Thomas Yuen

Yuen was born on September 10, 1951, in Yangzhou, China.

His father was a housekeeper and chauffeur who took his family to Hong Kong to follow his employer.[1]

In 1970, Yuen immigrated to the United States and attended community college before transferring to U.C. Irvine to study electrical engineering. In 1974,[2] he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from UC Irvine’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering.[3]

In 1973, he was diagnosed with a kidney disease that would require costly treatment. At the time, Yuen was working as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft, earning a modest salary of $12,000 a year.[4] He started to consider launching his own business.

In 1980, Yuen experienced kidney failure and learned that he would need dialysis treatment for the rest of his life.[1]

The same year, he co-founded AST Research, a hardware technology maker, with two other immigrant engineers, Albert Wong and Safi Qureshey.[5] The company, which initially produced expansion cards for IBM’s personal computers, became a leading maker of IBM-compatible personal computers[6] and grew into a Fortune 500 company, with revenues of $1.14 billion in 1992.[1]

In 1992, Yuen left AST[5] and invested $2.7 million into SRS Lab, an audio technology licenser. As Chief executive of the company, Yuen pushed the company to specialize into three-dimensional audio technology. In 2012, the company was purchased by DTS Inc., another sound licenser, for $148 million.[1]

Yuen spent the final decades of his life funding and promoting stem-cell therapy research, hoping that it would help address chronic diseases like the one from which he was suffering. He created his own company, R&D firm, PrimeGen Biotech, and donated to the University of California at Irvine’s stem research department.[7]