AAAS Elects Raissa D’Souza as Fellow
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, has elected Raissa M. D’Souza, associate dean of research for the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis, to its 2024 class of fellows.
AAAS Fellows are recognized for their achievements across disciplines, including research, teaching and industry, and for their distinguished efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications.
D’Souza has been elected for her seminal contributions to the physics of complex systems, including abrupt phase transitions, cascading failures and network control. She is also honored for her visionary role in advancing the field of network science. Her work on network theory and complex systems has resulted in more than 130 published works and has appeared in journals such as Science, PNAS, Physical Review Letters and Nature Physics.
“My research is very interdisciplinary, spanning physics, applied math, engineering and social sciences, so seeing it recognized by AAAS as a distinguished contribution to science is a great honor,” she said. “I am very grateful to all my collaborators and students for inspiring me and for their partnership, and to the funding agencies that supported this work. Without them, I would not have been able to do this research.”
Extending her work beyond individual complex systems, D'Souza’s research is currently focused on systems-of-complex-systems and the implications for tipping points and cascading failures in the interconnected networks at the core of modern society, from critical infrastructure networks to biological networks and social networks. She is also focused on understanding the ethical use of artificial intelligence in higher education.
As the College of Engineering’s associate dean of research, D’Souza stewards the college’s Next Level Research vision, fostering engineering research that strives to find innovative solutions to global issues and bring a sustainable, healthier and more resilient world within reach.
She is also a founding co-director of the college’s AI Center in Engineering, which aims to leverage AI for the betterment of humanity and the planet by building transformative collaboration on AI efforts within the college, across the UC Davis campus and with industry partners, policymakers and the community.
She has been the recipient of numerous honors, including being elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016 and of the Network Science Society in 2019, as well as receiving the inaugural Euler Award of the Network Science Society in 2019. D’Souza has received multiple distinguished paper awards and earned a Test-of-Time Award in 2018 and the 2017 UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award. She has served on the editorial board of numerous scientific journals, including the Journal of Complex Networks and Internet Mathematics. She currently serves on the board of reviewing editors at Science and was the president of the Network Science Society from 2015 to 2018.
D’Souza is a professor in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science and is a member of the graduate groups for physics, applied math, and biosystems engineering.
D’Souza earned her Bachelor of Science in Physics at the University of Illinois and her Ph.D. in statistical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before completing postdoctoral research at Bell Laboratories and Microsoft Research. She joined UC Davis as an assistant professor in 2005.
“I deeply appreciate that the environment at UC Davis fosters broad collaboration across the campus,” said D’Souza. “For me, this includes collaborators in physics, math, biology, engineering, political science, sociology, animal behavior, ecology and communications. It has made UC Davis a very vibrant intellectual home for me.”
