CITRIS and the Banatao Institute is pleased to welcome Costas Spanos as its newest director.
As the Andrew S. Grove Professor and Chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Spanos conducts research on the application of statistical analysis in the design and fabrication of integrated circuits, and the development and deployment of novel sensors and computer-aided techniques in semiconductor manufacturing. He is also using statistical data mining techniques for energy efficiency applications, and is the leader of the Singapore-based SinBerBEST project, focusing on energy-efficient buildings.
“CITRIS is a unique resource at the University of California and represents a great opportunity to drive flexible, meaningful engagement with today’s problems on so many critical fronts,” says Spanos. “In the coming years, we will build on the successes that have made CITRIS so well-known worldwide, and seek new challenges at the intersection of technology and societal benefit.”
In 1988, Spanos joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he has served as chair of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, the Associate Dean for Research, and the CEO of the Berkeley Educational Alliance for Research in Singapore. Spanos received his master’s and doctoral degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in 1981 and 1985, after which he worked for three years at the advanced computer-aided design group of the Digital Equipment Corporation.
Spanos will take over leadership of CITRIS from Paul K. Wright, who has served as director since 2007. Under Wright’s direction, the institute has grown to include more than 300 researchers on its four campuses: UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and UC Merced. In 2009, Wright oversaw the launch of Sutardja Dai Hall, CITRIS’s 140,000-square-foot headquarter building, which now also houses the state-of-the art Marvell Nanofabrication Laboratory and the CITRIS Invention Lab, both crucial components of CITRIS’s entrepreneurial, multi-disciplinary, high-tech landscape. Wright also fostered significant partnerships with California’s governing bodies including the California Energy Commission, and cultivated a state-wide telemedicine system, enabling over 800 remote clinics to connect to doctors and researchers at UC Davis Medical Center and CITRIS.
Wright, the A. Martin Berlin Professor of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley, will continue his efforts to address some of society’s most pressing problems as director of the new Berkeley Energy and Climate Institute (BECI), a coordinating hub for all of Berkeley’s energy and climate efforts. Since last year, when Wright took over the directorship of BECI, Camille Crittenden has been contributing to the CITRIS leadership team as deputy director.
“Costas and I share a vision of the contributions good technology can make to a hopeful future for California and the world,” says Wright. “I look forward to continuing our work on those contributions, especially on the pressing energy challenges that face us.”
“I am grateful to Paul for his extraordinary service to CITRIS and its four constituent universities and to the University of California as a whole,” says Robert Birgeneau, who stepped down as UC Berkeley’s chancellor late last year. “And I am confident Costas will continue to push CITRIS’s upward trajectory into great new realms.”
Press contact: Yvette Subramanian, yvette@citris-uc.org. (510) 643-4866