Over the weekend UC San Diego and, among others, its Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) department, received lavish coverage for the new crop of faculty hired ahead of the new academic year. Writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune, science editor Gary Robbins noted that from "San Diego to San Marcos, the region's major universities have been hiring scores of proven and promising scientists and engineers to cope with booming enrollment and exploit research opportunities in a region that's a mecca for science."
While school doesn't resume at UC San Diego until September 19, the other three surveyed campuses will have reopened by the end of August. The newspaper notes that enrollment at the four universities it surveyed will top 92,000 students, roughly 10,000 more than the campuses were serving five years ago.
According to the article on the "new wave of scientists" joining local universities, between them, UC San Diego, San Diego State University, Cal State San Marcos and the private University of San Diego recruited upwards of 125 new faculty to form a professorial "Class of 2016".
In the newspaper report, the most noteworthy hiring spree was in robotics, as departments began to beef up the newly-opened Contextual Robotics Institute, which will be based initially in Atkinson Hall, the home of the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego.
The robotics institute's founding director, Henrik Christensen (right), joined the CSE faculty from Georgia Tech, where "he created an acclaimed robotics research center," noted Robbins, adding that Christensen has set an ambitious goal of making the institute "in the top five in the world five years from now."
All told, the CSE department hired seven new faculty this year, including two other robotics researchers: associate professor Laurel Riek (from Notre Dame), who studies how to make robots work collaboratively with humans in hospitals, homes and other real-world environments; and assistant professor Ndapa Nakashole (Carnegie Mellon), whose work on "getting computer systems to understand what people say, do and write... could lead to better operating systems for phones and robots," according to the Union-Tribune. (Click here to read the CSE news release announcing new faculty hires.)
A few days after the Union-Tribune story, the Jacobs School of Engineering confirmed the hiring of former Brain Corp. senior vice-president Todd Hylton (left) to be executive director of the Contextual Robotics Institute, reporting to Christensen. Hylton will also be a Professor of Practice in the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department. ECE is also hiring Nikolay Atanasov from a postdoc position at the University of Pennsylvania. Atanasov's research focuses on "design control and estimation techniques to increase the autonomy, reliability, efficiency and versatility of robotic sensing systems." Atanasov will join another robot expert in ECE, Michael Yip, who joined the department last year as its first new hire under UC San Diego's robotics initiative.
Among other robotics hires in the Jacobs School, Harvard postdoctoral researcher Nick Gravish has joined the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department, where he'll leverage robotics, biology and physics to discover how organisms and robots move and interact.