Biography

During an interview given to CNN in February 2011, Diane Bryant cheerfully admitted that she hadn’t planned to attend college.

“I was the prissy girl growing up; I won ‘best dressed’ in high school. My parents didn’t go to college, so there wasn’t any expectation that my sister and I would go either.”

Dr. David M. Rocke’s influence across the UC Davis campus is extensive enough to suggest that he may have perfected the art of cloning, in addition to his many other accomplishments.

David Kappos’ high school advisors warned him not to think too ambitiously. He came to UC Davis with a respectable grade-point average; then, during his first quarter, he scored an A-plus — well above the rest of the class — in a chemistry course taught by Professor Dino Tinti (later emeritus).

Tinti subsequently wrote the young student a short note of encouragement.

“He said, ‘You could have a future,’ ” Kappos recalled, in a 2010 interview. “That was the first time an academic in a position of authority had said that to me, and it had a big impact.”

Students in the UC Davis Materials Science and Engineering program can credit their presence to Amiya K. Mukherjee, who became one of the program’s founding members when he joined the College of Engineering faculty in 1966, as an assistant professor in the fledgling Department of Mechanical Engineering. The department’s identity morphed a few times during subsequent years, and in 1993 became part of a merged Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Dr.

After earning an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of San Francisco, Alfred Chuang obtained a master’s degree — also in computer science, with a specialization in distributed data management — from UC Davis in 1986.

All these years later, his graduate thesis, “Table-Tabular Data Objects and their Use in Table Editing,” still remains one of California State Library’s most frequently used reference materials on relational database development.

“In science as in life, every day is a new adventure.”

When the robotic explorer Curiosity successfully touched down inside Mars’ massive Gale Crater at 10:32 p.m. PDT Aug. 5, 2012, the jubilant scientists and technicians trading enthusiastic high-fives included Adam Steltzner, whose 1990 undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at UC Davis eventually led to his becoming team leader of Curiosity’s Entry, Descent and Landing (EDL) System.

George Tchobanoglous, a professor emeritus in the UC Davis Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, worries about how to deal with what we leave behind.

Numerous UC Davis College of Engineering faculty members and alumni have made discoveries that are out of this world, but only a few enterprising souls have ventured out of this world themselves.

All career engineers build things as kids, and Maury Hull was no exception. His childhood was spent in the country, in Virginia, where his family owned two acres of pine trees. “I’d cut down trees and construct multi-level log houses,” he recalls, “both tree houses and things on the ground.

“And I also had an extensive set of Lionel trains. That was a blast!”