Johns Hopkins Engineering graduate, Jun Wu ’98, PhD ‘03, is a recipient of a 2019 JHU Distinguished Alumnus Award. The award honors alumni who have typified the Johns Hopkins tradition of excellence and brought credit to the university through their personal accomplishments, professional achievements, or humanitarian service.
Wu is a founder and managing partner at AMINO Capital, a venture firm based in Palo Alto, California, that focuses on seed to growth stage investments in big data and data driven technologies. Prior to that, he was a research scientist at Google, where he worked on the design and implementation of algorithms for information retrieval and natural language processing. At Google, he was a major contributor to the development of the Google Search Engine for Asian languages and he was a pioneer in the area of internet search anti-fraud. Wu has over 10 patents and is the author of 10 books, including Silicon Valley, The Road of a University, On Top of Tides, Beauty of Mathematics, Civilization, and Smart Times. Wu studied Computer Science at Johns Hopkins, where he also was a researcher in WSE’s Center for Language and Speech Processing. He now is a member of the Whiting School of Engineering’s Advisory Board.