CITRIS and the Banatao Institute at UC Berkeley announce the appointment of Ikhlaq Sidhu as a senior fellow. Sidhu brings extensive experience in technology innovation, research translation and global academic collaboration.
Sidhu currently serves as dean and professor at the IE School of Science & Technology in Madrid, Spain, where he leads international initiatives spanning Europe, the United States and the Middle East, including activities in New York, Riyadh and Brussels. He is also a senior fellow at the Institute for European Studies at UC Berkeley and co-chair of the Berkeley International Co-Lab for Technology and People, together with Trond K. Petersen, professor of sociology and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Sidhu has a long history of leadership at UC Berkeley. He previously served as the founding director of the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology and as the founding chief scientist of the Fung Institute for Engineering Leadership. In addition, he served as the lead for two significant interdisciplinary programs on campus: Engineering Leadership Professional Program (ELPP) and Data-X, Berkeley’s cross-disciplinary data science initiative.
Coinciding with this appointment, CITRIS will begin developing a research collaboration with the Berkeley International Co-Lab for Technology and People and the IEX Labs, an extension of the IE School of Science & Technology. The collaboration is designed to support joint research and programming across institutions.
Collaboration grants and student support will accelerate high-impact research spanning core technologies – including robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and cyber-physical systems – as well as application domains such as health systems, clean technology and financial infrastructure.
The collaboration will also support convenings and programmatic activities designed to connect researchers, industry leaders and policymakers. Among these efforts is the IEX Berkeley Collider Summit, which brings together cross-disciplinary participants which resulted in the recent report on the Rewiring of Globalization and Institutional Design in the Age of AI.
Through this appointment and collaboration, CITRIS continues to strengthen its mission of advancing research that applies information technology to address complex societal challenges while fostering global partnerships that accelerate innovation and impact.