Enrique Lavernia took up his new post as dean of the College of Engineering last month, leaving UC Irvine and the sprawl of Orange County for fields and bike paths of Davis.

Lavernia holds a master's degree and a doctorate from MIT and a bachelor's degree from Brown University in Providence, R.I. He succeeds Zuhair Munir, who has served as dean since 2000.

He recently took time out from settling into his new job, restarting his research program and building a house to talk to Dateline about his impressions of UC Davis and his plans for the college.

What attracted you to the post of dean for the College of Engineering at UC Davis?

You know, the opportunity I see is that UC Davis is at a junction period where it is poised to be a world-class university. There are really excellent people here, both faculty and staff. The energy level on campus is very high; everybody's pleased to be here. Everybody I meet has either lived here their whole life or has lived here, moved away and moved back. That shows a commitment to the campus from people at all levels, that people want to come back here because it's a great place to live and work.

What are your first impressions of the UC Davis campus?

• think, in the past, UC Davis has done a marvelous job of being modest. But we have many excellent programs in so many different areas.

With the opening of the Mondavi Center, this is a great time to be joining UC Davis - I think it represents a coming-out of the campus and an opportunity to raise our profile and name recognition in all these other areas.

What are your priorities for the college?

• want to sit down and talk with every faculty member in the college. I've already met with all the associate deans in the college and now I'm meeting the department chairs, then I will meet with all the faculty. I want our faculty to be energized about the growth in the college. I feel very strongly that the faculty and staff, postdocs and students should feel included in the college as we grow.

As a college, we're creating a vision statement that sets out goals for the college and identifies strategies to achieve those goals. That's now with the department chairs for discussion and comment. Then the faculty and staff will consider it and make their suggestions.

• want to emphasize interdisciplinary work in areas such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, biomedical engineering, environmental science and engineering and computer science and engineering - these represent the future of engineering. However, I want to emphasize that traditional areas of strength in the college must be intimately linked to our new plans for growth. All of the frontiers of science and technology are on the boundaries between disciplines. I think it's important to recognize that while at the same time we build on and complement our existing strengths and traditional disciplines.

Another important objective for me is to get more private and industrial support for the college. Again, I think this comes back to marketing and promoting UC Davis and the College of Engineering effectively. Our college is located in a strategic region, and our industry colleagues are hungry for interactions with UC Davis.

What do you think the college can contribute to the campus community?

• have met individually with the other deans, and there's a clear interest in making links with engineering. I want to credit Dean Munir for that; he did an excellent job in reaching out to the rest of the campus.

For example, the Genomics Center, the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the new Center for Biophotonics, funded by NSF, link us to the School of Medicine and the other sciences - the Division of Biological Sciences, veterinary school and physical sciences departments - on campus. The biophotonics center is a remarkable accomplishment - UC has not been very well represented in these NSF centers up to now.

With the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, we have a perfect match in the areas of biotechnology and biological and agricultural engineering, where we already share a department. And we have many joint appointments with the Division of Mathematics and Physical Sciences. We have an exciting initiative, the Computational Science and Engineering initiative, which will be a major link between several different campus units.

Outside the sciences, we're talking to the School of Law about joint courses in technology and the law. The Graduate School of Management has a new minor in technology administration that is jointly run with the college.

I've also talked with (Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies) Dean Elizabeth Langland about possible joint appointments in engineering and the arts - using technology to create works of art. For example, visualizing turbulent air currents around a ballet dancer, or building a musical instrument that responds to light and music. This clearly represents a non-traditional area for us, but one that is intellectually rich and unique in its origins.

What do you see as the contributions of the college to the state of California, the nation and the world?

At UC Davis we're uniquely qualified to support emerging industries in the Sacramento region. The great strength of California's economy has been the entrepeneurs who take new ideas to create businesses. This region is undergoing a boom of growth in technology and biotechnology industries, and we can help support those entrepeneurs.

The college is also contributing to initiatives such as the California Center for Preparedness, which aims to build, among other things, regional communications networks for responding to terrorist attacks. Where else do you have this combination of a major health center with expertise in telemedicine, plus engineering expertise in communications and sensors? That's one example of how engineers can form interdisciplinary links with other parts of the campus.

You are moving your lab here. Would you talk about your commitment to continuing your research?

• tip I got from Zuhair Munir - I try to cross out Fridays on my calendar and go to my research group. I have an outstanding group of staff and students and I'm highly gratified that most of them chose to come with me from UC Irvine.

My major area of interest is in nanomaterials. Those are materials that are made up of extremely small particles - technically, those with spatial attributes that fall in the range of 10-9 meters. I'm interested both in finding ways to make nanomaterials, and in understanding them and their properties.

Outside work, what are you doing to unwind?

In the past, I regularly went jogging at lunchtime, although now I find I usually have to jog early in the morning as I'm too busy during the day. I also play tennis - at the Chancellor's Fall conference I found that Steven Sheffrin (dean of Social Sciences) is a keen player and we've played a few games, though I need to practice more if I am to keep up with him!

What would people be surprised to know about you?

Well, we keep chickens. That was a little unusual in Orange County. When we moved into our previous house there, the chickens were already there, and my children (now 7 and 8) wanted to keep them so they became pets.

• thought we were going to leave them behind when we moved to Davis but I was outvoted by the rest of the family, so we drove up Interstate 5 in a rented truck with a dog and three chickens in the back.

How are you settling in to the Davis community?

• think this is a great place to live, close to San Francisco and to Lake Tahoe in the other direction. Everything I've looked for is here, and I'm really enjoying the atmosphere of Davis compared to the traffic and congestion of southern California. It's a very friendly, quiet town. We're living in a rental home at the moment, and the neighbors invited us over for a barbecue a few days after we got here.

We're also building a house in Davis, and we're hoping to move in soon, in December. That's fun to watch.