Six Alumni Inducted into Hall of Fame 

May 20, 2026 - The 2026 Engineering and ICS Alumni Hall of Fame at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa combined beautiful weather and an art-filled venue with a celebration of alumni success.  

Three engineering and three information and computer sciences outstanding alumni were inducted this year for making a significant impact in their profession, or in other ways bringing distinction to their alma mater. Around 170 faculty, alumni, students, friends and family attended the 11th annual event and were able to enjoy the museum galleries and then network and visit during cocktail hour on the second floor patio before the program began.  

UCI ICS alumnus Tim Kashani ’86 welcomed the crowd and served as master of ceremonies introducing each school’s dean – Marios Papaefthymiou, ICS, and Faryar Jabbari, engineering. Following the presentations, each inductee spoke, all fondly remembering their time at UCI and many calling out supportive former faculty and their families. After the program, attendees enjoyed a lovely outdoor buffet dinner as the sun was setting.  

Engineering Inductees 

Afshin Mohebbi, B.S. 1983 – Electrical Engineering 

A highly successful telecom industry leader, Mohebbi holds an MBA from UCI as well as his undergraduate degree. He began his career at Pacific Bell Telephone company in California and went on to British Telecom and then Qwest Communications International where he served as president and chief operating officer at 36, the youngest ever president of a major telecom company in the United States. During his tenure, he co-chaired integration with U.S. WEST, one of the largest mergers in the U.S. telecom industry. 

He was selected as one of 100 Global Leaders of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2000; appointed a trustee of the Colorado Institute of Technology by the Colorado Governor in 2002; and selected as one of the top 50 public company directors in the U.S. by the Wall Street Journal in 2005. Today, Mohebbi is an investor and senior advisor with TPG Capital, a Fortune 100 company, and serves on a number of boards including Digital Realty Trust, DirecTV and Climavision. 

 Mohebbi said he was honored and humbled to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. He was barely 16 years old when he came to UCI and studied physics under Nobel Laureate Frederick Reines. He was also one of two undergraduates assigned to Robert M. Sanders, UCI engineering school’s founding dean. “He could be gruff, people were scared of him,” said Mohebbi. But he remembers Sanders fondly. “When I told him my class schedule, full of engineering classes, he told me to take some psychology classes,” said Mohebbi. “I took three and that advice turned out to be very helpful.” 

Ramin Mousavi, B.S. 2008 – Electrical Engineering  

Mousavi, a dynamic and seasoned medical device executive, was serving as the president, CEO and a member of the Board of Directors at CathWorks until just recently when it was acquired by Medtronic. In addition to his bachelor’s degree, Mousavi earned an MBA from UC Irvine and completed a Healthcare Executive Leadership program for Business Innovation in Global Healthcare from Harvard Business School. Mousavi has a history of building high-performing organizations and achieving exceptional results in the medical device and high-tech industries. Prior to CathWorks, he led the patient monitoring and digital health portfolio at Baxter International, and has held positions at Edwards Lifesciences, Panasonic Avionics and Rockwell Collins. 

Mousavi is an active philanthropist and serves on a number of board of directors, including the Council on Aging Southern California and the American Heart Association. He has been recognized with the 40 Under 40, Excellence in Healthcare, Entrepreneur of the Year by the Greater Irvine Chamber of Commerce, and the Innovator of Year and the Excellence in Entrepreneurship by Orange County Business Journal.  

 Mousavi was honored by the Samueli School’s recognition. “I remember coming to UCI 30 years ago, my parents brought me. My engineering education taught me that failure is not the opposite of success, but the first draft of success,” he said. “Engineers are comfortable working on drafts or versions until they get to a solution.” 

Jonathan Posner, B.S. 1995, Ph.D. 2001 – Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering 

Jonathan Posner is the Richard and Victoria Harrington Professor for Engineering Innovation in Health and a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Washington. Posner’s research is primarily focused on the development of point-of-care diagnostics for infectious diseases (HIV, HCV) for use in low- and middle-income countries, precision medicine drug level measurements, and a wide range of medical devices. 

He led a team that developed and subsequently sold millions of cleaner burning biomass cookstoves for East Africa that are twice as efficient and an order of magnitude cleaner than traditional three-stone fires that are currently in use. He has 27 patents and patent applications and has founded two companies including VICIS, which created a football helmet that reduces the risk of concussion and was rated football’s safest helmet for the past eight years. Posner was awarded UW School of Medicine 2016 Inventor of the Year, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award.  

Posner thanked Dean Jabbari for the recognition and said he is proud to be an ambassador for UCI. He said it was people like John La Rue, professor emeritus, who encouraged him. “He told me to come to his lab and check things out. He saw something in me. And Derek Dunn-Rankin, who taught me that engineering  and academic scholarship is fundamentally a creative pursuit and I could do with it what I wanted. It’s limitless.” 

ICS Inductees 

Deborah Dubrow, M.S. 1995, B.S. 1993 — Information and Computer Science 

Dubrow is a product leader with broad experience at Fortune 500 companies including NVIDIA, Microsoft, Zillow and Apple. For over three decades, she has helped bring groundbreaking products to market across consumer and enterprise settings used by hundreds of millions of people. She brings a holistic perspective to the product lifecycle, with a particular focus on customer experience, end-user needs, and building the cross-functional clarity teams need to deliver well. She is also a co-inventor on several early patents related to video conferencing and application streaming. She is currently a program management leader at NVIDIA, where she is responsible for DGX Spark and NemoClaw.  

Outside of technology, Dubrow is a longtime travel enthusiast and advocate for families exploring the world together. She created DeliciousBaby, a successful family travel website that The New York Times described as “one of the top family travel sites.” Her advocacy reflects the same user-centered perspective she brings to product leadership: practical, empathetic, and focused on making complex experiences easier for real people. 

Hakan Hacigumus, Ph.D. 2003, M.S. 2001 — Information and Computer Science 

Hacigumus began his career at IBM Research, Almaden, where, alongside his doctoral work in computer science at UC Irvine, he co-pioneered the concept of database-as-a-service, a contribution later recognized with the ACM SIGMOD Test-of-Time Award. He went on to serve as head of Data Management Research at NEC Labs, before joining Google, where he led teams building the data analytics infrastructure behind some of the company’s most critical businesses. He then joined Meta as head of Analytics in Data Infrastructure, overseeing a broad portfolio of data analytics infrastructure products and services, and later served at Confluent with responsibility for its full suite of cloud applications. He currently serves as the CTO of RelationalAI, an AI company whose mission is to power every decision with intelligence. 

David Hilbert, Ph.D. 1999, M.S. 1996 — Information and Computer Science 

Hilbert is director of product management at Samsung Research America’s Enterprise & Security Innovation Lab, where he leads next-generation Samsung mobile solutions for enterprise. His career spans a broad arc — from software engineer to industrial researcher to product leader — across Samsung, Fuji Xerox, NASA, and Microsoft. Hilbert began his career as a software engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on the Galileo mission and Deep Space Network automation research. After his doctorate, Hilbert joined Fuji Xerox’s Palo Alto Laboratory, where he rose from senior research scientist to senior product manager and co-founded FXPAL’s Silicon Valley Business Innovation Group.  

- Lori Brandt