Professor Prasant Mohapatra, immediate past chair of the Department of Computer Science, has been appointed interim vice provost of Information and Educational Technology and chief information officer of the Davis campus.

Mohapatra

Mohapatra, who has held the Tim Bucher Family Endowed Chair of Computer Science since 2009, officially assumed the IET post on July 1. The appointment is for one year or until the appointment of a permanent replacement for Pete Siegel, who held the post for six years until leaving at the end of the June to become vice provost and chief information officer at the University of Southern California.

“I am delighted that Prasant has agreed to serve as interim vice provost,” Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter said. “He brings all the qualities needed to lead this critical campus unit during this time of transition. Prasant enjoys the wide respect of his colleagues, and, given his outstanding credentials and administrative experience, I have great confidence in his ability to guide and advance the information technology environment at UC Davis in the months ahead.”

Mohapatra joined UC Davis in 2001 and served as department chair from 2007 until this year. He received the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Research Faculty Award in 2011.

His research interests are in the areas of wireless networks, sensor networks, Internet protocol, and quality of service, and he has published extensively on these topics for various journals and conferences. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Intel Corp., Panasonic Technologies, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Rockwell International and EMC Corp.

He was a faculty member at Iowa State and Michigan State universities before coming to UC Davis, and has served as a visiting scientist, researcher or professor for a number of  institutions and companies, including the University of Padova (Italy) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, or KAIST (Daejeon, South Korea), and Panasonic, AT&T and Intel. He was director of the Center for Future Information Technology from 2006 to 2008.

Mohapatra serves on several editorial boards in the computing field and was recently named incoming editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. He was the program chair of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks (2012) and the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad Hoc and Sensor Systems (2010). He also has served on numerous technical program committees for international conferences and review panels.

Mohapatra received his doctoral degree from Pennsylvania State University in 1993 and received the Penn State Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award in 2008. He is a fellow of the IEEE and the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, and won the HP Labs Innovation Award in 2011 and ’12.

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