The name Franklin Antonio may not ring a bell, but chances are high that you regularly use technology he helped develop. Antonio, who died in 2022 at the age of 69, was cofounder and chief scientist of the semiconductor giant Qualcomm, which makes chips and other products used in everything from Wi-Fi to AI. Wealthy from his leadership role at the San Diego-based company, Antonio engaged in a mix of philanthropy during his life, notably including a $30 million gift in 2017 to the engineering school at his alma mater, University of California at San Diego.
But even that UCSD gift was dwarfed by recent news of a bequest from his estate. Antonio left $200 million, roughly a fifth of his wealth, to the Summer Science Program (SSP), a nonprofit educational program that, for more than 60 years, has provided high schoolers with immersive, six-week-long enrichment programs conducting research and attacking tough scientific problems. As a teen, Antonio attended the Summer Science Program himself, before continuing, like many of the program’s alums, into a productive career in technology.
Evidently, the experience had a profound impact on Antonio, who was credited with 378 patents during a career that included stints at pioneering tech firm Linkabit before joining the Qualcomm startup team. His gift will no doubt have a profound impact on the SSP, said Frank Steslow, CEO of the program. “When your organization has a $7 million annual operating budget, $200 million is transformational.”
The SSP was established in 1959 at the Thacher School, a private prep school in Ojai, California. Newton Chase, the headmaster at the time, felt that promising students weren’t being adequately inspired to pursue STEM subjects and careers. Remember, it was the height of the Cold War, Sputnik had beaten America into space, and fears of Soviet superiority in science were widespread.
Chase conceived of an intensive summer program for high schoolers, enlisting educators at California Institute of Technology and other colleges to contribute faculty and speakers. The National Science Foundation funded the summer program for its first decades. Alums of the SSP, like Antonio, have been key to its survival over the years, said Steslow, but none of the gifts approached the size of Antonio’s bequest.
These days, of course, efforts to attract young people to STEM careers continue. The SSP currently runs educational enrichment programs in astrophysics, biochemistry and genomics; most students are heading into their senior year of high school, though a few younger kids attend. The organization currently runs the summer educational programs at five universities across the country; the kids work in teams, guided by university faculty and graduate students, working in the same labs and using the same specialized equipment as the professionals. Many, though not all, of the SSP students go on to STEM studies and careers, said Steslow.
It will take the SSP leadership some time to determine how it will use the Antonio gift, Steslow said. But likely changes include expanding the number of program sessions and the number of university partners and faculty instructors, enabling them to serve more students.
The program is highly competitive, accepting only about 7% of applicants. Steslow said one of the SSP’s priorities will be to take more students, but particularly to enhance its recruitment practices to attract more students from underrepresented backgrounds. “We want to serve those highly motivated students who might not have the academic background because of where they go to school, but who would excel in a STEM career if they were given the opportunity.”
Although the Cold War is over, the U.S. still suffers from the same concerns about insufficient numbers of students in STEM. China has replaced the Soviet Union as the chief technology rival, but the country’s economic and political leadership still depends to a significant degree on a strong STEM workforce. As a result, a great deal of philanthropy, whether it’s coming from corporate giving programs or tech industry winners, places its sights on science education programs.
On that note, Antonio’s bequest to SSP may have been unexpected for the recipient, but it wasn’t out of character for the career tech professional and science enthusiast. Besides the 2017 gift to UCSD’s engineering school, Antonio was also known for his support over many years of the SETI Institute, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence. That support included $3.5 million in 2012 and $1.2 million in 2019, both of which went to upgrade an astronomical telescope array that the organization used to scan the universe.
Antonio’s estate also left nearly $5 million to the Foundation for Clovis Schools, an educational nonprofit in the community that Antonio grew up in; he had supported the foundation while he was alive, too. But his philanthropy wasn’t restricted to science and education: In 2014, for example, he made a $2 million donation to Father Joe’s Villages, a San Diego nonprofit that supports people experiencing homelessness and poverty.
There may be more philanthropy from Antonio’s estate in the coming months. He reportedly left about half of his near-billion-dollar fortune to family members, and half to charitable causes. That means there could be as much as $300 million more to be finalized and announced.
