Photos By Bart Nagel

The new engineering dean talks about his vision for the College, the biggest challenges in the field, and why he may still have your business card.

What are you most excited about in your new role as dean of UC Berkeley College of Engineering?

Berkeley has one of the premier colleges, if not the top engineering college, in the world. I feel the College is poised to become an even more powerful fountain of innovation in the years to come, through pushing forward the limits of technology and science and creating new companies. More than 300 startups have come out of Berkeley Engineering in the last 30 years, and some of these companies, like Intel and Marvell Semiconductor, are household names today.

What has best equipped you to become dean of the College of Engineering?

I’ve been here 30 years and care deeply about the College. I come into the deanship with a lot of humility about continuing a wonderful tradition at a great institution. I guess that may not be a qualification, but that’s what I bring to the table.

How will your transition to dean from director of CITRIS, the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, affect the scope of your research?

CITRIS focuses on helping people by applying better information technologies (IT) to societal scale systems. But beyond IT, there are a lot of other technologies—biotechnologies like neuronal technologies, synthetic biology, systems biology and nanotechnologies—that are coming of age. To bring all of these into the service of societal problems represents a massively expanded version of my job at CITRIS.

You frequently use the term “societal scale systems.” What do you mean by that?

Societal scale means a large-scale system that is subject to economic forces and legal constraints, like our telecommunications infrastructure or our water delivery systems. By and large, most engineering systems we are putting together nowadays are of this nature.

How do these systems figure in our day-to-day lives, and how can engineering help?

The biggest challenges, in my opinion, are developing more innovative technologies for health care delivery, for clean energy and environmental sustainability, and for stronger complex societal systems, that is, technological systems with a social and economic piece to them. For a few examples, we are increasingly confronted with blackouts, air traffic failures with people stranded on runways for six hours, gridlock on freeways. That’s because our transportation systems and electric grids and other infrastructures have grown organically by adding and reengineering pieces. Even our computer systems and the Internet don’t behave predictably because they are not well planned out. Engineers use the phrase composable system, which means you construct the pieces to play nicely with each other; even if one piece of the road degrades, it does not cause catastrophic failure. So we’ve got to teach ourselves and our students how to build these systems to be more pliable and more fault tolerant when they suffer breakdowns or even when they’re under attack by terrorists.

What about health care delivery and environmental preservation? How will you prepare the next generation of engineers to make contributions in these areas?

Fifty years ago engineers learned to digest physics and inorganic chemistry as the sciences that drove technology. This led to quantum mechanics and the semiconductor industry, which then begot transistors, computers, the World Wide Web, cell phones and so on. The challenge is to integrate organic chemistry and biology as the sciences that are driving technology now. We’ve got all kinds of biological sciences on campus, but they are more discovery oriented. In engineering, you actually take this discovery and convert it to solutions for health care, for the environment and perhaps for other kinds of systems.

How specifically will engineering be involved in energy and health care delivery? Can you give us some examples?

A key area in energy research will be the use of synthetic biology to develop biofuels. In health care, we’re working on telemedicine and electronic medical records, as well as elder care and nonproprietary treatments for emerging and neglected diseases like malaria and tuberculosis. The big drug companies may not even develop drugs for such diseases because they can’t actually charge enough for the doses to support their costs.

You’ve been at Berkeley for 30 years except for brief periods at MIT, Harvard and DARPA. How did you end up leaving academics for the government?

When I had my interview for a green card in 1982, the judge in Boston asked me if I had registered for the draft. I said I didn’t realize I had to because I wasn’t a permanent resident. Then he said, “Why do you want to be a permanent resident in a country you don’t want to defend?” So many years later, when DARPA asked me to run the information technology office, that question about responsibility and duty was still in my head, and I went off to DARPA. I was supposed to be there three years, but when Rich Newton became dean, he twisted my arm to come back and take his job as department chair, so I came back to Berkeley after 13 months.

How did you first know you wanted to be an engineer?

Actually, I wanted to study math after high school, but my father suggested it wouldn’t be quite the right choice. My father was a mechanical engineer, and my grandfather and uncle were chemical engineers. I realized engineering was a good way of combining my interest in mathematics and physics with problem solving in the real world.

What do you think is the coolest technology out there right now?

Wireless. But I think we should call it untethered communications. I like this term better because it explains that it’s a way of communicating.

How would your closest friends describe you as a person?

As gregarious and epicurious. I think that’s a pretty accurate description. I’m fond of good wine and good food.

What do you like to do in your spare time?

I’m a history buff. I like to read histories, every year in a different area. Right now I’m reading a history of Mongolian culture. There have been a whole ton of them recently, and there was one in particular which got me started, which traced the beginnings of the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire in India.

We hear you’re a big Cal Bears fan. What got you interested in college football?

When I came to Berkeley I stayed in I-House and drew a room looking right on to Memorial Stadium. So I was introduced to Cal football by these program vendors early Saturday morning, going “Programs, programs,” outside my window.

Why, as a communications technologist, do you keep seven low-tech Rolodexes full of names?

I have them all electronically, but I like to keep the business cards themselves, even after they’ve been scanned in.

See Dean Sastry’s Curriculum Vitae and link to his CV at http://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sastry/biography.htm