ECE senior Jaime Campos wins Alliant Energy Erroll Davis Award

Over the last few years, University of Wisconsin-Madison computer engineering undergraduate Jaime Campos has kept busy; he’s interned at the biggest names in computer architecture, including NVIDIA and AMD, worked as a teaching assistant and undergraduate researcher, and maintained a stellar academic record.

That effort has earned Campos the 2024 Alliant Energy Erroll B. Davis, Jr. Achievement Award for engineering.

The awards, endowed by the Alliant Energy Foundation, Inc., honor the outstanding scholarship and community service of undergraduate students from traditionally under-represented minority groups pursuing a degree in business or engineering at UW-Madison and UW-Platteville.

Campos grew up in Milwaukee, the son of immigrants from Mexico and Costa Rica. In high school, he had a curiosity about computers and how they worked, and even built a computer as part of a class project. But it wasn’t until his first semester at UW-Madison taking introductory computer engineering courses that he really caught the tech bug, deciding then that computer engineering would be his career trajectory.

By his second semester, he was already serving as a teaching assistant for ECE 252: Introduction to Computer Engineering. His sophomore year, he worked as a computer architecture researcher in the lab of Joshua San Miguel, an associate professor in ECE, designing low power and energy efficient hardware. Campos was able to leverage those experiences into coveted internships at chip makers NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) where he designed test programs for the next generation of server computer chips. Campos has accepted an offer to work for AMD in Austin after graduation in May, 2025.

Besides the world-class education he’s received, Campos says UW-Madison was an important stepping-stone for his development in other ways. Before college, he says he hadn’t been outside of Milwaukee too much. Being able to attend college closer to home while developing some independence was invaluable. “Moving to Madison has been great,” he says. “It gave me an opportunity to explore possible careers and life in general.”

Now, Campos says he’s ready to visit more of the world. “I’ll see where this AMD job takes me,” he says. “I want to take some time to work in different places around the US and have the opportunity to explore different places.”