Wim Roelandts Appointed to Board of Trustees at Santa Clara University
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Feb. 27, 2014— A longtime adviser and contributor to Santa Clara University, Willem "Wim" Roelandts, was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Jesuit, private University in Silicon Valley. This brings to 45 the number of members of the governing body that helps steer strategies and priorities of the 162-year-old institution.
"We are honored and gratified to welcome Wim Roelandts as a trustee after his years of dedication and loyalty to Santa Clara," said President Michael Engh, S.J. "His executive experience, technological knowledge, and passion for social justice will be great assets to us as we advance our integrated strategic planning and capital projects."
Born in Lennik, Belgium, Roelandts earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rijkshogere Technische School in Anderlecht, Belgium, in 1965.
He started his career with Hewlett Packard (HP) in Belgium in 1967. He held several jobs for HP in Belgium. In 1975 Roelandts moved to Grenoble, France and continued his career with HP. In 1983 he moved to the U.S. He held several management positions and finished his career at HP as senior vice president in charge of HP’s Computer Systems Organization, with responsibility for HP’s worldwide computer systems business of about $6 billion.
In 1996 Roelandts left HP to become CEO of Xilinx and later also became chairman of the board. Under his leadership the company’s revenue more than tripled to just under $2 billion, and market share increased in the programmable logic business from 30 percent to over 50 percent.
During his tenure, Xilinx was nominated several times in the top 10 of Fortune Magazine’s "100 best companies to work for." Roelandts retired as CEO of Xilinx in January 2008, but remained chairman of the board. He retired completely from the company in August 2009.
Roelandts serves as lead outside director and chairman of the compensation committee of Applied Materials, Inc. He is also a director of Aruba Networks, Inc. and serves as chairman of the compensation committee. He is a board member and a member of the compensation committee of eSilicon, a private company, and is a board member of IMEC, a Belgian research organization.
He is a board member of the El Camino Hospital Foundation, a member of the Board of Trustees of the Lincoln Law School in San Jose, and the chairman of the advisory board of Engineering Pathways to Success at San Jose State University. Roelandts holds an honorary doctorate from Santa Clara University (2004) and from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (2009).
Roelandts, 69, and his wife Maria have a long history of service to SCU. After his years of service on SCU’s Center for Science and Technology Advisory Board, the couple founded the Willem P. Roelandts and Maria Constantino-Roelandts Grant Program in Science and Technology for Social Benefit, which provides nearly $50,000 a year in annual support for awards to students and faculty researchers whose work emphasizes the use of science and technology to benefit underserved communities around the globe. Funded projects have included bamboo housing for Haiti, a motorized bike powered by clean compressed air, a portable solar/hydrogen fuel cell generator for off-grid electrification to meet basic needs, and a mobile application that helps piece workers in developing countries learn if they’re getting a fair price.
Maria Roelandts also has a record of providing scholarship support through SCU's Board of Fellows.
About Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university located 40 miles south of San Francisco in California’s Silicon Valley, offers its more than 8,800 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, theology, and engineering, plus master’s and law degrees and engineering Ph.D.s. Distinguished nationally by one of the highest graduation rates among all U.S. master’s universities, California’s oldest operating higher-education institution demonstrates faith-inspired values of ethics and social justice. For more information, see www.scu.edu.
Media Contact
Deepa Arora | Communications Director | darora@scu.edu | 408-554-5125