Sony’s $3-Million Donation to Fund Chair at Illinois U.

Japan’s Sony Corp. has donated $3 million, its largest single gift to date to a U.S. college, to endow a research and teaching position in electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois, the school announced today.

The chair to be funded by the grant will be named in honor of John Bardeen, 81, a university faculty member who won the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics as co-inventor of the transistor. Bardeen also won a Nobel in 1972 for co-development of the theory of superconductivity at low temperatures.

One of Sony’s earliest products was a radio using the transistor developed by Bardeen and his colleagues at Bell Laboratories.

The university revealed the gift at opening ceremonies for its $13.5-million microelectronics laboratory.