Dipak Ghosal Named Prem Chand Jain Family Presidential Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Computer science professor Dipak Ghosal has been named the inaugural Prem Chand Jain Family Presidential Chair for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. This new role will provide an opportunity for graduate students within the College of Engineering to expand their entrepreneurial mindset by providing resources to implement their innovative ideas.
The new endowed chair position supports the teaching, research and service of a senior computer science faculty member with nationally-recognized scholarship and a specialty in innovation and entrepreneurship. Ghosal’s appointment began on July 1 and will run until June 30, 2025.
“This endowed chair position is an exciting opportunity to promote innovation and entrepreneurship among UC Davis undergraduate and graduate students and translate new ideas that are generated in our research to the benefit society and the environment,” said Ghosal.
The endowed chair was established in 2019 by Prem Chand Jain ’77 and his family with a $1.5 million gift to the university. The University of California Office of the President matched the gift with $500,000 to create the $2 million chair in the Department of Computer Science.
The gift was inspired by Jain’s Graduate Studies Commencement speech in 2017, where he shared the story of how he immigrated to the U.S. as a student with just $7 in his pocket. His educational experience combined with his entrepreneurial spirit helped him find career success.
To Jain and his family, the gift is a way to give back to UC Davis by helping create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.
"My family and I are very excited to learn that Dr. Dipak Ghosal has been selected to be the Prem Chand Jain Family Presidential Chair at UC Davis,” said Prem Jain. “Dr. Ghosal is a distinguished academic scholar and highly accomplished engineering professor. I look forward to partnering with him to bring together budding entrepreneurs with top venture capitalists and transforming the UC Davis campus into an innovation hub fit for the 21st century."
An NSF CAREER Award winner, Ghosal is an expert on high-speed and wireless networks. When data transfers from one node in a network—usually a computer or sensor—to another, the network needs to make decisions about how to schedule that data transfer, such as how it’s prioritized in a network with multiple other transfers or whether to stop the data transfer if it looks malicious.
Ghosal’s team works on how to optimize this processing for speed, efficiency and safety for applications ranging from video delivery to traffic signals to wireless networks, sensor networks conservation efforts and high-performance computing. The lab also performs evaluation of computer and communication systems to recommend best practices for clients.
He received his B.Tech at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, his M.S. at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and his Ph.D. at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Maryland at College Park. Since joining UC Davis in 1996, he has received an NSF CAREER Award and serves as the chair of the Computer Science Graduate Group, along with teaching classes in computer networks to both undergraduate and graduate students.
