 million gift from the Lamond family underscores a multigenerational commitment to university’s future in advanced computing and AI‑driven hardware

Duke University has announced a transformative gift that will permanently enshrine the legacy of one of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor pioneers, as the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Pratt School of Engineering is now named the Pierre R. Lamond Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

At the heart of the $57 million initiative is a $30 million commitment from the Lamond family, representing one of the largest and most strategically focused investments in Duke’s engineering enterprise and underscoring a multigenerational commitment to the university’s future in advanced computing and AI‑driven hardware.

The beneficiary of this naming and the broader strategy is not just the department or the institution, but a single family whose roots stretch from the dawn of the integrated circuit to the cutting edge of venture‑capital‑driven innovation: Pierre R. Lamond and his descendants, led by alumnus David Lamond, his wife Kelsey Lamond, and their foundation, the Lamond Family Foundation.

Pierre Lamond, now in his mid‑90s, is a towering figure in the history of microelectronics. A French‑born engineer who came of age in the postwar era, he began his career at Transitron Electronics in 1957, not long before joining Gordon Moore’s team at Fairchild Semiconductor, the company that seeded the modern semiconductor industry.

At Fairchild, he oversaw the development of high‑frequency transistors and some of the first generation of digital integrated circuits, contributions that helped lay the foundation for the transistor‑rich systems that would later power computers, communications, and consumer electronics.

In 1967 he co‑founded National Semiconductor Corporation, where he helped shape the company’s integrated‑circuits business and its global manufacturing strategy; decades later he would go on to serve as a General Partner at Sequoia Capital and as a venture capitalist at Eclipse Ventures, investing in and guiding a string of semiconductor, systems, and software companies that became bellwethers of the tech boom.

His career thus spans the arc from the engineer on the lab bench to the boardroom strategist who backed the startups that turned Moore’s Law into an economic reality.

It is this legacy that the Lamond family gift now brings into explicit alignment with Duke’s own ambitions in engineering.

The naming of the Pierre R. Lamond Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is the first of its kind in Pratt outside the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, and it comes at a moment when chip design, nanoelectronics, and AI hardware are central to national competitiveness and global technological leadership.

The Lamond gift does not simply add a nameplate; it embeds Pierre Lamond’s life story in the institutional DNA of a department that is already ranked among the top 20 in the country and moving toward a top‑five aspiration.

The centerpiece of the gift is the Pierre R. Lamond Presidential Distinguished Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Duke’s highest endowed professorship and the first such chair housed entirely within Pratt. That chair will be devoted to advancing research in semiconductors, nanoelectronics, and computer engineering—fields that mirror the trajectory of Lamond’s own career and that position Duke to compete for the most sought‑after faculty in the U.S.

Beyond the chair, the Lamonds’ $30 million commitment leverages donor challenges to unlock an additional $27 million in matching funds, creating a package that will endow seven new faculty chairs and seven Ph.D. fellowships in ECE. This structure is deliberate: it is designed to build a self‑reinforcing ecosystem of talent, where distinguished professors supervise a cohort of doctoral students who can then become the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.

The gift also establishes an operational excellence endowment for the department, which will strengthen undergraduate programs, expand hands‑on learning, sponsor distinguished speakers, and support student‑driven initiatives.

Together, these elements amount to a decades‑long bet on Duke’s ability to shape the next era of computing technologies, from the physics of the chip to the systems that run artificial‑intelligence workloads at scale.

The prominent role of David and Kelsey Lamond underscores how this gift is both a tribute and a continuation of a family narrative. David Lamond, a history graduate of Duke College and later a JD from Duke Law, has built a career that spans technology, finance, and governance. He has served on the boards of for‑profit and nonprofit organizations, including Quince and Tipping Point Community, and has held leadership roles in venture and investment firms. His ties to Duke extend beyond his academic credentials; they connect to a broader pattern of engagement with the university’s mission and with social‑impact initiatives. Kelsey Lamond, also a Duke alumna, has participated in philanthropy that supports education and leadership development, including engagement with institutions such as African Leadership Academy. Their joint decision to partner with Pierre and Christine Lamond and the Lamond Family Foundation to name the department reflects a convergence of personal loyalty to Duke, admiration for Pierre’s career, and a shared belief that supporting the pipeline from engineering education to innovation is one of the highest‑impact forms of philanthropy.

For Duke leadership, the Lamond gift is a signal moment. President Vincent E. Price has described the family’s commitment as “visionary,” emphasizing that it will enable current and future generations of Duke scholars to advance technologies that are vital to society while also supporting excellence in computing across the entire university. Provost Alec D. Gallimore has highlighted the combination of endowed faculty chairs with fully funded graduate fellowships as a rare and powerful formula for building a “significant and enduring advantage” for Pratt in the global race for talent. Those endorsements underscore that the Lamonds are not merely funding positions; they are altering Duke’s competitive posture in a field where the distinction between research university and national leader often turns on the availability of endowment‑driven, stable research capacity.

Jerome Lynch, Vinik Dean of Engineering, has framed the naming in explicitly aspirational terms: having such a monumental investment from one of the earliest pioneers of microelectronics in Silicon Valley provides Duke with “tremendous momentum” toward its goal of breaking into the top five in electrical and computer engineering. In that context, the Lamond family’s role is not just that of benefactors whose names will appear on buildings and chairs; they are positioned as strategic partners in a national conversation about who will lead the next wave of semiconductor and AI‑hardware innovation.

Their story—an engineer‑turned‑venture‑capitalist whose life intersected with Moore, Fairchild, National Semiconductor, and Sequoia now joined by a son and daughter‑in‑law whose work bridges technology, governance, and philanthropy—creates a narrative that Duke can leverage in recruiting faculty, students, and industry partners.

In broader philanthropic terms, the Lamond gift fits within Duke’s MADE FOR THIS campaign, the university’s most ambitious fundraising and engagement effort to date, and within the Duke Science and Technology pillar, which seeks to accelerate discovery in foundational scientific disciplines.

It is emblematic of a trend in higher education where families with deep roots in technology and entrepreneurship choose to reinvest their wealth into the institutions that educated them, with the explicit aim of sustaining U.S. competitiveness in strategically sensitive fields.

The Lamonds’ decision to name the department for Pierre, rather than for themselves, suggests a preference for legacy over personal branding: the gift is framed as a tribute to a lifetime of engineering and investment, and the Lamond family appears content to stand behind the pioneer whose technical work helped make the modern digital age possible.

As the Pierre R. Lamond Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering moves forward under this new banner, the donor’s imprint will be felt far beyond the ceremonial moment.

The endowed chairs and fellowships will recruit faculty and students whose research agendas will be shaped, in part, by the expectation that Duke now sits at the table with other leading programs in semiconductors and computer engineering. The operational excellence fund will expand the department’s agility, allowing it to experiment with new curricula, support student projects aligned with AI and hardware, and deepen partnerships with industry.

And Pierre Lamond’s name will serve as a constant reminder that the field of electrical and computer engineering is not just an academic discipline but a living chain of innovation—one that stretches from the transistor labs of the 1950s and 1960s to the AI‑driven chip companies of today, and from the boardrooms of Silicon Valley to the classrooms and research labs of Durham.