The University of Southern California (USC) will mourn the loss of professor Bosco Tjan in a special prayer ceremony Monday, as the graduate student believed to have stabbed Tjan remains jailed.
Tjan was stabbed fatally in the chest last Friday, inside the Seeley G. Mudd building on the USC campus.
In a letter to the university community, USC President C.L. Max Nikias said the school’s public safety officers responded immediately and apprehended the suspect at the scene of the crime. Police arrested Jonathan David Brown, 28, reported to be a doctoral student in Tjan’s lab.
The USC Department of Public Safety said in a statement the attack was not a random act and “was the result of a personal dispute.”
Tjan, 50, a USC professor since 2001, taught at the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, and was considered an expert in vision loss restoration.
In his own words, Tjan wrote about what he did on his LinkedIn profile: “I direct the Laboratory for Functional and Computational Vision at the University of Southern California. My group studies the human visual system using a broad range of behavioral, computational, and neural imaging techniques to address basic and translational questions pertaining to vision loss, restoration, and rehabilitation. I also co-direct the USC Dornsife Cognitive Neuroscience Imaging Center, a shared human brain imaging facility for researchers in human neuroscience.”
When the news broke of Tjan’s murder, his friends and colleagues expressed their dismay on social media.
