2023 Hall of Fame Inductees

Interview

Carlos F.M. Coimbra is the John Dove Isaacs Endowed Chair in Natural Philosophy and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC San Diego. Coimbra first visited Orange County in the summer of 1994 when UCI hosted the 25th Symposium (International) on Combustion. About a year later, he returned to UCI for his doctoral studies under the expert guidance of Roger Rangel.

A proud Anteater, Coimbra credits much of his career success to the graduate experience he had at UCI. As one example out of many, the first course Rangel advised him to take in the fall of 1995 was MAE 224 - Convective Mass Transfer, offered by the late Don Edwards. This course introduced him to the then newly released first edition of Heat and Mass Transfer by Anthony Mills (UCLA). The course started a lifelong fascination with heat and mass transfer applications, particularly with respect to atmospheric processes. At the end of that fall quarter, Edwards offered to teach radiation heat transfer individually to Coimbra in what became a year-long, one-to-one course based on his Radiation Heat Transfer Notes textbook and many other research papers. This unique academic experience, available exclusively at UCI and made possible only due to Edwards’ personal commitment and generosity, influenced much of Coimbra’s recent research on atmospheric radiation. Coimbra received his doctorate from MAE at UCI in 1998, and after three faculty appointments spanning six time zones in the US, joined the faculty of the MAE department at UC San Diego in 2011. In 2014, Mills invited Coimbra to co-author the 3rd Edition of the Heat and Mass Transfer collection. This collection is now the largest compendium of thermal engineering in print, spreading over four books with over 1,300 pages of non-overlapping content, and it is used in many of the best programs in the U.S. and in Europe.

Coimbra was elected chair of the MAE department at UC San Diego in 2017. His research interests cover a wide range of topics related to energy and climate, planetary-scale heat transfer, solar forecasting, atmospheric radiation, multiphase flows and variable order methods. He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, which is published by the American Institute of Physics. He is also a life member of the American Geophysical Union and a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Throughout his career, Coimbra has received a number of best paper awards, both for conference and journal paper contributions, as well as multiple graduate mentorship awards. He credits these professional recognitions to the mentorship he received at UCI.

Coimbra has been a motorcycle enthusiast for over 40 years. He lives with his wife, Kaori, in Carmel Valley (North County San Diego). They enjoy motorcycle riding, walking, swimming and snorkeling together. They have two daughters, Miya and Kaila, both mechanical engineers who are pursuing doctoral degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Dinner conversations are interesting.

Interview

Manu Gulati has been immersed in the fields of electrical and computer engineering for over 30 years, in both academic and nonacademic capacities. A love for problem-solving and engineering has underscored his entire career. It began with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, in 1992, followed by a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from UCI in 1995.

Upon graduating from UCI, Gulati moved to the Bay Area to begin his career as a chip designer, initially as a CPU microcode engineer at a small startup in Santa Clara. That subsequently led to roles in various disciplines, covering different aspects of chip design, like verification, physical design, modeling and front-end design, among others. Armed with this versatility, Gulati became chip lead of security chips at Broadcom.

A pivotal point in his career came when he left Broadcom to become an SOC architect at Apple. He became the lead SOC architect at Apple and spent nearly eight years directing the architecture of chips that powered iPhones and iPads. Given the explosive growth of these consumer devices over the last 15 years, his work at Apple turned out to be the one with impact to the largest number of end-users. If you owned an iPhone or iPad from 2012 to 2019, you had a device whose architecture stemmed from him and his team at Apple.

When Google aspired to build their own silicon for first-party phones, they selected Gulati to be the lead architect. His work at Google began the trend of in-house silicon for Google's own phones, which continues to this day.

The roles at Apple and Google in particular helped Gulati realize one of the main professional goals he set for himself early in his career -- to take large complex problems and find meaningful yet simple solutions to them. Gulati believes strongly in the tenet that if you cannot explain the essence of your solution to a layperson, you've probably made it too complex. Nowhere is that truer than in large vertically integrated systems like mobile phones.

A love for problem-solving has led Gulati to be a relentless innovator over the years. He has authored close to 100 patents covering numerous areas of chip design and methodology.

Eventually, at the age of 48, the startup bug bit Gulati. He and two of his Apple colleagues started Nuvia, a company focused on high performance CPUs and chips for data centers in 2019. There were some challenges along the way, like trying to do a large fundraiser at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, when companies and investors alike were clamming up. They also had to contend with a lawsuit (however without merit). In the end, the three founders' tenacity and focus paid off; Nuvia exited with a sale to Qualcomm two years later for $1.6 billion. Since then, Gulati has been vice president of engineering at Qualcomm, where the focus of his team is to change the CPU landscape of the industry.

Gulati believes in education as an equalizer, especially having come from a relatively humble background himself. He feels he owes a big debt to the educational institutions that molded him. He has been repaying this debt by "paying it forward" as they say. He has done hands-on work at elementary schools for the underprivileged, donates every year to educational causes (including UCI), and most recently has become a founding member of a new university in India, that aims to re-imagine the way technology is taught, to create effective and well-rounded engineers who are equipped to have an impact on the real world.

Gulati’s greatest joys in life are his wife Dolly and two boys named Kunaal (9) and Kabir (6), who motivate him to stay youthful and fit.

Interview

Wendy Robello has over 18 years of systems engineering and strategy experience in the aerospace and defense industry. She is currently the national director of systems engineering for Northrop Grumman aeronautics systems, where she leads the long-term strategic planning in training, processes and tools to ensure systems engineering rigor across the sector.

Prior to this role, Robello held the distinguished honor of being a senior NG Fellow, leading the strategic integration of technology and engineering within defense systems. Robello has also led strategic analytics teams, providing competitive positioning and investment strategy across the businesses both at mission systems and aerospace systems sectors. Before joining Northrop Grumman in 2012, she held program management and systems engineering positions at General Atomics – Aeronautical Systems, Inc.; Boeing Phantom Works; and Boeing Defense Systems. Robello has supported systems across space, air, ground and underwater domains.

Robello is a mentor in Northrop Grumman development programs and employee resource groups including Women in Science and Engineering, Supporting Women in Future Technology, Pride in Diversity Alliance, Adelante’s Mujeres Mentoring Circles and serves as an executive advocate for the LatinX/Hispanic Employee Advocacy Program. She is also an executive board member for the Global Women in STEM Leadership Summit and founder of the Robello California Alliance for Minority Participation Scholarship.

Robello has received numerous awards and honors such as the Northrop Grumman Innovation Award, Lambda Theta Nu Sorority, Inc. Exceptional Leadership Award and Professional of the Year Award, U.S. Air Force Medium Altitude UAS Division GEM Award, Boeing Phantom Works Silver Team Award and Boeing Amelia Earhart Society – Woman of High Potential Award.

Robello earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from UC Irvine, a master’s degree in systems architecture and engineering from the University of Southern California and a doctorate in systems engineering and engineering management from The George Washington University. Her research focused on strategic investment planning using machine learning techniques for quantitative competitive positioning.