A Purrfect Way to Support Students

In a flight of feline-inspired fancy, Caltech electrical engineering 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 us as something we wanted to do,” says Chapman, a senior Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) architect with Nvidia. [Caltech story]