BERKELEY - Key Persons
My name is Abigail, and I graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Computer Science. I'm a UX designer, researcher, and developer.
Job Titles:
- Director of Academic Affairs
As the Director of Academic Affairs, Amy manages the MDes Program and the academic and student affairs team for the Jacobs Institute. She also serves on the Jacobs Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee and partners with the MDes Student Association Executive Board. Contact Amy if you have questions about MDes program resources or policies; have a question, suggestion, or concern regarding your student experience; or require assistance from a Graduate Student Affairs Officer (GSAO).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Björn Hartmann is Faculty Director of the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
His research in Human-Computer Interaction focuses on novel design, prototyping, and implementation tools for the era of post-personal computing. His group investigates how better software and hardware can facilitate the exploration of interactive devices that leverage novel form factors and technologies (e.g., sensors and actuators). They also investigate how software can help students, designers, and makers to learn and share their expertise online.
He received his PhD from the Stanford Computer Science department in 2009, as well as an MSE in Computer and Information Science and Undergraduate Degrees in Digital Media Design and Communication from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. He is a Qualcomm Faculty Fellow and has received an NSF CAREER award, Sloan fellowship, and Okawa research award.
At the Institute, Hartmann oversees the Institute's curriculum, public programs, and maker space, rethinking the nature of hands on learning in the twenty first century.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lab Manager and Head
- Senior Lab Manager, CITRIS Invention Lab
Chris Myers is the Senior Lab Manager and Head Inventioneer for the CITRIS Invention Lab - a one of a kind educational maker space at CITRIS and the Banatao Institute that serves the UC Berkeley community - and teaches at the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation.
As a graduate of the product design program at The Art Center School of Design in Pasadena, California, Chris has designed a variety of products including concept automobiles, electric vehicles, medical equipment, exhibit design, wearable computers and toys. As a practicing product designer he has worked with many companies including Intel Research, (Xerox)Parc, and Nokia Research. Chris has a passion for education and has developed and taught STEM classes for schools, museums and libraries. It is through these classes that Chris developed a series of robotic drawing toys which are now produced by his company ArtBot Toys.
Chris brings broad experience in digital fabrication, from 3D modeling to laser-cutting. Contact him about high-end 3D printing or to hear about hacking shopbots to draw. Learn more or book office hours appointment.
Cody is a designer, fabricator, and roboticist whose work centers around surface rationalization and computational solutions for complex facade and enclosure problems. His interests are in computational design and digital fabrication and their roles within the greater discourse of design. Contact him about CNC fabrication, PCB fabrication, robotics, computation, optimization, and general design questions. Book office hours appointment.
Job Titles:
- Designer
- Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture
Danika Cooper is a landscape designer, urbanist, and researcher. Her teaching and research centers around the geopolitics of scarcity, alternative water ontologies, and designing for resiliency in the world's arid regions. Her work has been published and exhibited across the world, and she has practiced in both the United States and India. Previously she was the 2015-2016 Designer-in-Residence teaching fellow at the University of Illinois, Department of Landscape Architecture.
Job Titles:
- Chief Learning Officer for the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation
- Director Professor
Eric Paulos is the Chief Learning Officer for the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation and Associate Professor in Electrical Engineering Computer Science. He is also founder and director of the Hybrid Ecologies Lab, Director of the CITRIS Invention Lab, a Co-Director of the Swarm Lab, and faculty within the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM).
Previously, Eric held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute and in the Entertainment Technology Center. At CMU he founded and directed the Living Environments Lab.
Prior to CMU, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at Intel Research in Berkeley, California where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group - challenged to employ innovative methods to explore urban life and the future fabric of emerging technologies across public urban landscapes. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in critical making, design research, urban computing, sustainability, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, and intimate media.
Eric is a leading figure in the field of urban computing, coining the term in 2004, and a regular contributor, editorial board member, and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley where he helped launch a new robotic industry by developing some of the first internet tele-operated robots including Space Browsing helium filled blimps and Personal Roving Presence devices (PRoPs).
Gary focuses on electronics and robotics. Contact him regarding Jacobs Hall's spaces and tools for electronics-based making or to hear about his BattleBots experiences. Learn more or book office hours appointment.
Georgios Grigoriadis is a Designer and an Architect (of things), working with emerging technologies, future making and fabrication. He uses digital, physical tools and machines to design and build spaces, objects, experiences, worlds, words and tell stories about them.
He holds a Master of Design (MDes) from UC Berkeley and a Diploma (Master & Bachelor) of Architecture and Architecture Engineering from the School of Architecture of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. There, he was a researcher at the Innovative Environments research cluster working on several European research projects, and academic related activities in the School of Architecture. George is the co-founder of the space design practice GHOST office (no place specific, 2019) and one of the founding members of the creative collective xyzzy (Thessaloniki, 2015-2018). He has been a member of the Technical Chamber of Greece since 2019.
He is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a Lecturer at Berkeley MDes and a Design Technologist at Butlr Technologies.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
Biomechanics of cartilage and intervertebral disc; tissue engineering; continuum modeling of soft tissues; intervertebral disc function, degeneration, and regeneration.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering
- Member of the IEEE
Research Interests: The invention, modeling and simulation of micro- and nano-manufacturing processes, materials-testing techniques operating down to the nanoscale, and applications of polymeric materials in micro- and nano-fabrication-including for tissue scaffold engineering.
Biography: Hayden Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Biosystems and Micromechanics group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, and a Research Associate in the Microsystems Technology Laboratories at MIT.
Hayden was born in Bristol, United Kingdom, in 1981. He attended Bristol Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving the B.A. and M.Eng. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering in 2004. He was sponsored as an undergraduate by ST Microelectronics. He is a Senior Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, and received the Cambridge University Engineering Department's Baker Prize in 2004. Hayden received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2009, working with Professor Duane Boning.
Hayden is a member of the IEEE, the Institution of Engineering and Technology, and the Institute of Physics. He was an Institution of Electrical Engineers Jubilee Scholar 2000-4, and was a Kennedy Scholar for the academic year 2004-5.
Job Titles:
- Chief Scientist and Founding Director of UC Berkeley 's Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology
- Professor, Industrial Engineering and Operations Research
Ikhlaq Sidhu is the Chief Scientist and Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology. He received the IEOR Emerging Area Professor Award from his department at Berkeley. Professor Sidhu founded the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership. He serves as the faculty director of the Engineering Leadership Professional Program (ELPP). His research areas include systems and stochastic models, strategic data analytics, and learning models. He has been granted over 60 US Patents in networking technology, IP telephony, communications, and mobile computing. He was awarded 3Com Corporation's "Inventor of the Year" in 1999. Dr. Sidhu also serves as a Venture Advisor at Onset Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley investment firm.
Dr. Sidhu received his bachelor's degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his masters' degree and a doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor at the University of California
- Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban
- Professor
Kristina Hill is an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Hill studies urban ecology and hydrology in relationship to physical design and social justice issues. Her primary area of work is in adapting urban districts and shorezones to the new challenges associated with climate change.
In the past, she helped to develop new ideas for urban water system design that support salmon health in the Pacific Northwest. Her involvement as a citizen in urban system advocacy led her to serve as the head of a transit agency in Seattle, after helping to found that agency as a volunteer board member.
After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, she became a member of the Dutch-American engineering and design team that developed New Orleans water management strategy. She continues to collaborate internationally to understand the potential for designs to help protect coastal communities as sea levels rise.
Prof. Hill currently focuses her research on adaptation and coastal design in the San Francisco Bay Area, but engages in comparative studies in the US Mid-Atlantic, Europe, and Hawaii. Professor Hill lectures internationally on urban design and ecology. Before coming to Berkeley, she served as chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Virginia. Her book, Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning, was published by Island Press in 2002, and her current book project proposes adapting urban waterfronts to climate change while incorporating productive ecosystems.
She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University, and was a member of the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Virginia before coming to California. She was honored as a Fellow of the Urban Design Institute in New York, and has conducted research in Stockholm, Sweden, as a Fulbright Scholar.
Kuan-Ju Wu is interested in creating delightful interactions between humans, machines, and environments. He builds kinetic construction kits and tangible interfaces that borrow facets from the shapes and movements of nature, from the stories about the future machines, and the perceptual memories from our early childhood, those intuitive, rich and satisfying experiences. He has shown work in such venues as Frame Gallery, Pittsburgh; Assemble Gallery, Pittsburgh; and Interacción I/O/I, Disseny Hub Barcelona
Kuan-Ju sees teaching as art. In addition to illustrating technical knowledge he enjoys engaging in the constructive thinking process with students. He has led courses and workshops at universities and communities in the topics such as Making Thing Interactive (CMU), Robotic Bug Workshop (Assemble Gallery), Drawing Machine (RISD), Sensor Driven Storytelling - Internet of Trees (RISD).
Kuan-Ju Wu received his Master's in Tangible Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA and his Bachelor in Electronics Engineering from National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.
Job Titles:
- Architect
- Associate Director
Kyle Steinfeld is an architect who works with code and lives in Oakland. Through his unique hybrid practice of creative work, scholarly research, and software development, he seeks to reveal certain overlooked capacities of computational design; he finds no disharmony between the rational and whimsical, the analytical and uncanny, the lucid and bizarre. His work cuts across media, and is expressed through a combination of visual, formal, and spatial material. Across these, we find an undermining of the authoritative and imperative voice that is so often bestowed upon the results of computational processes, and find in its place a range of alternative voices.
His creative work at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Environmental Design has been exhibited at the NeurIPS workshop on Machine Learning for Creativity and design in 2017 and 2018, and has been published in Towards Data Science.
In his academic and scholarly work, he seeks to illuminate the dynamic relationship between the creative practice of design and computational design methods, thereby enabling a more inventive, informed, responsive, and responsible practice of architecture. He is the author of a number of works of software design tools, and has published widely on the subject of design and computation. He is the author of "Geometric Computation: Foundations for Design", a foundational text that demystifies computational geometry for an audience of architecture students and design professionals. He has been the recipient of a number of research grants and fellowships; he was an IDEA fellow at Autodesk in 2014, and a Hellman Fellow in 2012.
Luisa Caldas is Professor in the Department of Architecture and director of the Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory. After initially training as an architect, she received a MSc from the Bartlett Graduate School, UCL and a PhD in Architecture and Building Technology from MIT.
Caldas founded and directs the XR Lab - Virtual and Augmented Reality Laboratory in the Department of Architecture, and she offers graduate courses in VR/AR. Her research focuses on user experience, narrative and storytelling, and the use of immersive environments for building design and simulation. The XR Lab is developing an Augmented Reality project for BAMPFA, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, focusing on the construction of the new museum building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. She is a member of the Center for Augmented Cognition at UC Berkeley, and of the HTC Center for Enhanced Reality.
Luisa Caldas has also been active for more than twenty years in the field of sustainable design and green building, both in academia and as an energy consultant for large commercial buildings. Her work focuses on the use of advanced computational tools to supportthe inclusion of sustainability in early design decision making.
One of her main areas of research is the integration of complex geometry architectural solutions with sustainability, by developing the conceptual processes, workflows, and computational tools that allow multiple scale integration, from master planning to building design to envelope components.
Caldas research is also directed to the field of generative design systems. She is the author of GENE_ARCH, the first generative design system for search and generation of energy efficient buildings, and integrated Energy Plus as a simulation engine. GENE_ARCH currently includes other simulation engines, such as Radiance and Daysim.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California
- Associate Professor, City and Regional Planning
Marta C. Gonzalez is Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Physics Research faculty in the Energy Technology Area (ETA) at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
With the support of several companies, cities and foundations, her research team develops computer models to analyze digital traces of information mediated by devices. They process this information to manage the demand in urban infrastructures in relation to energy and mobility. Her recent research uses billions of mobile phone records to understand the appearance of traffic jams and the integration of electric vehicles into the grid, smart meter data records to compare the policy of solar energy adoption and card transactions to identify habits in spending behavior.
Prior to joining Berkeley, Marta worked as an Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a member of the Operations Research Center and the Center for Advanced Urbanism. She is a member of the scientific council of technology companies such as Gran Data, PTV and the Pecan Street Project consortium.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer, Materials Science and Engineering
After earning an Associate of Science degree from American River College, Dr. Sherburne earned his bachelor's degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Mineral Engineering at UC Berkeley. Dr. Sherburne went on to obtain his Master of Science and his Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from UC Berkeley. His work focused on computational approaches to understanding the limits of strengths of materials. After finishing his Ph.D. he took a position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in the Materials Science and Engineering department, where his research continued to focused on metals.
He also founded a maker space with faculty in the College of Business to study the cross-cutting nature of additive manufacturing and teach the fundamentals of the design process as well as to give students a place to pursue their personal interests. In addition, he was a faculty mentor for the Hoeft Technology & Management program. On returning to UC Berkeley he was the Program Director for the Singapore-Berkeley Research Institute for Sustainable Energy (SinBeRISE) and is the Director of International Programs for the Materials Science and Engineering department. His research focuses on applying computational techniques to the discovery, design and development of materials for a sustainable world: solar energy, catalytic reaction and CO2 reduction, and water for example.
Michael Naimark has worked in immersive and emerging media for over four decades. He has directed and advised on projects with support from Apple, Disney, Microsoft, Atari, Panavision, Lucasfilm, and Paul Allen's Interval Research; and from National Geographic, UNESCO, the Rockefeller Foundation, NY MoMA, the Banff Centre, Ars Electronica, and the Paris Metro. He's listed as lead inventor on 16 issued patents relating to cameras, display, haptics, and live; and his work has been seen in nearly 400 art exhibitions, film festivals, and presentations around the world. Since 2009, Michael has held faculty positions at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, USC Cinema's Interactive Media and Games Division, and the MIT Media Lab.
From 2017 to 2021, Michael served as visiting faculty in Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai, where he developed a VR/AR curriculum and directed research into live, online, glasses-free tele-immersion. Prior to that, in 2015-16, he was Google's first-ever VR resident artist. Michael's early work in projection mapping is listed "#3" in Wikipedia (after Disney and George Harrison). He's a founding editorial board member of Presence Journal (MIT Press) and a longtime advisor-at-large to ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax's Global Jukebox Project. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Exploratorium, the Centre for Arts and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, and the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the School of Information
- Assistant Professor, School of Information
Niloufar Salehi is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information at UC, Berkeley. Her research interests are in social computing, technologically mediated collective action, digital labor, and more broadly, human-computer-interaction (HCI). Her work has been published and received awards in premier venues in HCI including CHI and CSCW.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Architecture
- Registered Architect and Researcher
Paz Gutierrez is a registered architect and researcher focused on nature and multifunctional material organizations. In 2008 she founded BIOMS, a new interdisciplinary research initiative intersecting architecture and sciences as bioengineering to integrate principles of design and biophysics. BIOMS develops next-generation material systems through funded research on biologically inspired technologies developed in collaboration with bioengineering and civil/environmental engineering. She is recipient of various research grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation, DOE, and EPA in the area of sustainable building systems innovation.
Gutierrez became registered in Chile in 1998. Her independent built work includes the R.W. School Playspace and BFHS Plaza in Philadelphia, and Grant House, Niteroi, Brazil. She previously taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the University of Pennsylvania, and Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile. She is a member of the National Institute of Building Sciences (High Performance Building Council) and a panel reviewer for the National Science Foundation, where she oversees biologically inspired sensors and actuators at the CMMI division. Her work has been exhibited and published nationally and internationally. These include Architecture Responsiveness (Riverside Press, 2006) and Environmental Tectonics: AA Agendas No.6.
Gutierrez is recipient of the 2006 Best Interior Design Award - Interior Design Magazine (ECCB) for Bayhealth Maternity, Dover, DE; the AIA Academic Medal (First Prize); Spayd Design Prize; and a semi-finalist of 2006 PHL International Airport walls competition. In 2009 she received the Helman Faculty Award at UC Berkeley in recognition of her promise of research distinction, and the Blue Award 2009 First Prize - Sustainable Building Systems category (supervisor), a prominent International Competition organized by the University of Vienna, Austria. In recognition of her teaching and research originality she received the ACSA 2010 Creative Achievement Award (HM). Gutierrez is recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation EFRI-SEED Award 2010 for research innovation in sustainable building technologies based on microengineering principles. She is the first architect ever (principal investigator) to receive this award. Gutierrez has two inventions currently on patenting process.
Job Titles:
- Designer
- Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture
Richard Hindle is a designer, innovator, and educator. He teaches courses in ecological technology, planting design, and site design studios. Professor Hindle's research focuses on technology in the urban and regional landscape with an emphasis on material processes, innovation, and patents. His current research explores innovation in landscape related technologies across a range of scales, from large-scale mappings of riverine and coastal patents to detailed historical studies on the antecedents of vegetated architectural systems.
A recurring theme in Hindle's work is the tandem history, and future, of technology, city and landscape. His writing and making explores environmental futurism as chronicled in patent documents and the potential of new technological narratives and material processes to reframe theory, practice, and the production of landscape. He is a published author with articles appearing in the Journal of the Patent Office Soceity (JPTOS), Journal of Landscape Architecture (JOLA), Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM), The Plann Journal, UC Berkeley's Ground-Up Journal, and Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. In 2012 he received a Graham Foundation Award for the reconstruction of the "Vegetation-Bearing Architectonic Structure and Systems" and continues to explore the technological origins of other emergent technologies. Richard has worked as a consultant and designer, specializing in the design of advanced horticultural and building systems, from green roofs and facades to large-scale urban landscapes.
Job Titles:
- Senior Director of External Affairs
Sabrina brings good ideas to life. She is one of the creators of Maker Faire, the internationally recognized festival brand celebrating makers and creative culture. Sabrina developed the global network of community-driven Maker Faires that grew to 220 annual events in 44 countries, reaching over 1.4M people annually, and contributed on many levels of content curation and production of the flagship Bay Area and New York shows. During the 2020 COVID-19 supply chain crises, she helped stand up a nonprofit, Open Source Medical Supplies, to facilitate the global open source hardware community in emergency design and production of over 48 million pieces of needed medical supplies. More recently Sabrina has been consulting for the Ford Foundation, creating a new context for cross-field collaboration and strategy among public and private sector leaders working to modernize technology in the U.S. government. She has also developed science and tech experiences for NASA and The Exploratorium; run brand building campaigns for MOTO Development Group and Code for America; and was on the founding Board of Directors for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. Sabrina is a mom of two CalPoly SLO undergrads, Arlo and Ruby, and is a dedicated dahlia grower.
Job Titles:
- Teaching Professor, Haas School of Business
Beckman's research focuses on the pedagogy of teaching design and on the role of diversity on design and innovation teams for which she developed a Teaming with Diversity curriculum that is being used in classes in engineering, biological sciences, humanities and business courses at UC Berkeley as well as at a local high school. She has published case studies on design for sustainability, design roadmapping, and leveraging design approaches in sales processes.
Beckman directs the Product Management Program for the Berkeley Center for Executive Education, serving over 350 product managers from around the world each year and works with a wide variety of companies teaching and helping them implement design and innovation practices. In her time at UC Berkeley, she has received three Distinguished Teaching Awards at Haas, the campus-wide Distinguished Teaching Award, and in 2018 the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Senior Faculty.
Before joining UC Berkeley, Beckman worked in the Operations Management Services group at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and ran the Change Management Team at Hewlett-Packard. She received BS, MS and PhD degrees in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management and an MS in Statistics from Stanford University.
Job Titles:
- Designer
- Researcher
- Assistant Professor, Architecture
Simon Schleicher is an architectural designer, researcher, and educator from Germany whose work brings together architecture, engineering, and biology. In his research on bio-inspired compliant mechanisms, Simon is searching for a promising alternative to the persisting paradigm of rigid-body mechanics and has found inspiration in flexible plant movements. He aims to transfer the bending and folding mechanisms found in plant movements to elastic systems in architecture. By using modern computational modeling and simulation techniques, he reveals the plants' compliant mechanisms and integrates them into bio-inspired, flexible structures. In case studies, he demonstrates the transfer process in more detail and shows how bio-inspired mechanisms can be used, for example, to shade double curved facades.
Before coming to UC Berkeley, Simon was project manager for the first ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion 2010, which won the DETAIL prize and was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe Award. With his work, Simon has won awards including the Gips-Schüle-Forschungspreis, the International Bionic-Award, the Ralph Adam Cram Award, the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize, the British Institution Award, and the Pininfarina-Förderpreis. During his study, Simon was recipient of a Merit-Based Full-Tuition Scholarship at MIT and received grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst DAAD) and from the prestigious German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).
Job Titles:
- Director of Career Development
Stephanie Bianco is a career educator with years of experience working in higher ed, where she has taught and engaged with students from a range of backgrounds from across the globe. Stephanie has a passion for career development and supporting students as they prepare for their futures and career pathways. She is excited to help build a career program at Jacobs Institute that emphasizes equity, inclusion and access and best meets the unique needs of the MDes students and those studying design at JIDI.
Tarek I. Zohdi received his Ph.D. in 1997 in Computational and Applied Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany from 1997 to 1998 and then a lecturer (C2-Oberingenieur) at the Gottfried Leibniz University of Hannover in Germany from 1998 to 2001, where he received his Habilitation in General Mechanics (Allgemeine Mechanik). Approximately one out of every twenty Ph.D holders in Germany is allowed to proceed with a Habilitation. It is the highest academic degree in Germany and is usually required to obtain the rank of full Professor there and in other parts of Europe. In July 2001, he became an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He was promoted to Associate Professor in July 2004 and to Full Professor in July 2009. In July 2012, he was appointed Chair of the Designated Emphasis Program in Computational and Data Science and Engineering (DE-CSE) at UC Berkeley and in 2018 the Chief Technology Officer UC Berkeley Fung Institute for Innovation. Previously, he has served as Chair of the Engineering Science Program at UC Berkeley (2008-2012) and Vice-Chair for Instruction in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (2009-2012). He is currently a Chancellors Professor of Mechanical Engineering and holder of the W. C. Hall Family Endowed Chair in Engineering. He also holds a Staff Scientist position at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and an Adjunct Scientist position at the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute.
His main research interests are in modeling, simulation and optimization of advanced manufacturing processes with emphasis on nonconvex multiscale-multiphysics inverse problems. He has published over 175 archival refereed journal papers and seven books, as well as six handbook/book chapters and five encyclopedia chapters.
In 2017, he was awarded the University of California, Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award. The Distinguished Teaching Award is a campus-wide recognition for faculty that have established a sustained and varied record of teaching excellence. This is the highest award for teaching in the University.
A more comprehensive list of publications, awards, projects, and board affiliations, can be found on Dr. Zohdi's site.