Raissa M. D'Souza

Raissa M. D'Souza is the Associate Dean of Research for the College of Engineering and a Professor of Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Davis as well as an External Professor and member of the Science Board at the Santa Fe Institute. She was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2016, Fellow of the Network Science Society in 2019, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2024. D'Souza works on theory and complex systems.

Early life and education When D'Souza was younger she faced the personal choice of going to college or moving to Paris to become a fashion designer. She eventually settled on university and studied physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She earned her doctoral degree in theoretical physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1999, where she worked with Mehran Kardar and Norman Margolus. These networks could be in technological, biological or social systems. The percolation transition can be applied to a variety of real-world systems, from nanotubes to epileptic seizures or social networks. Large-scale connectivity and synchronisation can be crucial to the structure and function of complex networks. She demonstrated that sparse connections between separate networks helps to suppress cascading failures. She has also studied cascading behaviours in general, including power-grid failures, crashes in financial markets and spreads of political movements.

In 2014 D'Souza was awarded a United States Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative Award to investigate the prediction and control of interdependent networks for the period 2014–2019.

Academic service

She is an External Professor at both the Santa Fe Institute and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. She was a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences several times and previously served on the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council of Complex Systems. She was made an inaugural member of the Global Young Academy in 2010. In 2015, D'Souza was appointed the 2nd President of the Network Science Society, and served in this role until 2018. In 2019, she was awarded the Network Science Society's inaugural Euler Award "for her influential contribution to the discovery and study of explosive percolation and the insights it provided to explosive synchronization and network optimization".

D'Souza serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of Quanta Magazine. She was made lead editor of the American Physical Society journal Physical Review Research in 2019. Since Aug 2020, she is a member of the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science.

Awards and honours Her awards and honours include;

2015 Elected President of the Network Science Society 2016 Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society 2017 University of California, Davis Outstanding Mid-Career Faculty Research Award 2018 ACM Test-of-Time award (for lasting influence of paper from 2008 ) 2019 Network Science Society Euler Award 2019 Elected Fellow of the Network Science Society 2024 Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Publications Her publications include;

Winner 2018 ACM Test-of-Time award.