CITRIS is pleased to announce that Bahram Ravani has been appointed CITRIS Director for the UC Davis campus, effective January 1, 2016. With appointments in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering, Professor Ravani has experience and insight into research trends in academia and industry. He currently focuses on engineering design and manufacturing, intelligent transportation systems, and biomechanics. On March 31, we are hosting a reception at UC Davis to welcome him to his new position and thank outgoing director Nina Amenta for her service to the institute.
Q. What excites you most about CITRIS?
A. I am happy to join CITRIS in a leadership role at this time of promising technological innovation. By providing a mechanism to encourage more research interactions among different CITRIS campuses and potentially throughout the UC system, CITRIS allows researchers to take a multidisciplinary approach to solving societal problems.
Q. What strengths does UC Davis contribute to the CITRIS research and innovation community?
A. One of the important strengths of UC Davis is that we have so many interdisciplinary programs and faculty on our campus already, which can allow us to broaden CITRIS’s scope and provide more impact. Beyond engineering and computer science, I would like to engage with faculty and students in the business school and in the humanities and social sciences as well; research centers and academic programs such as the Child Family Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Center for Regional Change, and the programs in Technocultural Studies, and Science and Technology Studies, among others, would be rewarding partners for CITRIS at Davis.
Q. What new trends in research and entrepreneurship are you seeing on the UC Davis campus?
A. As I mentioned, we have extensive interdisciplinary research and innovations in areas like sustainability in civil infrastructure, water resources, manufacturing, and food sciences. We are also strong in genomics, biomedical and medical sciences — all of which are fields seeing advances because of informatics, big data, and computer technology.
Q. Two years from now, what accomplishments would you like to celebrate for CITRIS at UC Davis?
A. I plan to work with my colleagues here to increase the awareness of and participation with CITRIS, foster collaborations across the UC Davis community, strengthen research partnerships with the UC Davis Medical Center, and enhance collaborations beyond CITRIS-affiliated campuses to include all 10 UC campuses. I would like to engage a broader sector of academic and non-academic communities in CITRIS activities. It is also important to encourage and facilitate more participation from underrepresented groups at UC Davis and promote entrepreneurial endeavors that can have the potential of leading to more significant impact.