Raissa D’Souza Appointed Associate Dean for Research
Raissa D’Souza, a professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been appointed as the new associate dean for research in the College of Engineering. D'Souza assumes the role at an exciting time as the college continues to advance its research profile and enterprise. She will play a central role in advancing the college’s new strategic research vision by developing and overseeing new initiatives across the college and between the college and strategic partners across campus and beyond.
"I am deeply honored and excited for this opportunity to help advance the outstanding research in the college, in particular the transformative research required to tackle society’s grand challenges as laid out in our new strategic vision," said D'Souza. "These are problems that require inherently interdisciplinary thinking, and which have engineering at the core of the solutions."
In addition to appointments in the College of Engineering, D'Souza is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute and at the Complexity Sciences Hub Vienna. She is lead editor of Physical Review Research and on the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science.
D’Souza received a Ph.D. in statistical physics from MIT in 1999, then did postdoctoral training at Bell Laboratories and at Microsoft Research. Her interdisciplinary work on network theory and complex systems spans the fields of statistical physics, theoretical computer science and applied math, and has appeared in journals such as Science, PNAS, Nature Physics and Physical Review Letters.
She is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the Network Science Society and has received numerous honors, including the Network Science Society's inaugural Euler Award in 2019, the 2018 ACM Test-of-Time Award and the 2017 UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award. She was also a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems and served as President of the Network Science Society from 2015 to 2018.
D’Souza uses the tools of statistical physics and applied math to reveal the underlying principles of organization in complex systems, with a focus on the interplay of structure and function in network systems. The resulting theoretical principles provide insights into the behaviors of real-world networks, such as infrastructure networks and social networks and opportunities to identify tipping points and small interventions to control the self-organizing, collective behaviors displayed in these systems.
Her research has been funded by NSF, ARO, AFOSR, DARPA, DTRA, NIH, CITRIS and the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative. She was PI of a Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) grant from 2014-2020.