UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society is welcoming seven new faculty to its community this fall.
The scholars are working to improve areas from clinical healthcare to software delivery using statistics, computer science and data science. Three are Berkeley alumni, who will now help shape the next generation of leaders in their fields at their alma mater.
“These faculty members reflect UC Berkeley’s reputation for all-around excellence and the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society’s dedication to harnessing technological approaches to solving societal problems,” said Jennifer Chayes, dean of the college. “We’re thrilled to add them to our community.”
The faculty are joining the institution at an exciting moment, just months after CDSS became the first new college or school at Berkeley in more than 50 years. These individuals will contribute to the college’s mission of harnessing the power of computing and data science to help solve society’s most pressing challenges from climate change to health inequities.
“They really represent the breadth of CDSS, from the foundations in statistics and computing to the interfaces and the applications within other disciplines,” said Sandrine Dudoit, CDSS associate dean for faculty and research. “CDSS provides a home for faculty who do groundbreaking interdisciplinary research and who create new disciplines.”
The new faculty include Alex Strang and Ryan Giordano in Berkeley’s Department of Statistics; Alane Suhr, Matei Zaharia in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS); Preeya Khanna in EECS and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute; Bronwyn Lucas in the Center for Computational Biology and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology; and Irene Chen in the Berkeley-UC San Francisco Computational Precision Health program.
All are assistant professors except Strang and Zaharia. Strang is an assistant teaching professor, and Zaharia is an associate professor.
“These faculty members reflect UC Berkeley’s reputation for all-around excellence and the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society’s dedication to harnessing technological approaches to solving societal problems."
CDSS’s new faculty are “outstanding” experts “with already pioneering achievements,” Dudoit said. They’ll contribute to the college research, education and service missions and benefit from the college’s culture of bringing together scholars from different disciplines, she said.
Take Zaharia, who is also the co-founder and chief technology officer of Databricks and a Berkeley EECS alum. Zaharia is studying cloud computing and cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools like large language models, which can underpin chatbots like ChatGPT. He is excited to join EECS’ deep bench of expertise in computer systems and AI.
He is also particularly interested in interacting with law researchers and experts from other science fields “who have large amounts of data that they want to analyze using AI.” And he’s dedicated to help provide Berkeley’s diverse student body a stellar education like his own.
“I had a great experience here as a PhD student,” said Zaharia. He added, “I think the culture and Berkeley's track record of building and launching really impactful ideas and getting them to be usable in the outside world is really the most exciting thing for me.”
While Dudoit said it’s always “a joy” to welcome new faculty to Berkeley, this cohort is especially meaningful, because “ it is the first cohort of the new college. It's a big success."