18 Endowed Chairs

Pedro Cabrales
Alan M. Schneider Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Cabrales’ research focuses on measuring, understanding and modifying microvascular gas transport and physiology in health and disease. He aims to understand oxygen delivery and its regulation in both acute and chronic cardiovascular disease, including anemia, brain traumatic injury, sepsis, cancer, obesity and diabetes. His laboratory has contributed to the development and evaluation of various oxygen transporters based on hemoglobin and fluorocarbons as alternatives to blood in transfusion medicine. Cabrales also has helped develop a widely-implemented program to create healthy eating habits for school children in Mexico, called “Good Manners for a Healthy Future.”

Adam Engler
Kenneth Bowles Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering 

Engler’s research aims to understand the cellular behavior of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and aging. His lab develops microfabricated technologies and biomaterials to study how cell behavior is directed by the extracellular matrix (ECM), a 3D fibrillar scaffold to which cells adhere. Engler’s lab has shown that ECM mechanics can regulate the differentiation of stem cells into specific adult cell types, cause heart cells to contract better/worse with age, and cause cells to transform into cancer and metastasize. He is also an advocate for early access to hands-on research opportunities, and has hosted an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program in bioengineering at UC San Diego for many years.  

Jeff Hasty
Paul A. Libby Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Hasty’s research focuses on the use of engineering methods in the theoretical design and experimental construction of synthetic gene networks in order to gain insight into the general modules of gene regulation. He aims to understand genetic networks ss a first step towards controlling and monitoring the function of cells, with a long-term goal of building synthetic genetic switches which could tightly regulate the expression of a desired protein, or cause an undesirable cell to self-destruct. For example, Hasty was part of a team that engineered bacteria to detect the presence of tumor DNA in a live organism. Hasty also holds an appointment in the Department of Molecular Biology. 

David Fenning
Francine Berman Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Fenning’s research aims to advance the performance and operational lifetime of solar cells and to develop new materials and devices for solar energy storage. His lab designs materials for low-cost photovoltaics and photoelectrochemistry using robotic automation to accelerate materials synthesis and the evaluation of functional energy conversion properties. His research focuses in particular on understanding how nanoscale defects limit energy conversion efficiency, often working at the frontiers of synchrotron X-ray microscopy to elucidate limiting mechanisms and identify pathways to improve energy conversion.

Ping Liu
William Coles Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering 

Liu’s research is centered on two goals: to develop low-cost, long-lasting energy storage systems to enable greater adoption of renewable energy and electric vehicles; and to study electrochemical processes that underlie a broad range of sustainability issues, including corrosion, low-grade waste heat utilization, and scalable production of functional nanomaterials. To achieve these goals, Liu’s lab characterizes interfacial processes, develops new materials for potential use in batteries and energy storage, and designs new architectures for energy storage devices. Liu is faculty director of the Sustainable Power and Energy Center at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Andrea Tao
Jeanne Ferrante Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Tao seeks to change the way inorganic nanomaterials are designed, for applications ranging from sensors to circuits. Her research group is interested in the synthesis and surface chemistry of colloidal nanocrystals, with an emphasis on developing new approaches for self-assembly and integration into composites and biological systems. She is the author of Chemical Principles of NanoEngineering, the preeminent undergraduate textbook in the field, and co-leads the Predictive Assembly research group within the NSF-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at UC San Diego.

Ryan Kastner
William Nachbar Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Kastner’s research is focused on hardware acceleration, hardware security, and remote sensing. He aims to design, build, and prototype computing systems that are safe, secure, high performance, inexpensive, and low power. His lab develops systems that solve real-world problems motivated by scientific and industry collaborations, including developing low cost modems for underwater acoustic communication; drones flying multispectral cameras for ecosystem monitoring; vision systems to capture large-scale 3D models of Maya archaeological sites, reconfigurable systems for DNA sequencing, and high frame rate 3D scanners for machine vision. Kastner co-founded and co-directs the Engineers for Exploration program at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Laurel Riek
David R. Miller Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Riek leads research in human-robot interaction, assistive and accessible technology, embodied AI, and health informatics. Her lab designs and develops new robotics and embodied AI technologies to support disabled people, healthcare workers, and community members. Riek’s recent work has applications in the areas of neurorehabilitation, dementia caregiving, and emergency medicine. She adopts a health equity, human-centered, community-driven approach, centering the voices and ideas of people who are marginalized to ensure any technology created is both well-aligned to their needs and reflective of their ideas. Riek also holds an appointment in the Department of Emergency Medicine. 

Alex C. Snoeren
Peter Banks Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Snoeren’s research interests include computer networks, distributed systems, and many aspects of Internet security and privacy.  Recent work focuses on increasing the efficiency of datacenter-scale computing, including techniques to leverage optical switching to dramatically increase the capacity and scale of datacenter networks while decreasing their energy footprint. His research group is currently exploring ways to better distribute computational tasks across the increasingly heterogeneous resources in modern datacenters, such as programmable networking hardware and task-specific accelerators. Snoeren has previously been honored for innovative approaches to measuring, managing and detecting network traffic.

Tara Javidi
Jerzy (George) Lewak Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Javidi’s research reveals how data and decisions can be controlled and optimized to acquire information, enable intelligence, and achieve autonomy. These deep theoretical insights and findings, at the intersection of AI, information theory, and stochastic control, empower a slew of practical technical solutions for complex large-scale systems such as next generation wireless networks and multi-agent robotic systems.  Javidi is a founding co-director of the UC San Diego Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and Security and a Co-PI of the NSF Institute for AI-enabled Optimization at Scale. She is also the faculty director of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC San Diego.

Farinaz Koushanfar
Siavouche Nemat-Nasser Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering 

Koushanfar's research has made foundational advances to the end-to-end design and optimization of secure computing systems, emphasizing on safe and automated intelligent systems, collaborative machine learning (ML), and cryptography-based secure/private computing. The standing challenge in such holistic secure co-optimization is simultaneous handling of the increasing scale/complexity of contemporary data, hardware, algorithm, and sophisticated robustness requirements. Koushanfar’s notable contributions include inventing logic-locking for traceable integrated circuits; pioneering deep learning watermarking for tracking distributed models; and developing advanced AI on encrypted data through algorithm-cryptography co-optimization. She also innovated the first provably (cryptographically) private federated learning system resilient to data poisoning and backdoor attacks. Koushanfar is co-director of the Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and Security. 

Olivia Graeve
Elias Masry Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Graeve’s research focuses on the design and manufacturing of advanced materials for extreme environments of temperature, pressure and radiation. Her lab aims to develop better-performing materials for a series of critical applications including hypersonic flight, nuclear fusion reactors; electro-optics, and hydrogen storage. Graeve is the faculty director of UC San Diego’s Graduate Program of Materials Science and Engineering, and leads the CaliBaja Center for Resilient Materials and Systems at UC San Diego. Graeve is dedicated to increasing the representation of Latinos in STEM, and founded and has run the ENLACE bi-national summer research program at UC San Diego since 2013.

Jan Kleissl
Henry G. Booker Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering 

Kleissl is the principal investigator of the $42M National Science Foundation Distributed Energy Resources Connect (DERConnect) testbed at UC San Diego. The testbed interconnects campus infrastructure such as buildings, electric vehicles, and batteries to test power grid control methods that facilitate incorporating renewable energy resources into the power grid.  Generally, Kleissl researches the interaction of weather with engineering systems, particularly buildings and solar power systems. He published two books on solar resource assessment and forecasting.

Sonia Martinez
Benjamin W. Zweifach Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Martinez’ research spans all aspects of the control of networked, multi-agent systems, including robotic teams and cyber-physical systems. In particular, her lab is researching the resilient, safe, and robust coordination of mixed multi-agent systems subject to attack. She has focused on the analysis and design of distributed coordination algorithms for groups of autonomous robots by leveraging nonlinear control, distributed optimization, and game-theoretical approaches. Martínez has developed novel locomotion and trajectory planning algorithms for underactuated robots, and developed scalable and robust motion coordination algorithms for the optimal deployment and formation control of robotic networks.