Rachel Carson College Faculty Fellows
Sikina Jinnah is Rachel Carson College's new faculty chair!
The Chair of the Faculty is an Academic Senate member, other than the Provost, who is elected by the college Faculty to serve a two year term, and will serve as a member of the Executive Committee.
Dr. Jinnah is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department, an affiliated faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department, and a 2017 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. Her research focuses on the shifting locations of power and influence in global environmental governance, and in particular the role of transnational actors in environmental decision-making. Her most recent projects examine how key norms in global climate politics shape power relations, the role of U.S. preferential trade agreements in shaping environmental policy in trading partner nations, and the politics of climate engineering governance.
- Title
- Distinguished Research Professor and Distinguished Professor Emeritus
- Division Baskin School of Engineering
- Department
- Computer Science and Engineering
- Phone 831-459-4768
- Website
- Office Location
- Engineering Building 2, Room 345A
- Mail Stop SOE3
Research Interests
- Principles of database systems
- Logic in computer science
- Computational complexity
Biography, Education and Training
- Phokion Kolaitis is a Distinguished Resarch Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Santa Cruz and a Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center. He served as Chair of the Computer Science Department at UC Santa Cruz from 1997 to 2001, and during 2014-15. From June 2004 to September 2008, he served as Senior Manager of the Computer Science Principles and Methodologies Department at the IBM Almaden Research Center (and while on leave of absence from UC Santa Cruz). Kolaitis is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, a Foreign Member of Academia Europea, and the recipient of a 1993 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also the recipient of two IBM Research Division Outstanding Innovation Awards, an IBM Research Division Outstanding Technical Achievement Award, a co-winner of the 2013 ICDT Test-of-Time Award, a co-winner of both the 2008 and the 2014 ACM PODS Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award, and a co-winner of the 2020 Alonzo Church Award for Outstanding Contributions to Logic and Computation. In 2014, Kolaitis was awarded an Honorary Doctorate Degree (Doctor Honoris Causa) from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece.
