Alice M. Agogino is the Roscoe and Elizabeth Hughes Professor of Mechanical Engineering and affiliated faculty at the Haas School of Business in their Operations and Information Technology Management Group. She directs the BEST Lab Berkeley Energy and Sustainable Technologies | Berkeley Expert Systems Technology | Berkeley Emergent Space Tensegrities. She currently serves as Chair of the Development Engineering Graduate Group and Education Director of the Blum Center for Emerging Economies.
Alice Agogino served as Chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate in 2005-06, having served as Vice Chair during the 2004-05 academic year. She has served in a number of other administrative positions at UC Berkeley including Associate Dean of Engineering and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost in Educational Development and Technology. She also served as Director for Synthesis, an NSF-sponsored coalition of eight universities with the goal of reforming undergraduate engineering education, and continues as Founding Director for the Engineering Pathway digital library of engineering courseware. She is currently serving as Chair of the Development Engineering Graduate Group and Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. She has supervised 187 MS projects/theses, 50 doctoral dissertations, and numerous undergraduate researchers.
Prior to joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, Dr. Agogino worked in the tech industry for Dow Chemical, General Electric, and SRI International. Her research interests include soft robotics; community-based design; development engineering; sustainable engineering; internet of things; intelligent learning systems; information retrieval and data mining; multiobjective and strategic product design; nonlinear optimization; probabilistic modeling; intelligent control and manufacturing; sensor validation, fusion, and diagnostics; wireless sensor networks; multimedia and computer-aided design; design databases; design theory and methods; MEMS synthesis and computer-aided design; artificial intelligence and decision and expert systems; and gender/ethnic equity. Dr. Agogino has authored over two hundred peer-reviewed publications in these subject areas. She is a member of AAAI, AAAS, ASEE, ASME, AWIS, IEEE, NAE and SWE and served as Chair of the AAAS section on Engineering (2001-2002). She serves on the editorial board of three professional journals and has provided service on a number of governmental, professional, and industry advisory committees, including the NSF Advisory Committee for Engineering, Engineering Directorate, (1991-96, Chair 1996-97); Guidance Committee of the “Removing Barriers to Collaborative Research” project of the National Research Council (NRC) Government-University-Industry Roundtable (1997-98); NRC Committee on “Standards for Technology Education,” (1997-98); National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Academic Advisory Board (1998-2002); NAE “Engineering of the Year 2020”Planning/Steering Committee (Co-Chair of Planning, 1999-2000; Member of Steering; 2002-2005) and Executive Committeee, Digital Media Innovation Initiative, University of California System (2000-2001), Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST; 2004-2005), JPL/Cal Tech Engineering Advisory Board (2003-2005), National Academies Board on Science Education (BOSE, 2005-2007) and the Women in Academic Science Engineering Committee of the National Academies Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP; 2005-2010). She is or has served on a number of university advisory boards: CMU CIT, KAUST, Harvard/Radcliffe, MIT, and SUTD.
Dr. Agogino received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of New Mexico (1975), M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering (1978) from the University of California at Berkeley and a Ph.D. from the Department of Engineering-Economic Systems at Stanford University (1984). She received an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985; Pi Tau Sigma Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1986; Ralph R. Teetor Educator Award in 1987; SME Young Manufacturing Engineer of the Year Award in 1987/88; Best Paper Award (with S. Bradley) at the ASME-Design, Theory and Methods Conference in 1990/91; Best Paper Award at the AI Applications ’92 Conference; Most Outstanding Alumnus at the University of New Mexico in 1992; elected AAAS Fellow in 1994; Best Paper Award (with Andy Dong) at the Artificial Intelligence in Design’96 Conference (with Robert Paasch); elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997; Best Paper Award (with Ann McKenna) at IEEE/ASEE FIE’97; John Wiley & Sons Premier Award for Quality Courseware (with David Yu) in 1997; Best Overall Paper Award at ASEE ’98 (with Ann McKenna); IEEE Helen Plants Award for “Best Non-Traditional Session” at the 1998 IEEE/ASEE Frontiers in Engineering Education Conference; and First Runner-up for the Novel Smart Engineering System Design Award (with Ningning Zhou, Bo Zhu and Kris Pister) in 2001; Fellow, Association of Women in Science, 2003; NSF Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars, 2004; ASME Xerox Best Paper Award (with Shuang Song), 2004; IEEE Robotics & Automation Society Best Paper Award at the Symposium of Micro- and Nano-Mechatronics for Information-based Society (with R. Kamalian and Y. Zhang), 2005; elected Fellow of ASME, 2005; Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence, 2006; Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Mentoring, Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student Council, 2007; Chancellor’s Awards for Public Service:CARES (Community Assessment for Renewable Energy and Sustainability), 2010; Best Note Honorable Mention, (with Kimiko Ryokai, Lora Oehlberg and Michael Manoochehri) ACM CHI (Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems), 2011; Professor of the Year , UC Berkeley Pi Tau Sigma, 2011; Academy of Distinguished Alumni, University of New Mexico, 2012; and Leon Gaster Award for Lighting Technology (with Yao-Jung Wen), 2012; AAAS Lifetime Mentoring Award, 2012-13; “Reviewers’ Favourite Award” (with Euiyoung Kim, Victoria Kocsik and Cecile Basnage) International Conference on Engineering Design, 2013; Assemblymember Nancy Skinner STEM Women of the Year, 2014; IEEE Senior Member, 2014; ASME Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award, 2015; Best Paper Award (with Euiyoung Kim and Sara Beckman), Design Theory and Methods (DTM), International Design Engineering Technical Conference (IDETC), 2016.
