ICS Honors Our Veterans

For Veterans Day, we share highlights from stories of the members of our Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) community who have served. We thank all ICS veterans for your service, and for contributing your skills, experience and talent to the field of computing. We are the richer for it.

Former ICS communications staff member Filbert Fontejon, who now works in the UCI School of Medicine, performed the national anthem at the UCI Veterans Day 2024 Ceremony on November 6. Fontejon was an avionics technician, working on electronics for communications, navigations and weapons systems in the U.S. Marine Corps.

Alum Jumar Balacy is a U.S. Navy veteran who became a UX Designer. As Balacy has explained, “I feel really strongly that anyone who has volunteered to defend the nation should be involved in tech. I want people who have taken that oath, and who have a strong ethical core, to be on the informational front lines, making these design decisions, so that we can use technology to help people.”

Computer science major Jixing Bian is a former U.S. Army infantryman who aims to use his degree to further the technological development of environmentally friendly vehicles. Another computer science major, Tucker Goldman, traveled the world with the U.S. Air Force before joining UCI as a transfer student in 2022. Recent graduate Zixu Yu spent four years in the U.S. Marines before studying computer science at UCI. He has said he hopes to work at a Naval or Air Force research facility in order to use the knowledge he learned from UCI to continue to serve his country. Cheonwoo Seo, who served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a data systems administrator and graduated with a degree in Business Information Management in 2023, is now a quality manager at Epic.

Marine Chauncy Sapien, a software engineering major who graduated in 2020 with hopes of creating software to support the U.S. military, is now a full stack software engineer at Fuse Integration, a defense and space manufacturing company. Yet another Marine, Mario Rodriguez, has been a software developer at General Motors since 2021. Navy veteran Timothy Tomas earned his B.S. in Informatics, and one of the reasons he chose UCI was because it offers guaranteed housing for veterans.

In other related stories, alum Jim Sherriff has worked to help give veterans a jump start in the tech industry, and in 2022, ICS established its scholarship for military connected students – the first of its kind in the UC – through the Master of Data Science program.

For more information on support for veterans, visit UCI’s Veteran Services Center.