Alexander Wolf
Alexander Wolf serves as dean of the Baskin School of Engineering and is a distinguished professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Alex’s research interests span the areas of distributed systems, networking, and software engineering. His achievements include seminal work in software architecture, business analytics, and information-centric networks. His more recent projects concern cloud computing, data-center networking, and service-based systems hosted on MANETs.
Anne Criss
Anne Criss is the assistant dean and chief of staff for Baskin Engineering. She has over 20 years of experience building and managing successful multidisciplinary teams and programs focused on climate change, sustainability and technology; fisheries ecology; toxics and water quality; and protected areas.
Anne has managed U.S. congressional and state legislative affairs, and has been called on to deliver testimony on a variety of scientific and technical subjects. She was appointed to four National Academy of Sciences research committees focused on impacts and adaptation to climate change and government policy approaches to transportation and climate change.
Jim Whitehead
Jim Whitehead is the associate dean for undergraduate experience and a professor of computational media. Jim received his B.S. in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in information and computer science from the University of California, Irvine. His research interests include procedural content generation for games, testing autonomous vehicles, automation of software testing, software repository mining, software bug prediction, and level design in computer games.
A leader in education about computer games, Jim led the creation of the B.S. computer science: computer game design degree, and was a key figure in the first five years of the games and playable media M.S. program. He served as chair of the Computer Science Department from 2010–14, and Chair of Computational Media from 2017–19.
Roberto Manduchi
Roberto Manduchi is the associate dean for graduate experience and a professor of computer science and engineering.
Roberto obtained his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Padova, Italy. Before joining UC Santa Cruz in 2001, he held positions at Apple and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Roberto runs the Computer Vision Lab on campus, conducting research on assistive technology for individuals living with visual impairments.
Marcella Gomez
Marcella Gomez is the inaugural associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion and an associate professor of applied mathematics. A first-generation, Mexican-American college graduate from Riverside, CA, Marcella received her B.S. in mechanical engineering from UC Berkeley and a Ph.D. in. mechanical engineering from the California Institute of Technology.
Her research focus is on control and dynamical systems with applications to synthetic biology including modeling, analysis, and design of biological networks involved in gene regulation, metabolic engineering, and spatial patterning. She is a faculty affiliate of the UC Santa Cruz Research Center for the Americas, where her primary scholarly focus area is on “Climate Science, Environment, Ecology, & Nature Studies.” Marcella joined the Baskin School of Engineering in 2017.
Sri Kurniawan
Sri Kurniawan is the associate dean for research at Baskin Engineering and a professor in the Department of Computational Media.
Kurniawan received a B.S. in electronics engineering from Satya Wacana Christian University, an M.S. in human factors from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a Ph.D. in industrial and manufacturing engineering from Wayne State University. She served as the Computational Media department chair for three years from 2019-22 and is the department’s current graduate director. She is also UCSC’s senior faculty lead for the new Action Collaborative on transforming trajectories for women of color in tech. Kurniawan leads the ASSIST LAB which centers on improving the lives of people with diverse special needs through assistive technology. She has 35 major funded research projects to date, and is the author or co-author of close to 200 publications.
Ian Lane
Ian Lane is the associate dean for Silicon Valley engagement and a professor in the computer science and engineering department. He also serves as program director of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) Professional Master’s Degree Program.
Lane received his B.S. in information engineering from Massey University and his M.S. and Ph.D. in intelligence science from Kyoto University. He’s gained an international reputation across academia and industry for high impact research in NLP and AI, developing cutting-edge speech recognition, machine translation and conversational AI systems. Lane is building on his prior research engineering new techniques, models, and frameworks to allow language technologies to be effective “in the wild” and to learn and improve through real-world interaction.
Dean’s Council
Brandon Allgood, Chief AI Officer at Valo Health
Laura Bushnell, Partner at King & Spaulding LLP
Ahmed Hamdy, MD, Chief Executive Officer at Vincerx Pharma
Michael Hilton, Board of Directors Member at Accolade
Birong Hu, Financial Controller at SV Tech Ventures
Giulia Pagallo, Machine Learning Consultant