Rate My Professor Raissa D’Souza

Raissa M. D’Souza is an Associate Dean of Research and Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis, holding joint appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. She earned her B.S. in Physics with Distinction from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999. Following her doctoral studies, she held postdoctoral positions at Bell Laboratories from 1999 to 2002 and at Microsoft Research from 2002 to 2005. She joined UC Davis as an Assistant Professor in 2005, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008, and to Professor in 2014. Additionally, she has served as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute since 2007. In leadership roles, D’Souza was President of the Network Science Society from 2015 to 2018, serves as a Member of the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science, and was the Founding Lead Editor of Physical Review Research. She also held positions on the editorial boards of several journals, including IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering and Journal of Complex Networks.

D’Souza’s research focuses on complex networks, percolation, cascades, and interdependent complex systems. Her seminal publications include "Explosive Percolation in Random Networks" (Science, 2009), "Suppressing Cascades of Load in Interdependent Networks" (PNAS, 2012), "Target Control of Complex Networks" (Nature Communications, 2014), "Curtailing Cascading Failures" (Science, 2017), and "Mutualistic Networks Emerging from Adaptive Niche-Based Interactions" (Nature Communications, 2020). She has garnered major awards such as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (class of 2024), Fellow of the American Physical Society (2016), Fellow of the Network Science Society (2019), the 2019 Euler Award from the Network Science Society, the 2018 ACM Test-of-Time Award, the 2017 UC Davis College of Engineering Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award, and the 2013 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.