The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering (COE) at UC Santa Barbara will celebrate a record-breaking year during the 2026 Undergraduate Commencement, which begins at 9 AM on Friday, June 12 on Commencement Green. The college has conferred 474 bachelor’s degrees during the 2025-26 academic year, breaking the previous record set last year by two degrees. 

Roughly 22 percent of the degrees were earned by women, breaking another college record. The class of 2026 has amassed 200 computer science degrees, 85 degrees in mechanical engineering, 74 degrees in electrical engineering, 73 in computer engineering, and 42 in chemical engineering. By posting cumulative grade point averages (GPAs) of 3.98 and above, 23 students will graduate in the top 2.5% of the class and receive highest honors; 35 students with GPAs between 3.94 and 3.97 will graduate with high honors; and 63 students with GPAs between 3.86 and 3.93 will graduate with honors. Another 52 students will graduate as COE Honors Program Scholars for completing an array of requirements, such as a minimum 3.5 GPA and community service hours. Twenty-five graduating students have also earned multiple degrees. 

Standard Bearers
The college selected one student from each undergraduate degree program to serve as a standard bearer during commencement. The five students who will lead the class of 2026 into the ceremony includes: Anuj Acharya (Chemical Engineering); Sammy Lesner (Computer Science); Michael Wu (Computer Engineering); Mohamed Elfouly (Electrical Engineering); and Henry Easton (Mechanical Engineering). 

The standard bearers were also nominated and selected by their departments as Outstanding Seniors, a distinction based on their academic excellence, undergraduate research ,and other scholarly pursuits. 

Student Commencement Speaker
A COE committee selected Lily Chen to represent the class of 2026 as the student commencement speaker. Chen, who will receive a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, says that she is honored to represent her fellow graduates and to help commemorate their accomplishments and perseverance and reflect on the people and experiences that shaped their time at UCSB.

“Commencement celebrates more than the degrees that we earned; it honors who we became in the process,” said Chen, who said that her speech will encourage classmates to carry forward the community, confidence, and purpose they built as UCSB engineers. “UCSB Engineering taught us that being an engineer is more than mastering technical concepts. We learned how to build, question, communicate, and collaborate. We became more capable, more confident, more connected, and more committed to using our skills with purpose.”

Chen’s undergraduate experience has extended well beyond the classroom. She conducted research with electrical and computer engineering professors Mahnoosh Alizadeh and Jason Marden, a applying data-driven modeling and optimal control to industrial refrigeration systems. Her work, which uses real operational data to improve the planning and control of large-scale industrial processes, contributed to a paper accepted by the 2026 American Control Conference. She said that undergraduate research has become one of the most defining parts of her UCSB experience, helping her connect classroom concepts to real-world systems. Chen credited Alizadeh and Marden with helping guide that journey.

“I am especially grateful to Professor Alizadeh and Professor Marden for their mentorship and support,” Chen said. “Professor Alizadeh helped me discover the area within computer engineering I’m most excited to pursue and introduced me to the research group that has become central to my academic growth over the past two years. Professor Marden taught me how to think critically, investigate problems deeply, tell a cohesive story with data, and present technical content clearly. Their mentorship helped to shape me into the engineer and researcher I am today.”

Having used that experience to discover her passion for controls and machine learning, Chen will continue at UCSB after commencement through the BS/MS program in electrical and computer engineering. This summer, she will return to CrossnoKaye, an industrial autonomy company that partners with her research group, as an intern working on advanced process control. Long term, she hopes to build a career applying AI and control systems to physical industries, where better planning and control can improve efficiency and sustainability.

Chen has also been active across campus, serving as president of Tau Beta Pi’s CA Sigma Chapter, a UCSB tour guide, a peer educator for COE Advising, and the solar team lead for Engineers Without Borders. In that role, she helped grow the solar team from a small group of students into a larger team focused on solar-energy projects and engineering service.

“Together, research and student organizations shaped my UCSB experience by helping me grow as an engineer and as a collaborator, mentor, and leader,” Chen said.

Chen, who moved to the United States during high school, said that her upbringing in China helped build the mindset she brings to engineering. She said she was fortunate to grow up in an environment that embraced the Chinese saying, “妇女能顶半边天,” or “women hold up half the sky,” a belief that helped shape the confidence, discipline, and determination she carries as a woman in engineering. 

“To me, my story is not about leaving one identity behind to succeed in another place,” she said. “It is about carrying both with me, and letting each part of my journey help me become more confident, capable, and purposeful.”

Commencement Speaker
A pioneering computer scientist, UCSB alumnus, and Google’s chief technologist, commencement keynote speaker Prabhakar Raghavan will congratulate The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering’s class of 2026 and share insights from a career spent shaping how people around the world find, organize, and use information.

Raghavan is one of the foremost authorities on search, algorithms, information retrieval, web mining, and databases. He earned his master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from UCSB in 1982 before completing his PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley.

Since joining Google in 2012, Raghavan has held senior leadership roles overseeing some of the company’s most widely used products, including Search, Ads, Commerce, Geo, Assistant, Workspace, and Gemini. Before joining Google, Raghavan founded and led Yahoo! Labs, served as chief technology officer at Verity, and spent fourteen years at IBM Research. He has published more than one-hundred papers, holds twenty issued patents, and co-authored two widely used graduate texts, Randomized Algorithms and Introduction to Information Retrieval.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of both the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Raghavan has received several major honors for his contributions to computer science, including the 2017 Seoul Test of Time Award for the influential paper “Graph Structure in the Web.”