Leadership

As executive director of the UC Noyce Initiative, Bryan Kerner oversees the consortium of five University of California campuses dedicated to supporting research and development collaborations in digital technology and innovation. These efforts are focused on advancing the public good, with an emphasis on areas such as quantum information science and computing, computational health and a women’s brain health initiative.

Prior to his role as executive director, Kerner served as the director of development for the sciences at UC Santa Barbara. He played a key role in launching the Ann S. Bowers Women’s Brain Health Initiative, a brain imaging consortium focused on women's brain health across the UC system.

Before his career in higher education, Kerner worked in financial and estate planning, as well as development director for a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit supporting families with children with cancer. He also is active in volunteer leadership roles in his community, including serving as president of the board of directors for the Children’s Creative Project and board member of Explore Ecology.

Kerner holds a bachelor’s degree from Eastern Connecticut State University and a Nonprofit Management Certification from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management.

Vice Chancellor for Research and Robert S. Pepper Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

Katherine A. Yelick serves as UC Berkeley’s Vice Chancellor for Research. Her administrative portfolio includes management of more than 50 campus research units, 12 research museums and remote field stations, and all research administration offices. She previously served as Executive Associate Dean in the Division of Computing, Data Science and Society. She also is a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her research is in high performance computing, programming systems, parallel algorithms and computational genomics. 

Vice Chancellor for Research

Simon J. Atkinson is the Vice Chancellor for Research at UC Davis.  Atkinson has more than 20 years of leadership and is internationally recognized for his studies in the prevention and treatment of acute kidney injuries that can be triggered by heart failure, cardiac surgery, toxins and contrast agents used in diagnostic tests. In 2005, he co-founded INphoton, a life sciences company. Atkinson has a doctorate in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge and a bachelor’s degree in cell and molecular biology from King’s College London. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

Vice Chancellor for Research

Anderson obtained her B.S. in Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and her Ph.D. in Biology/Neuroscience at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). After post-doctoral positions at UCI and Harvard, she began her faculty position at UCI in 2001, serving as associate and then interim director of the UCI Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center from 2013-2017, and director from 2017-2025. She has been recognized as an OC Metro honoree and UCI mid-career research award honoree, received a UCI Chancellor's award for research mentorship, and been recognized as a distinguished faculty member for outstanding contributions to bioengineering by UC Riverside as part of her commitment to translational work for spinal cord injury. Dr. Anderson serves on science advisory boards for Wings for Life and Mission Connect nonprofit foundations, as well as at the Houston Methodist Center for Neural Regeneration.

Vice Chancellor for Research and Professor of Medicine and Health Policy

As vice chancellor for Research, Harold Collard oversees and stewards UCSF's research mission. Collard previously served as Associate Vice Chancellor of Clinical Research and Director of UCSF’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute. In this role, he helped to position UCSF as a leader in the NIH’s national consortium of clinical research institutions. Collard has written seminal articles on the epidemiology, natural history, and management of interstitial lung disease, and is an internationally recognized clinical researcher.

Vice Chancellor for Research

Segalman is UCSB’s chief research officer, overseeing the Office of Research and guiding the campus’s expansive research enterprise. Her responsibilities include shaping the strategic direction of research across disciplines, advancing extramural funding efforts, supporting faculty and research teams, and fostering a collaborative, interdisciplinary research environment. A UCSB alumna, Segalman earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering and returned to campus in 2014 after a decade on the faculty at UC Berkeley and as a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she also served a term as interim director of the lab’s Materials Science Division.