SUBJECT:

Appointment of Carlos Jensen as Associate Vice Chancellor – Educational Innovation

I’m delighted to announce that following an extensive national search, Dr. Carlos Jensen has been appointed Associate Vice Chancellor for Educational Innovation (AVC-EI), effective March 30, 2020.

Dr. Jensen currently serves as Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University (OSU). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a tenured member of the faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at OSU. His research lies at the intersection between usability and software engineering, with an emphasis on studying how Open Source communities operate and organize, and the tools and processes needed to make them more efficient. His most recent work uses novel automated testing techniques to help developers improve the reliability of large and complex open source software systems.

Dr. Jensen has exceptional leadership experience in public education, with a strong emphasis on teaching excellence, educational innovation and access, and enhancing the student experience. As Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs, he successfully led a process of data-driven, transformational change to the College of Engineering’s fifteen degree programs, an initiative that engaged over 200 faculty in a comprehensive curricular overhaul. He has also collaborated with partners across campus on initiatives to support student success (and remove institutional barriers to success), and launched new online and nontraditional educational offerings, while overseeing accreditation, academic affairs, and student advising and support for more than 8,000 undergraduates, including over 1,500 online and remote students.

He helped develop and deliver a new faculty bootcamp program aimed at helping new faculty succeed and discover resources and best practices. His efforts at championing diversity include launching a new center for diversity and inclusion in the college; implementing a more equitable academic misconduct process; examining data to identify and address inequalities and barriers to success for both students and faculty; and serving on the President and Provost’s Diversity taskforce and the Provost’s Student Success Initiative steering committee.

As a champion of experiential learning, he served as the founding Director of the Center for Applied Systems and Software at OSU, a unique program providing experiential learning to students and cutting-edge solutions to external industry partners. Mentored student internship projects have included the Oregon Department of Transportation’s central control system for emergency response, Smarter Balanced online assessments of K-12 learners, the Linux Foundation’s server infrastructure, and IBM’s public-facing test infrastructure around new server architectures.

As AVC-EI, Dr. Jensen will provide strategic leadership to creatively advance education at UC San Diego, to provide an equitable, high-quality educational experience for all students. He will lead our campus educational innovation efforts, designed to stimulate the creation of new academic programs and related infrastructure to meet campus priorities for access, academic success, enhanced reputational standing, faculty career development, societal impact, and sustainability. Dr. Jensen will also supervise and partner with the Faculty Director of The Teaching + Learning Commons, a unit which promotes educational excellence through instructional development for educators and comprehensive academic support for students. In addition to oversight of these two distinct programmatic areas, our new AVC-EI will collaborate with university leadership, deans, college provosts, faculty, the Academic Senate and staff to co-create a culture of innovation in education that will shape future generations of responsible, compassionate, global citizens. In this capacity, Dr. Jensen will champion the development of digital strategies and introduction of new technologies to enhance educational excellence.

Please join me in welcoming Dr. Jensen to UC San Diego and in partnering with him in this important work. I anticipate that the entire campus will benefit from his expertise, perspective, and creativity.

I sincerely thank the members of the AVC-EI Search Committee for their thoughtful contributions and insights. I also appreciate the wide-ranging input from members of the campus community who participated in the search process.

Elizabeth H. Simmons Executive Vice Chancellor