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The Board of Advisors comprises senior leaders from business, industry, government, and academia, active or retired, who represent the broad spectrum of regional, statewide, and national high-technology industries.
The board provides the chair of the department of electrical and computer engineering with an external perspective on the department’s programs and activities; identifies issues important to the success of these initiatives; provides guidance, counsel, consultation, and recommendations to the chair; reviews curricula for relevance and research for purpose and progress; and provides other assistance and support as required by the chair.
Hossny El-Sherief
Manager, Electronics Software & Engineering Center, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Mission Systems
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Industrial Work History and Experience
Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems 1987 – Present
Senior Manager, Guidance, Navigation and Control Center
Exxon Production Research Company (1981 to 1987)
Group leader and Research Engineering specialist.
Academic Work History and Experience
Adjunct Professor, Electrical Engineering Department, University of California, Riverside (1996 to present)
Teaching classes in digital signal processing, digital control and microelectronics circuits. Participated in the development of a graduate program.
Member of the Advisory Board, Electrical Engineering Department (1989 to present)
Member of the Advisory Board at the University of California, Irvine, University of California, Riverside, the California State University, Long Beach and the University of Nevada, Reno.
Served on several committees, including curriculum development, laboratory development and ABET-2000 accreditation preparation.
Master Thesis Committee Member, California Sate Polytechnic University, Pomona, (1993-1995)
Served as a member of a Master Thesis committee at the Department of Electrical Engineering.
Assistant Professor, Electrical Engineering Department, University of Petroleum and Minerals (1979 to 1981)
Taught courses in control systems, state estimation, electronics. Conducted research and advised Master Thesis on the subject of system identification.
Education
PhD Electrical Engineering, McMaster University, Canada, 1979
MS Electrical Engineering, McMaster University, Canada, 1977
BS Applied Mathematics (honors), Ain Shams University, Egypt, 1975
BS Electrical Engineering (honors), Cairo University, Egypt, 1973
Published over 60 technical papers in journals and conferences on system identification, digital signal processing, GPS, modeling and simulation, guidance and control.
Kumaran Krishnasamy
Principal Engineer, Broadcom Corporation
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
No bio available.
Patrick Sain
Principal Multi-Disciplined Engineer, Raytheon Electronics Systems
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
No bio available.
Dennis Rice
Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
In February 2011, Dennis K. Rice retired as contractor employee working at the Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems Sector in El Segundo, California. Since February 2006 he had been supporting a Sector Engineering program to provide common best-in-class engineering tools/processes to enable work-sharing across the Sector & achieve the “design anywhere” objective. Over 800 Sector level processes/procedures were standardized. It has been successful expediting program standup timelines, enhancing engineering quality & reducing cost of rework for major Sector programs. He also provided advisory support to the newly reformed Corporate University Relations Advisory Board.
From January 1999 until February 2006 Dr. Rice was the Assistant Dean for Planning, Industry Relations, and Administration for the Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside. He helped formulate long term and short term scenarios regarding faculty growth, student growth, space needs and extramural research support. He acted as liaison with industry, collaborating with outside organizations to create and grow academic programs to provide future workforce and technology transfer. He created and managed a Council of Advisors for the College and supported the Department Chairs in creating and managing department advisory boards. He also coordinated College communications efforts by developing strategies to publicize programs, personnel, and facilities and had responsibility for oversight of aspects regarding budgets, space, equipment, staff, personnel matters, health and safety, affirmative action and administrative policies and procedures.
After spending 28 years with the Northrop Grumman Corporation he retired at the end of 1998. He retired as Corporate Vice President for Planning. He managed the Fortune 200 company’s planning process during its growth from $3B to $9B in sales. He also facilitated the process for authorizing annual R&D investments of $300M in products and programs providing for continued growth of the corporation. As chair of the company’s Educational Relations Advisory Board he supervised the distribution of $15-20M to a target set of universities for improved access to technology, business processes, and enhanced recruiting.
Prior to his corporate assignment he was a Division Vice President responsible for all aspects of combining two multi-hundred $M divisions including closing the facilities of one. Previously he was a Division Vice President for Advanced Systems which entailed responsibility for program management, engineering, manufacturing, R&D, marketing, finance, planning and facilities for a high technology business area which eventually generated over $1.5B in sales.
He had previous experience as Division Manager of Advanced Systems, Assistant to Division General Manager for Technology and Planning, Manager of Electro-Optical Engineering, Program Manager for High Power Lasers and Director of Engineering.
During his career he has been recognized in Who’s Who in Technology Today, American Men and Women of Science, Who’s Who in Finance and Industry, Community Leaders in America, Who’s Who in California, Who’s Who in U.S. Executives, and others.
He has been on the Board of Directors of the Independent Colleges of Southern California, Harvey Mudd President’s Advisory Board, Chair of UC Irvine’s Engineering Steering Committee, and other University advisory boards. He currently serves on the Electrical Engineering Advisory Board at UC Riverside.
Dr. Rice was born in Newell, West Virginia. He received a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from Cleveland State University. He attended the University of Southern California and received a M.S. and PhD in Electrical Engineering. He also attended the Engineering Executive Program and the Advanced Management College at Stanford University and the Executive Program at the University of California, Irvine.
Becky, his wife of 42 years, passed away in December 2012. He has two daughters, a son, two grandsons and a granddaughter. He enjoys golf, exercise, bridge, guitar and singing in the church choir.
Jean Easum
Supervisory Scientist, Naval Surface Warfare Center
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
No bio available.
Joel Schulman
Senior Scientist, The Aerospace Corporation
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Joel Schulman is a Senior Scientist at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, CA. Prior to 2008 he was a scientist at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, CA for twenty-three years, most recently as Principal Research Scientist. He has been an Adjunct Professor since 1985 in the Electrical Engineering Department. He received a B.A. in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD in Physics from the California Institute of Technology. He is an author of eleven patents and over one hundred journal articles. Prior to joining HRL, Dr. Schulman was an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.
J.R. Richardson
Principal Systems Engineer with Honors, Raytheon - Network Centric Systems (NCS)
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
J.R. Richardson is a Principal Systems Engineer with Honors at Raytheon – Network Centric Systems (NCS) Fullerton, CA, currently serving the Highway Transportation Management Systems (HTMS) group in strategic technology and business development. Since 2008 J.R. has filed 6 patents for his work in the traffic safety field, most notably for advanced pedestrian warning system technology. He also currently serves the transportation industry as a member of the OmniAir connected vehicle Certification Committee. Prior to joining HTMS he served the Navigation and Landing Systems (NLS) group as WAAS program System Safety Certification Lead for 5 years. He received his B.S. (1984) and M.S. (1992) in Aerospace Engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He also has extensive experience in flight simulation (Northrop and Hughes Training), aircraft avionics design and implementation (Northrop and Lockheed Martin), and air traffic management systems development (Hughes/Raytheon). He joined Raytheon on the WAAS program in 1996 and has served the aerospace industry for 26 years.
Peter Chu
Manager, Advanced Technologies,The Boeing Company
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Dr. Peter Chu is Manager of Advanced Technologies for Electronic Products, a Shared Integrated Product Team within Space & Intelligence Systems, a business unit of The Boeing Company located in El Segundo, California. He is responsible for coordinating a wide range of development efforts including photonics, laser communications, specialized test equipment, and special projects. He is also New Business lead for Electronic Products and oversees various business development activities. He has been involved in a broad range of technologies and has had a broad range of project management experience.
Dr. Chu started his career working semiconductor materials and devices. He was a III-V “bandgap” engineer growing material starting with chemical vapor deposition and eventually with molecular beam epitaxy as well as fabricating devices. He gradually expanded into process engineering for MMIC fabrication. He was responsible for the transition of a 0.25mm pHEMT process from development into manufacturing. He eventually became Head of Fab Process Engineering for Hughes Aircraft’s GaAs Operations, a Gallium Arsenide MMIC foundry located in Torrance, CA. In this role, he was responsible for the delivery of hundreds of thousands of MMICs, overseeing both development and sustaining engineering in the foundry. After transitioning to Hughes Space & Communications (later to become Boeing Satellite Systems) he worked on single event effects on SiGe and InP BiCMOS technologies. He then became Manager of the Optical Communications Activity at BSS overseeing the development of advanced photonics and laser communications systems. At the end of 2010 he transitioned to become Manager of Advanced Technologies.
He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University in 1982, and his M.S. (1985) and Ph.D. (1990) in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, San Diego. He holds four U.S. patents in HBT, PHEMT, and photonic technologies, and has published more than 30 papers.
Cyrus Johnson
Director of Engineering, SEACOMP
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Cy Johnson is an alumni of University of California, Riverside. He earned his B.S. degrees in electrical engineering and mathematics in 1998. As an undergraduate, he worked with Dr. Ilya Dumer on several National Science Foundation research projects in error correcting codes. After graduating from UCR, he earned his M.S. in Electrical Engineering at UCLA in 1999, focusing on communications.
He has been an independent consultant for the last decade. As a consultant, he works with the latest technology, in multiple fields including:
- ZigBee lower power mesh network applications, based on IEEE 802.15
- 4G LTE Channel Estimation using DPUs
- Proton accelerator for cancer patient treatment
- HomePlug AV power line communications
- Secure, tamper proof PIN encrypting smart card devices for the financial industry
- Security and cryptography for a satellite service provider
Brian M. Petrini
Technical Product Manager, IBM
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Brian M. Petrini is a technical product manager for IBM, in their Systems - Middleware division since 2013. He is responsible for the IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) product, overseeing the areas of migration, integration, performance, security, HA/DR, database and configuration. Prior to joining the BPM PLM organization in 2013, he was in the IBM Software Services for WebSphere team, where he spent 13 years helping customers use IBM products in the areas of integration architecture, service oriented architecture (SOA) design and development, enterprise architecture, business process management (BPM) methodologies, mentoring and training.
He is a frequent conference presenter, having presented at over two dozen conferences. He is also passionate about education, having co-created 3 IBM internal courses and taught them to hundreds of students over the years.
He is a graduate of UCR in Electrical Engineering in 1996.
Alex Poveda
Mission Design Engineer, Virgin Orbit
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Alex Poveda is a Mission Design Engineer for Virgin Orbit in Long Beach, CA. Virgin Orbit is the newest number of the Virgin family. Their team is hard at work launching the smallsat revolution. They are in the final stages of testing and preparation of LauncherOne, a two-stage, expendable, LOX/RP-1 rocket that launches from their mobile air launch pad, a dedicated Boeing 747-400 carrier aircraft, called Cosmic Girl.
Alex is a graduate of the University of California Riverside (UCR), where he received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering in 1996. His first job was with Logicon in El Segundo, CA, where he was a systems engineer and member of the Future Architecture Network Integrated Product Team for the United States Air Force Satellite Control Network. Alex then transitioned to TRW in San Bernardino, CA, where he was a scientist performing analysis on launch vehicles and on intercontinental ballistic missiles for the United States Air Force, officially making him a "rocket scientist." As the company name changed through merges and acquisitions Alex held successively responsible positions from Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GN&C) engineer, GN&C lead, Software, Controls, and Electronics Manager, to Launch Services Mission Assurance Program Manager and site lead. The company changed from TRW, to Northrop Grumman, to TASC, and to Engility. Alex was a member of the TASC team that helped NASA with a moon exploration mission that launched the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE). After 20 years from when he started with TRW, Alex has now transitioned to Virgin Orbit, to help them design trajectories for their new rocket LauncherOne.
STEM - Science, Technology, Engineering and Math education -- is important to Alex. He became involved in STEM when asked by his wife, a teacher at the time, to speak to her eighth-grade science class. He's also presented at the elementary level to first-grade and fifth-grade students, and at the university level with presentations to signals and systems classes and electrical engineering freshman seminar class at UCR, and has represented his employer at various university hiring events. He is also currently a member of the Foothill Knolls STEM Academy of Innovation advisory board and a member of the UCR College of Engineering Advisory Board.
Girish Balachandran
General Manager, Riverside Public Utilities (RPU)
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Girish Balachandran is the General Manager of Riverside Public Utilities. As the General Manager of Riverside Public Utilities (RPU) - which serves electricity to approximately 105,000 customers and water to approximately 65,000 customers – he leads a dynamic organization of nearly 600 employees and manages a budget of approximately $500 million. RPU and is one of the largest municipal utilities in California and is the 29th largest public power utility in the country.
Since joining RPU in 2014, Balachandran has initiated a number of innovative and collaborative processes focused on the following priorities: rebuilding aging water and electrical infrastructure, utilizing advanced technology to improve service delivery and customer satisfaction, developing the workforce to meet new skills needed in the utility of the future, and developing business models for the utility to adapt and thrive in a an uncertain environment. These initiatives are together called Utility 2.0 and serves as a vision to transform the utility to serve the needs of customers in the 21st century.
Before joining RPU, Balachandran served as General Manager of Alameda Municipal Power (AMP) for seven years. Balachandran led a series of changes that resulted in AMP’s #1 rating in residential customer satisfaction after years of steady improvement, bond-rating increase from A- to A+, and selling a failing telecom system to end years of financial losses.
Prior to his tenure in Alameda, Balachandran served in a variety of capacities with the City of Palo Alto Utilities, including Assistant Director of Utilities, Resource Management. He started his career as an analyst with Pasadena Water and Power after obtaining his Masters in Electrical Engineering from University of California, Los Angeles. He obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Anna University in Chennai, India.
Balachandran is also a graduate of Riverside’s Leadership Academy and currently serves on the Boards of the Southern California Public Power Authority as its President, California Municipal Utilities Association and the American Public Power Association.
Christopher Mayhew
Senior Power Systems Engineer, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX)
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Dr. Christopher Mayhew is a Senior Power Systems Engineer at Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in Hawthorne, California, where he is responsible for many aspects of the design, analysis, and simulation of the electrical power systems on the rockets and spacecraft manufactured by SpaceX. Prior to joining SpaceX in early 2014, Dr. Mayhew was a Research Engineer at the Bosch Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, CA for four years, where he designed and validated sophisticated estimation algorithms used in next-generation battery management systems and those of production electric vehicles.
Dr. Mayhew graduated with high honors from the University of California, Riverside, where he received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering. He went on to receive his M.S. and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008 and 2010, respectively, where his research at the intersection of topology and control theory illuminated fundamental limitations of classical paradigms in control systems and developed new methods to break topological gridlocks that were previously impassable.
The backbone of Dr. Mayhew’s expertise is applied stability theory for control and estimation of complex systems, multi-domain control-oriented modeling, and numerical methods for optimization, control design, and system identification. He has a tangible passion for learning and jumps at new opportunities to deeply understand engineering problems through his unique holistic viewpoint. Likewise, Dr. Mayhew’s love for teaching is evident in his enthusiasm for communicating everything from fundamental theoretical topics to practical lessons learned in an application setting to all interested ears.
Thomas Underhill
Product Governance and Compliance
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
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2014 San Diego Top Technology Executive Nominee
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Developed tablet and cloud-based solutions for electronic voting and election administration
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Developed software for large-scale automation, fraud analytics, and API integration
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Developed software for safety-critical aeronautical systems in support of the U.S. National Airspace System and Air Traffic Control System Command Center
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Dozens of inventions in a variety of areas, encompassing hardware and software
Juris Doctor, Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration (Summa cum Laude), Strayer University
Certificate in Global Legal Studies
Jacob Rael
Director, Broadcom Corporation
, ECE Board of Advisors
No bio available.
Mr. Taylor Cole
Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Corona
Member, ECE Board of Advisors
Industrial Work History and Experience
Mr. Taylor Cole, Navy Civilian, is the current Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Corona. In this position he is the focal point for cross Navy organization CTO communications, student intern programs, command educational partnerships, Navy Innovative Science and Engineering (NISE) funded R&D projects, and technology transfer. Prior to the CTO role, Mr. Cole was a 2-year Technology Fellow for the Chief of Naval Operations, Strategic Studies Group. Mr. Cole spent his early career leading the Navy Operations Research Systems Analysis (ORSA) group where math was used to predict human behavior in war.
Education
B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering and M.S. degree in Fluid Mechanics - University of California, Riverside