Dear Colleagues,
It is bittersweet to announce that Dean Albert (Al) P. Pisano will be retiring from the UC system and stepping down from his appointment as dean of the Joan and Irwin Jacobs School of Engineering, effective June 30, 2024. While we wish him an enjoyable and well-deserved retirement, we recognize the significant contributions he has made to the school and the university during his 10-year tenure and will miss his leadership and collegiality.
Dean Pisano joined UC San Diego as dean on Sept. 1, 2013. Over the next decade, under his leadership, the Jacobs School of Engineering grew in research prominence to being ranked first in California for research expenditures in 2021-22 and rose from 17 to as high as 9 in the US News & World Report rankings in a five-year period. He also successfully stewarded the educational aspects of the Jacobs School as California’s largest school of engineering, in alignment with UC San Diego’s Strategic Plan.
Since his appointment, Dean Pisano has led important initiatives to increase diversity and inclusion throughout the school, including championing the Inclusion, Diversity, Excellence, Achievement (IDEA) Engineering Student Center, significantly increasing the recruitment and retention of female faculty members and boosting the number of female undergraduate and graduate students. Other accomplishments of note include:
- Increased annual fundraising for the school by more than $20 million annually, including gifts from alumni rising by 55 percent in the past year.
- Encouraged and supported cross-campus partnerships including programs such as the Center for Microbiome Innovation with the UC San Diego School of Medicine, the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio with the School of Arts & Humanities, the Institute for the Global Entrepreneur with the Rady School of Management, the Contextual Robotics Institute with the School of Social Sciences and the Institute for Materials Discovery and Design with the School of Physical Sciences.
- Emphasized innovative and interdisciplinary research through building five interdisciplinary institutes and sponsoring 13 agile research centers.
- Emphasized the importance of ethical conduct among all members of the school, including the creation of the annual Henry Booker Award for Exemplary Ethical Engineering for Ph.D. students who demonstrated ethical engineering practice and engineering for the global good.
In addition to serving as dean, Pisano also holds the Walter J. Zable Chair in Engineering and holds faculty appointments in the departments of mechanical and aerospace engineering and electrical and computer engineering. He is the Founding Chair of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering’s Deans’ Roundtable, and has been a member of the Academy since 2001.
Prior to joining UC San Diego, Pisano served as the FANUC Professor of Mechanical Systems in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. He also served as the Faculty Head of the Program Office for Operational Excellence at that campus. Dean Pisano is an internationally respected scholar of mechanical systems, specializing in invention, design, fabrication, modeling and optimization of micro electromechanical systems (MEMS).
The Jacobs School of Engineering comprises six academic departments – Computer Science & Engineering, Electrical & Computer Engineering, Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, Nanoengineering, the Shu Chien-Gene Lay Department of Bioengineering, and Structural Engineering.
A search will commence shortly for the next dean for the Jacobs School of Engineering. Additional announcements will be made in the coming months relative to the search.
Please join us in congratulating Dean Pisano on his impending retirement and in thanking him for his tremendous contributions to UC San Diego and the Jacobs School of Engineering.
