University of California, San Diego Appoints Six Women Engineering Professors to Endowed Chairs

The Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego has recently promoted 18 faculty members to endowed chairs, six of whom are women.

Andrea Tao has been named the Jeanne Ferrante Endowed Chair in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering. She has been a UC San Diego faculty member since 2009. She holds several leadership roles within the university including vice chair of education for her department, deputy director of the San Diego Nanotechnology Infrastructure, research lead for the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, and founding director of the Institute for Materials Discovery and Design.

Dr. Tao is a graduate of Harvard University, where she double-majored in chemistry and physics. She holds a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley.

Laurel Riek has been named the David R. Miller Endowed Chair in the department of computer science and engineering. She holds affiliated faculty appointments in the department of emergency medicine, the Contextual Robotics Institute, and the Design Lab. In addition to her teaching role, she directs the Healthcare Robotics Lab. Prior to her career at UC San Diego, she served as the Clare Booth Luce Chair in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Dr. Riek received her bachelor’s degree in logic and computation from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Cambridge in England.

Tara Javidi has been named to the Jerzy (George) Lewak Endowed Chair in the department of electrical and computer engineering. She has been a faculty member with the university for nearly two decades, currently holding an additional faculty appointment in the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute. She also serves as the founding co-director of the Center for Machine-Intelligence Computing and Security. Outside of her roles with UC San Diego, she is the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Information Theory.

Dr Javidi is a graduate of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, where she majored in electrical engineering. She holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied mathematics and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of Michigan.

Farinaz Koushanfar has been named to the Siavouche Nemat-Nasser Endowed Chair in the department of electrical and computer engineering. Alongside Dr. Javidi, Dr. Koushanfar serves as founding co-director of the Center for Machine-Intelligence Computing and Security. She is also the principal investigator for the Adaptive Computing and Embedded Systems Lab. Earlier in her career, she taught electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston for nine years.

Dr. Koushanfar holds a master’s degree in statistics and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.

Olivia Graeve has been named the Elias Masry Endowed Chair in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering. She is the faculty director of the university’s graduate program in materials science and engineering and director of the CaliBaja Center for Resilient Materials and Systems. Additionally, she is the founding director of the university’s ENLACE bi-national summer research program, which aims to encourage students to pursue research in STEM fields, while promoting cross-border collaborations in Baja California and the San Diego region.

Dr. Graeve is an undergraduate alumna of UC San Diego, where she majored in structural engineering. She received her Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of California, Davis.

Sonia Martínez has been named the Benjamin W. Zweifach Endowed Chair in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering. She first joined the university in 2006 as an assistant professor, ultimately rising to the rank of full professor in 2014. She currently serves as co-head of the Multi-Agent Robotics Lab. Her academic work has led her to authoring two books, most recently Distributed Optimization-Based Control of Multi-Agent Networks in Complex Environments (Springer, 2015).

Dr. Martinez earned her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Zaragoza in Spain and her Ph.D. in engineering mathematics from the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain.