Larry Smarr Receives 2023 Revelle Medal
UC San Diego announced today that winners of this year’s Revelle Medal include Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), the parent organization of Qualcomm Institute (QI), as well as a faculty member in the Jacobs School of Engineering (Computer Science and Engineering Department).
“It is a privilege to recognize these incredible thought leaders who have helped establish UC San Diego as one of the world’s top research universities,” said Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla. “Through their efforts, each of these honorees has advanced our understanding of the world, shaped new fields of study and made discoveries that transform lives.”
Other winners of the award, which recognizes retired or emeriti UC San Diego faculty members for sustained, distinguished and extraordinary service to the university, are Eleanor Antin, professor emeritus of Visual Arts; Marta Kutas, distinguished professor emeritus of Cognitive Science; and Lu Jeu Sham, professor emeritus of Physics. Smarr is currently distinguished professor emeritus with the Jacobs School of Engineering.
Created in honor of Roger Revelle, who helped establish UC San Diego during his tenure from 1950-64 as director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the Revelle Medal celebrates individuals whose careers show a commitment to thinking further, solving problems and shaping the future in ways only possible at UC San Diego.
Serving the Public Good
Smarr, whose expertise spans astrophysics, computation, AI and biology, joined the UC San Diego Department of Computer Science and Engineering in 2000.
Later that year he became the founding director of Calit2, a partnership of UC San Diego and UC Irvine that was recently expanded to include UC Riverside. In the following two decades, before his retirement in 2020, Smarr grew Calit2 into a collaborative discovery enterprise that engaged hundreds of faculty, staff, students and companies.
Calit2 illustrates Smarr’s guiding principle: public higher education institutions serve the public good and the community that surrounds them. Over the years, the research institute engaged in many public-facing efforts, including carrying out R&D for CAL FIRE and providing access to advanced technologies for local and regional companies.
Over the last 20 years, Smarr also served as principal investigator on four National Science Foundation research grants, designing and deploying NSF’s largest distributed academic AI/Machine Learning Big Data cyberinfrastructure in the United States. In the last decade Smarr has become a pioneer in the quantified-self movement, including personalized surgery.
Smarr’s commitment to public service extends to stints on President Clinton’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, the Advisory Committee to the director of the National Institutes of Health–serving three directors–and the Advisory Council to four NASA administrators. He also was the founding director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in 1985 at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Chancellor Khosla will bestow the awards upon the honorees during a ceremony on November 17.
For more information about other Revelle Medal awardees, see UC San Diego Today article, “2023 Revelle Medal Recipients Announced.” See their websites for more information about Calit2 and QI.