Bahram Ravani is the Warren and Leta Giedt Endowed Professor and Chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He also serves as co-director of the Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Research Center, a collaboration between the California Department of Transportation and UC Davis.
Ravani has been a faculty member at UC Davis since 1987. He was interim chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2005–08 and chair of what was then the Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from 1996–2001. His current areas of research include robotics and mechatronics; mechanical design and manufacturing including applications of robotics, mechatronics and informatics; intelligent transportation systems and highway safety, and dynamics and biomechanics.
He has served as the chief technical editor of the Journal of Computing and Information Science and Engineering and the Journal of Mechanical Design, as well as a past member of the management committee and former editor for design of the ASME/IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics. He is a fellow of ASME and a past recipient of several ASME achievement awards including the Machine Design Award, Design Automation Award, MESA Achievement Award and the Gustus Larson Memorial Award. He has published over 140 technical publications and one graduate-level textbook.
Ravani received his B.S. degree magna cum lauda from Louisiana State University in 1976; M.S. degree from Columbia University in 1978 and Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1982, all in mechanical engineering. He was a tenured faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before moving to UC Davis.