Patrice Koehl and Raissa D'Souza Win 2017 College of Engineering Outstanding Faculty Awards

Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award

Patrice Koehl, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Computer Science and faculty member in the UC Davis Genome Center, is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Faculty Teaching Award. An internationally recognized researcher and educator in bioinformatics and computational biology, Prof. Koehl stands out for his energy and skill in exploring the possibilities that computers create for biologists. Students recognize Prof. Koehl for his determination, passion and patience and praise him as an educator who “embodies all the exact characteristics of an exceptional professor who goes above and indeed beyond the basic call of his profession.” In their nomination of Prof. Koehl, colleagues remarked, “If his commitment to teaching a course well is matched, it is by the sheer variety and amount he teaches.” In addition to teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in computer science, Prof. Koehl regularly delivers guest lectures on biophysics, scientific computing and medical informatics programs at UC Davis and at the National University of Singapore.

Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award

Raissa D’Souza, a professor with dual appointments in the UC Davis Departments of Computer Science and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has earned the Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award for her contributions to the field of network science. Prof. D’Souza’s interdisciplinary research focuses on mathematical models of the structure and function of networks emphasizing self-organization and phase transitions. In recent years, her transformative research on layered networks and explosive percolation has led to a new chapter in network science. A colleague who nominated Prof. D’Souza said, “Raissa is a star of her chosen field, with a series of fundamental discoveries under her belt that have altered our research.” She is widely published in journals, such as Science, Nature Communications and Physical Review Letters, and has had cover stories in Nature Physics and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Prof. D’Souza is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, a long-serving external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, as well as the elected President of the Network Science Society and is an editorial board member of numerous scientific journals. She has also served on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Complex Systems. Prof. D’Souza’s current research, sponsored by the U.S. Army Research Office, is funded by a $6.25 million interdisciplinary MURI grant for fundamental research on control of collective phenomena in complex networks.