“Obviously everyone wants to be successful, but I want to be looked back on as being very innovative, very trusted and ethical and ultimately making a big difference in the world.”

Sergey Brin, Co-Founder of Google, graduated from University of Maryland with high honors in mathematics and computer science in 1993 and, as a NSF Graduate Research Fellow, went on to Stanford to further study Computer Science. Early in his graduate studies, he showed interest in the Internet, specifically data-mining and pattern extraction…

In his short executive biography, Brin [link broken, so link removed] lists the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that supported him while at Stanford among his top achievements. Like NSF, Brin understands the importance of research in innovation, and sponsors it in part through Google’s “20% time” program – all engineers at Google are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time on projects that interest them.