A former Georgia Tech professor was indicted last month on charges that he engaged in a scheme that led to the theft of more than $1 million from the university. If convicted, Joy Laskar could face between 10 and 40 years in prison and a hefty fine. Laskar was dismissed by the university in 2011.
The indictment alleges that Laskar, who had served as Georgia Tech’s director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center, used university resources to purchase about $1 million in computer chips from CMP, a French microchip fabricator, to benefit Sayana Wireless, a private company he formed in 2006. Laskar also allegedly used the university resources to conduct his company’s day-to-day business activities -a violation of university policy and procedure – between June 2006 and June 2011, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution reported.
Laskar was charged in May 2010 when agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation raided his university offices. At the same time other agents went through the house and confiscated files and computer equipment, The New York Times reported. The case has been ongoing for the past three years. Craig Gillen, a lawyer for Laskar, told the Times that the attorney general had been running out of time on the case due to the statute of limitations.
“We’ve reviewed the indictment, and we vehemently disagree with the charges brought against Dr. Laskar,” Gillen said. “He’s a well-recognized, national pioneer in his field. This indictment came, literally in our view, days before the case would have gone out on a statute of limitations. We will fight every single allegation. We look forward to Dr. Laskar’s day in court,” he said.
A spokeswoman for the Georgia attorney general’s office told the Times that the case was indicted within the statute of limitations.
Meanwhile, Laskar’s friends and family have started an online petition – Justice for Joy Laskar – helmed by his wife Devi Sen Laskar, to shed light on the case. The website also provides a chronology of events leading to Laskar’s indictment.
At Georgia Tech, where he was a professor of electrical engineering, Laskar did research on chip design and mentored dozens of Ph.D. students and, over the years, started and sold a number of tech companies, the website says. Laskar and Stephane Pinel co-founded Sayana Wireless in June 2006 and entered into a license agreement with Georgia Tech Research Corp., the licensing arm of Georgia Tech, about a month later. According to the website, to date, Georgia Tech has received more than $1.2 million in funds from Sayana and a five percent ownership position in the company, which later became 10 percent.
Laskar received his B.Sc. in Computer Engineering (with physics and math minors) from Clemson University and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From 1992 to 2011, he held various faculty positions at the University of Hawaii and at Georgia Tech where he was the Schlumberger Chair in Microelectronics. During his tenure at Georgia Tech, Laskar founded one of the largest mixed-signal design centers in the U.S. – the Georgia Electronic Design Center.
Since 1995 Laskar has co-founded three start-up companies that have transferred results of his research to commercialization and has co-authored five textbooks, has published more than 600 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers, and has 52 patents (issued or pending). He is currently a partner at anayas360, a technology advisory firm in Silicon Valley.