18 Endowed Chairs

We are proud to announce 18 new endowed chairs here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
 

The creation of these 18 new endowed chairs is possible thanks to the generous and visionary philanthropic planning of Irwin and Joan Jacobs.
Each of the new endowed chairs is named in honor of an early and foundational faculty member of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Thanks to these new endowed chairs, we are empowered to honor the positive impacts of another 18 world-class faculty from across all six Jacobs School departments, bringing our total number of faculty who hold endowed chair professorships to approximately 70.
 

Learn about the Jacobs School top-ranked programs here.

 

Jump to meet the inaugural chair holders in each department:

Bioengineering 
Chemical and Nano Engineering 
Computer Science and Engineering 
Electrical and Computer Engineering 

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Structural Engineering

 


Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering 
 

Prof. Pedro Cabrales

Pedro Cabrales
Alan M. Schneider Endowed Chair in the 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, traumatic brain 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 the 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.  

""Prof. Jeff Hasty

Jeff Hasty
Paul A. Libby Endowed Chair in the 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 as 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 in the School of Biological Sciences. 

 


Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering 
 

Prof. David Fenning

David Fenning
Francine Berman Endowed Chair in the 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.

Prof. Ping Liu

Ping Liu
William Coles Endowed Chair in the 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.

""Prof. Andrea Tao

Andrea Tao
Jeanne Ferrante Endowed Chair in the 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.

 


Department of Computer Science and Engineering  
 

Prof. Ryan Kastner

Ryan Kastner
William Nachbar Endowed Chair in the 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.

Prof. Laurel Riek

Laurel Riek
David R. Miller Endowed Chair in the 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. 

Prof. Alex Snoeren

Alex C. Snoeren
Peter Banks Endowed Chair in the 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.


Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 
 

Prof. Tara Javidi

Tara Javidi
Jerzy (George) Lewak Endowed Chair in the 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.

Prof. Farinaz Koushanfar

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

Koushanfar's research has made foundational advances to the end-to-end design and optimization of secure computing systems, emphasizing 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. 

 


Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering 
 

Prof. Olivia Graeve

Olivia Graeve
Elias Masry Endowed Chair in the 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.

Prof. Jan Kleissl

Jan Kleissl
Henry G. Booker Endowed Chair in the 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.

Prof. Sonia Martinez-Diaz

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

Martinez’ research spans all aspects of the control of networked, multi-agent systems, including robotic teams and cyber-physical systems such as transportation and power-grid networks. In particular, her lab is researching the resilient, safe, and robust coordination of mixed multi-agent systems subject to attacks. She has focused on the analysis and design of distributed coordination, learning and estimation 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 task assignment and formation control of robotic networks. She has developed novel distributed optimization algorithms for the deployment and integration of distributed energy resources in the power grid.

 


Department of Structural Engineering 

Prof. Tara Hutchinson

Tara Hutchinson
Jan Talbot Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Hutchinson is an earthquake engineering theoretician and experimentalist, aiming to develop new structural designs, materials and components. She is fortunate to be able to utilize the large-scale testing capabilities within the Powell Laboratories and the various shake tables at UC San Diego, including the LHPOST6 facility, the world’s largest multi-degree-of-freedom outdoor earthquake simulator. In addition to her expertise in earthquake and geotechnical engineering, and performance assessment of structural/non-structural components, Hutchinson creatively applies information technology, machine learning and computer vision to evaluate damage to structures. Results from her investigations of the seismic performance of soil-foundation-structural systems and non-structural building components have made their way directly into design guidelines, codes, and construction practices.

Prof. John McCartney

John McCartney
Hal Sorenson Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering 

McCartney’s research in geotechnical engineering focuses on unsaturated soil mechanics, energy geotechnics, and geosynthetics engineering. The goals of his lab are to solve new problems encountered when using building foundations, retaining walls and landfills as thermal energy resources; explore the response of unsaturated soil layers during surface vibrations or earthquakes; develop and test new approaches to anchor floating offshore renewable energy systems; understand how geosynthetic reinforcements can be used to improve the efficiency and sustainability of geotechnical systems; and study how waste materials like shredded tires in the form of tire-derived aggregates can be used in retaining walls or for low-cost seismic isolation of structures.

Prof. Gilberto Mosqueda

Gilberto Mosqueda
Mervyn Lea (M. Lea) Rudee Endowed Chair in Jacobs School of Engineering

Mosqueda’s primary research interests are in the experimental evaluation of large-scale structural and nonstructural components under earthquake loading. His current research examines the performance of seismically isolated buildings and bridges considering seismic shaking beyond design considerations and developing recommendations for structural design standards. Mosqueda led national teams for the Reconnaissance of the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina and the 2017 Puebla Morelos Earthquake.  Mosqueda serves as Associate Dean for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in the Jacobs School and is the Director of the Seismic Response Modification Device (SRMD) Test Facility.

 

 
 

Did you know?

The Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California San Diego offers excellence at scale in research, education, public service, and technology transfer. The Jacobs School of Engineering ranks the #7 public engineering school in the nation and #11 in the nation overall. A widely-recognized thought leader, the Jacobs School of Engineering ranks #1 in the nation for citations per publication. With 288 faculty and more than 9,100 students in six departments, the Jacobs School of Engineering is the second largest engineering school in California. Our entrepreneurial faculty lead teams that work across disciplines and industries to tackle the toughest challenges that no lab, department or company can handle alone. At the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, we make bold possible