UCLA announced Friday that Jayathi Murthy will be the new dean of the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science starting Jan. 1, 2016. Daily Bruin reporter Chandini Soni spoke with Murthy, who is currently the chair of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin, about her plans as dean and her thoughts on engineering.
Daily Bruin: Can you tell us about yourself?
Jayathi Murthy: I’m a mechanical engineer by training, and my area of research is heat transfer and fluid mechanics … I have worked in industry and academia for several years. The first third of my career was actually in the software industry. Then, I came back to academia and was a professor and researcher for many years … I moved to (University of Texas at Austin) to be the (mechanical engineering) department chair and now I’m transitioning to be the dean (of engineering) at UCLA.
DB: What are your plans as dean? What goals do you hope to achieve?
JM: Excellence is always the biggest thing on one’s horizon. And by excellence, I mean excellence in research, in teaching and … in entrepreneurship. … I’m very interested in online education, in the executive education arena. I looking forward to working with the provost and chancellor on the centennial campaign that they’ve kicked off.
DB: Why did you become an engineer?
JM: My father … was a civil engineer and he was one of the early engineers to graduate from college soon after India’s independence. He actually built some of the roads and bridges in the most remote parts of India, and I saw as a child how much of a difference those simple roads and bridges could make by completely transforming villages. It’s that power of transformation I think that’s the most important thing about being an engineer.
DB: What research are you doing at the University of Texas at Austin and do you plan on continuing it at UCLA?
JM: Over the last few years, I’ve started to concentrate on trying to understand transport processes, particularly heat transfer on a very small-length scale. … You know that your computer gets hot when you turn it on, and that heat essentially originates in the transistor. What we’re trying to do is understand how that heat transfer happens because the physical laws that govern heat transfer on small scales are different from those that govern heat transfer on normal-length scales.
DB: What advice do you have for UCLA engineering students?
JM: I think it’s really important to love what you do and explore all the opportunities that engineering affords. … As a young person in engineering and as you’re casting around trying to find a pathway, you should know that the basic analytical skills that you learn as an engineer are widely applicable. You can find all sorts of pathways in life, where they’re going to be really useful to you. So go find those pathways.