Fox named academic director of online-education center

Professor Armando Fox has been appointed to serve as academic director of the Berkeley Resource Center for Online Education, a new unit dedicated to supporting online-education initiatives and research.

Diana Wu and Armando Fox, executive director and academic director respectively of BRCOE (Noah Berger photo)

Working under the guidance of the Online Education Steering Committee, Fox will collaborate with BRCOE’s executive director, Diana Wu, to build an infrastructure to support the campus’s numerous and varied online-education initiatives — from offerings for the public good to professional certificate programs.

Fox is a professor-in-residence in the College of Engineering’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, a researcher in the campus’s Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab), and a co-founder of the Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems (RAD) lab. His 2003 collaboration with Professor David Patterson on recovery-oriented computing earned him the distinction of being named a “top-50” researcher by “Scientific American” and led to formation of the RAD Lab. Prior to that, he taught computer science at Stanford, where he received teaching and mentoring awards from the Associated Students of Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers, and the Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society.

Provost George Breslauer and John Wilton, vice chancellor for administration and finance, announced Fox’s appointment in an Aug. 30 CalMessage. Wu’s role, providing administrative leadership to Berkeley’s online education efforts, was outlined in an April 27 CalMessage.

Information about the office, Fox’s and Wu’s roles and online initiatives will be shared through the BRCOE website. Questions may be directed to [email protected].