Irwin Jacobs is founding chair and CEO emeritus of Qualcomm, a San Diego-based telecommunications company. An engineer by training, Jacobs began his career as a professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is the recipient of numerous international accolades for innovation and philanthropy.

He was professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where the Jacobs School of Engineering is named for him and his wife, and he co-authored a textbook entitled Principles of Communication Engineering.