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 and Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Pramod Khargonekar has more than three decades of experience as a scholar, educator and leader in academic institutions and government organizations. He is an expert in control and systems theory, cyber-physical systems and applications to manufacturing, biomedical engineering and renewable energy and smart grids. Most recently, he has been working on the confluence of machine learning for control and estimation. Beyond these, he is deeply interested in understanding and improving processes that connect research to innovation. 

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.

Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Scott Grafton received bachelor's degrees in mathematics and psychobiology from the University of California at Santa Cruz and his medical degree from the University of Southern California. He completed a neurology residency at the University of Washington and a residency in nuclear medicine at UCLA. He was a research fellow in neuroimaging at UCLA where he developed methods for mapping human brain activity using positron emission tomography. With this he focused on brain plasticity during motor learning and the reorganization of the nervous system in the face of injury or neurodegeneration. He went on to develop brain imaging programs at University of Southern California, Emory University and Dartmouth College. He joined the UCSB faculty in 2006 and is director of the UCSB Imaging Center. The center uses fMRI, magnetic stimulation and high density EEG to characterize the neural basis of goal directed behavior.