A Purrfect Way to Support Students
In a flight of feline-inspired fancy, Caltech alumnus and Nvidia chip architect Robert Chapman has endowed a scholarship named for his cat.
Eager to support students at Caltech, Robert "Rob" Chapman (BS '96) and his wife, Felicity Rogers-Chapman, have endowed the Amelia Earhart Scholarship.
No, it isn't an homage to the famous aviator. The scholarship is whimsically named for the tiniest and boldest of the Chapmans' three cats, adopted while the family was living under pandemic lockdown in Mountain View, California. Amelia, an intrepid explorer, was the first feline out of the box.
Usually, donors name scholarships after their families, but "that didn't strike my wife and me as something we wanted to do," says Chapman, an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) architect with Nvidia.
The decision to fund a scholarship grew out of Chapman's gratitude for the support he received as an undergraduate.
Between paid summer internships and endowed scholarships, Chapman graduated with only $17,000 in student debt. "That was less than half-a-year's starting salary as an engineer, which I easily paid off," he says.
He adds: "Caltech was very generous with me—I was always aware of that, and I always wanted to help in some way."