BEARS 2021: Leaders
EECS Chair / EE Division Chair - Jeff Bokor
Prof. Jeffrey Bokor is the Paul R. Gray Distinguished Professor of Engineering in EECS and has been the Associate Dean for Research in the College of Engineering since 2012. He currently holds a joint appointment with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) as Senior Scientist in the Materials Science Division, and formerly held a joint appointment as Deputy Director for Science at the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscale science research center at LBNL. His current research activities include nanomagnetics/spintronics, carbon nanotube and graphene electronics, nanophotonics, and nano-electromechanical systems. He is known as one of the creators of the FinFET, a type of non-planar double-gate transistor that is now the basis for modern nanoelectronic semiconductor device fabrication. He made the news in October for the discovery of a new technique for magnetization switching that is nearly 100 times faster than state-of-the-art spintronic devices.
EECS Associate Chair / CS Division Chair - John Canny
Prof. John Canny has made significant contributions to various areas of computer science and mathematics, including artificial intelligence, robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer security, computational algebra, and computational geometry. As the author of “A Variational Approach to Edge Detection” and the creator of the widely used Canny edge detector, he was honored for seminal contributions in the areas of robotics and machine perception. He joined the EECS department in 1987 and currently works on several applications of data mining for human learning (MOOCs and early language learning), health and well-being, and applications in the sciences.
EE Division Vice-Chair of External Relations - Ming Wu
Prof. Ming Wu, whose areas of expertise are optical MEMS, optofluidics, silicon photonics and optoelectronics, is the Co-Director of Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center (BSAC). He co-founded Berkeley Lights, Inc. in 2011 to commercialize his group’s optoelectronic tweezers, which are capable of sorting, cloning, culturing, and analyzing the secretions of tens of thousands of single cells on microfluidic chips. The OET instruments have been used by major pharmaceutical companies for antibody discovery, cell line development, and synthetic biology. Wu is a Cal alumnus (PhD ’88, advisor: Shyh Wang) and received his B.S. from National Taiwan University. He worked at AT&T Bell Labs and UCLA before joining the Berkeley faculty,
CS Division Vice-Chair of External Relations - Trevor Darrell
Prof. Trevor Darrell‘s research interests include computer vision, machine learning, computer graphics, and perception-based human computer interfaces. He develops algorithms to enable visual recognition across a variety of platforms and applications. He was faculty in the MIT EECS department from 1999-2008, where he directed the Vision Interface Group. Darrell was a member of the research staff at Interval Research Corporation from 1996-1999, and received the S.M. and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in 1992 and 1996, respectively. He obtained the B.S.E. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1988, having started his career in computer vision as an undergraduate researcher in Ruzena Bajcsy’s GRASP lab.
Director of EECS External Relations - Bennett Agnew
Bennett Agnew handles alumni relations and industrial partnership development for the EECS Department. He holds a 2011 B.A. from Cal in Political Science and Government. public-relations@eecs.berkeley.edu