College of Engineering 50th Anniversary
To celebrate the College of Engineering’s Golden 50th Anniversary in 2012, a series of events are planned on the Davis campus and in the Bay Area. Exhibitions at UC Davis, website features, and special events will celebrate the first 50 years of the College of Engineering, and enlarge the vision for our success in the next half-century.
College of Engineering Notable Biographies
RAJU PANDEY
Reducing the carbon footprint — whether as a nation, community or individual — has become a headline-making environmental goal these days. Raju Pandey, an associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Computer Science, doesn't merely contribute to the ongoing dialogue; he has done something about the issue.
Something truly significant.
What began as a theoretical discussion about wireless sensor systems — which took place in 2005 between Pandey and his graduates students — quickly morphed into interest from a venture capital firm and an introduction to Peter Van Deventer, who recently had left Intel Corp. One year later, Pandey and Van Deventer collaborated on the creation of SynapSense, a Folsom-based tech start-up that has made a serious impact in energy-efficient technology within a few short years.
"We got funded with an idea," Pandey said, during an interview in 2010. "We knew the product had potential."
SynapSense products are designed to improve energy efficiency and cut power and cooling costs in large-scale data centers, which are notorious for their demands on the U.S. power grid. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, data centers are among the largest consumers of the country's power: a situation destined to get worse, as businesses and individual consumers demand more and more of the wireless technology that soon will deliver everything from daily news to high-resolution entertainment, to the home and office.
The energy consumption of such servers and data centers has doubled in the past five years, impacting both greenhouse gas emissions and the very reliability of the national power grid. These practices also are expensive for the companies running such data centers.
SynapSense sensors do a deceptively simple thing with a huge impact: They monitor temperatures at data centers, and switch off unnecessary cooling systems when demand permits. SynapSense products already have been installed in data centers operated by Fortune 500 companies across the country and around the world — including Yahoo Inc., Facebook, the New York Stock Exchange and Stanford University — with results that have cut energy use by close to one-third, saving these companies hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Pandey and Van Deventer's company won a gold medal in SearchDataCenter.com's Product of the Year awards; more crucially, in 2010 GE and several other firms joined to invest a combined $5 million in technology developed by SynapSense. Henceforth, GE will collaborate with SynapSense on digital energy via a commercial partnership with GE Intelligent Platforms.
Pandey shepherded his new company full-time for four years, but today spends just one day a week at SynapSense, and has resumed his UC Davis teaching responsibilities for the other four days. After all — as he well knows — the next technological breakthrough could result from another initially innocent discussion with graduate students.
For more information on the College of Engineering's 50th Anniversary Celebration, please email Oliver Ramsey.