A native of Highland, Indiana, Stephen J. Zelencik started his college career at Purdue North Central. After completing two years in the Signal Corps, he came to the West Lafayette campus where he completed his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1960.

Zelencik began his professional career in sales and marketing with the Amphenol-Borg Corporation, a manufacturer of electrical connectors and cable assemblies. After five years with Amphenol-Borg, he joined the sales team of Fairchild Semiconductor. In 1966, Zelencik secured one of the largest contracts ever obtained by the semiconductor industry and was named Fairchild's salesman of the year.

In April 1970, Zelencik joined Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) as the company's first outside salesman, managing all western area sales from a southern California location. In 1979, Zelencik accepted a position in Sunnyvale as director of all of AMD's distributor operations and expanded operations to include Europe and Japan. He rapidly worked his way up the corporate ladder to his present position of senior vice president and chief marketing executive. Today he heads a world-wide team of approximately 800 professionals, AMD's sales exceed $1.5 billion, and the company is the number two worldwide supplier of microprocessors.

A resident of Woodside, California, since 1976, Zelencik is president of the Board of Trustees of the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, a member of the Advisory Board of the Silicon Valley Charity Ball Foundation, and on the board of the Mrs. Timothy Hopkins Society in support of the Children's Hospital at Stanford.