Eric Schmidt, the chairman and chief executive officer of Internet search giant Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., was named 2006 CEO of the Year by Investors Business Daily.

Schmidt, who graduated from Princeton with a degree in electrical engineering, joined Sun Microsystems as a software manager in 1983 after earning his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. He became Sun’s chief technology officer in 1994 and subsequently joined Novell as CEO in 1997, a position he held until joining Google in 2001. In 2006, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering based on his work on “the development of strategies for the world’s most successful Internet search engine company.” He currently serves as a trustee of Princeton University.