Prior to joining UCLA in January 2022, Bills was an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Wayne State University in Detroit. Bills was also a Michigan Society Fellow and an assistant professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She served as a lecturer at Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya, and as a research scientist at IBM Research Africa, where she used data from smartphones to analyze the quality of transportation. At UCLA, she will teach two courses: Transportation Equity, and Travel Behavior Analysis and Forecasting.

Bills is a co-principal investigator on two current National Science Foundation grants studying transit issues in resource-constrained communities. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. in civil and environmental engineering, and transportation engineering from UC Berkeley, as well as a B.S. in civil engineering technology from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. Bills’ appointment is part of a UCLA-wide “Rising to the Challenge” initiative spearheaded by the Ralph J. Bunche Center to expand the scope and depth of scholarship that address racial equity issues. Announced in June 2020 by Chancellor Gene Block and then-Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Emily Carter, the program was established to help UCLA advance diversity, equity and inclusion. The plan includes the recruitment of 10 new faculty members over five years whose scholarly work addresses issues of Black experience.

Prior to joining UCLA in the spring of 2021, Carbajo was a principal investigator at Stanford University and served as the department head at Linac Coherent Light Source — a free electron laser facility at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Palo Alto, California.

Carbajo received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hamburg in Germany, conducting research through a joint program from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron in Germany. He has received several awards and recognitions, including the 2021 SPIE Early Career Achievement Award, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Fellowship in 2019 and the SRI 2018 Young Scientist Award. Carbajo is actively engaged in professional service and outreach efforts for underrepresented minorities. He is devoted to promoting equity in educational and professional opportunities, and served as co-chair of the LGBTQ+ employee resource group at SLAC.

Carbajo’s appointment  is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

He has been principal investigator and co-principal investigator on multiple research projects to improve the assessment of droughts risks, unsustainable water use, and climate change impacts in California and other regions. His research links natural processes, infrastructure system planning and management, and individual and collective human decision-making to improve socio-economic and environmental outcomes in cities and agricultural communities.

At UCLA, Escriva-Bou will teach classes and conduct research that examine the intersection of society and environmental systems (both engineered and natural), with a particular focus on water, energy and food systems.

Since 2015, Escriva-Bou has served first as a research fellow and later as a senior fellow at the Water Policy Center of the Public Policy Institute of California, where he has explored groundwater sustainability in the San Joaquin Valley, analyzed California’s water accounting system, studied urban drought resilience, and investigated energy and climate policies related to water use. He also served as a lecturer with UC Davis’ Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Previously, he worked as a civil engineer, managing and developing large infrastructure projects for local and regional governments and consulting firms in Spain. He will join the university in March 2023.

Escriva-Bou received his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, master’s degree in hydraulic and environmental engineering and doctoral degree in water and environmental engineering from the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. He also holds a second master’s degree in agricultural and resource economics from UC Davis.

As a doctoral student at Stanford University, she developed a technology that helps to detect and diagnose tuberculosis at the point-of-care, for which she was awarded a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation grant to test the device. Kamariza is currently a Harvard Junior Fellow, working with well-known computational biologist Pardis Sabeti at the Broad Institute of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of bioengineering in January 2023.

A native of the Republic of Burundi, Kamariza immigrated to the United States and attended San Diego Mesa College. She later transferred to UC San Diego for her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, where she pioneered a mentorship program for transfer students. Kamariza has demonstrated her efforts in diversifying representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics through similar initiatives, and intends to continue pushing for equity and inclusion in scientific academia. She received her master’s degree from UC Berkeley and Ph.D. from Stanford University, both in cell biology. Among other accolades, Kamariza was recognized as one of the World’s Most Powerful Women by Fortune Magazine in 2017 and named one of Chemical & Engineering News’ Talented 12 in 2020.

Kamariza’s appointment is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

Kim has studied 2D quantum materials, ultrafast photonic quasiparticle interactions, nanophotonics, plasmonics, diamond spin microscopy and defect centers in diamonds. Applications from this line of research include new classes of nanophotonic devices and quantum technologies, as well as the design of quantum imaging and sensing systems to capture phenomena that have remained elusive with classical systems.

Kim is currently an Intelligence Community Postdoctoral Fellow with the Quantum Photonics Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics and will join UCLA Samueli in November. In addition to leading research projects, Kim has been an active mentor and advisor to graduate students. Prior to MIT, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Caltech where she also received a Ph.D. in materials science and a B.S. in chemical engineering.

Among the many accolades she garnered, Kim was named an Achievement Rewards for College Scientists Foundation Graduate Fellow and she received the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. In 2020, UC Berkeley named her a Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Kim’s appointment is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

She is currently a transportation equity research fellow at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation in Washington, D.C. Prior to working at the foundation, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Patterson will join UCLA Samueli in the fall of 2022.

A UCLA alumna, Patterson received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and became the first Black woman to deliver the engineering School’s commencement speech at the encouragement of staff in the Center for Excellence in Engineering and Diversity. She held several leadership positions at the National Society of Black Engineers at UCLA. Among the honors she has received are the Agents of Change in Environmental Health Fellowship from Environmental Health News, the Switzer Environmental Fellowship from the Robert & Patricia Switzer Foundation, the 2017 Impact Award from the Kapor Center for Social Impact, and the STAR Fellowship from the Environmental Protection Agency. Patterson earned her M.S. and Ph.D. in environmental engineering at UC Berkeley, where she was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Fellowship.

Patterson’s appointment is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

Prior to joining UCLA in July 2022, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. He received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from UC Santa Barbara.

In addition to his academic pursuits, Peterson has worked at 3M as both an intern and technical aide in the company’s Safety and Graphics Laboratory. At Cambridge, he has worked on constitutive equations for the processing of wormlike micelles and dense emulsions, which was funded in part by Unilever PLC, a U.K.-based multinational consumer goods company.

She is currently a Life Sciences Research Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, where she works on the design, synthesis and characterization of DNA and RNA structures for the detection and separation of biomolecules. Stewart will join UCLA Samueli as an assistant professor of bioengineering in July 2023.

Stewart serves as the RNA Editor for the textbook Art of Molecular Programming and is a member of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee for Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. She has received several awards and honors, including the 2019 Ford Postdoctoral fellowship and recognition as a fellow by the Intersections Science Fellows Symposium in 2021. She received her B.S. in bioengineering with a concentration in cell and tissue engineering from the University of Illinois at Chicago and her Ph.D. in bioengineering from UC Riverside.

Stewart’s appointment is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

Tian is also a faculty member with the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, which is affiliated with both the UCLA School of Law and the Samueli School of Engineering.

Prior to joining UCLA in July 2022, Tian was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Virginia.

Tian received her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Zhengzhou University and a master’s degree in computer science and engineering from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications in China. Her doctoral degree is in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

In addition to teaching, Tian is a consultant for SmartCityPHL for the city of Philadelphia. The project involves developing strategies to create smart city technologies to support local communities.

Tian is the principal investigator on four National Science Foundation research grants, including winning the organization’s CAREER Award. She has also received a 2021 Google Research Scholar Award and a 2019 Amazon Research Award. Her work has been adopted by top technology companies, including Apple and Microsoft.

The research has potential applications in developing agents for gene and drug delivery in the treatment of diseases, as well as in the production of industrial and consumer products. Wright is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in chemical and biological engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder and a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the NanoEngineering Department at UC San Diego. She will join UCLA Samueli in the fall of 2022.

Wright received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Spelman College in Georgia and a Ph.D. in chemistry from Miami University in Ohio, where she was the Dissertation Scholar for the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. In addition to her doctoral studies at Miami, Wright founded and led the university’s Science Policy Group, which aims to advocate for science-informed policy at the university, state and national levels. Wright also earned a certificate in college teaching through the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Wright’s appointment is part of UCLA Samueli’s Mentor Professor Program, an initiative designed to hire faculty who are not only excellent in their fields but also have a demonstrated record of, or show exceptional promise for, mentorship of students from underrepresented and underserved populations.

The research focus builds on Zhou’s previous work developing widely used methods of training artificial intelligence systems to interpret visual data. He has also helped develop Places and ADE20K, which are computer vision benchmarks that aid AI systems in identifying various images. His research publications on computer vision have been cited more than 10,000 times.

An associate editor for Pattern Recognition, Zhou has also been an area chair for the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, the International Conference on Computer Vision and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence. His research has been recognized through the MIT Technology Review’s Innovators under 35 in Asia-Pacific Award and featured in media outlets such as TechCrunch and Quartz. Formerly an assistant professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Zhou received his Ph.D. in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018. He joined UCLA Samueli in January 2022.