To anyone who’s spent time on the UC Santa Barbara campus, Margaret “Maggie” Mosher’s name may sound familiar — particularly when passing by the Mosher Alumni House. The prominent Santa Barbara philanthropist was an avid supporter of the university and the surrounding community, and served as a Trustee of the UCSB Foundation for nearly 20 years until her death in 2002. 

This spring, the Mosher Foundation — the continuation of the legacy of Maggie Mosher and her husband, former UC Regent and Signal Oil & Gas founder Samuel Mosher — expanded its commitment to the campus with the endowment of three Mosher Chairs in Mechanical Engineering, investing in the talent and vision of department faculty. The inaugural Mosher Chairs are distinguished professor and UCSB chancellor emeritus Henry Yang, distinguished professor Francesco Bullo, and distinguished professor Igor Mezić.

“Endowed chairs provide an enormous benefit to our faculty, giving them the opportunity to pursue novel research projects, support graduate students, and expand their lab’s capabilities,” said Jeff Moehlis, the chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at The Robert Mehrabian School of Engineering. “We are grateful to Maggie Mosher and the Mosher Foundation for their long-standing support of our campus, and now, of these exceptional faculty members.”

Francesco Bullo

Bullo, who joined the department in 2004 and became a distinguished professor in 2022, said that he is grateful to the Mosher Foundation for its vision and its support of the Mosher Chair, and to Maggie Mosher’s continuing legacy of philanthropy that extends across the university and to education, healthcare, and arts organizations throughout Santa Barbara. “I’m also extremely thankful to my colleagues, for more than two decades of collegial faculty collaborations, to the staff, and to my graduate students, who have been with me on this great research adventure.”

The research adventure, for Bullo, has included modeling, dynamics, and control of multi-agent network systems — which has applications in robotic coordination, power systems, distributed computing, and social networks. A fellow of numerous research organizations, including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Bullo and colleagues from UCSB and six other institutions around the country recently received a five-year, $9 million grant to deepen and broaden this work in multi-agent network systems to applications in cognitive science, computing, and beyond. 

The endowment, he says, “is a recognition of the work of the past, but it will enable more new and exciting things in the future,” including expanded opportunities to support graduate students and visiting scholars, attend conferences, and extend his laboratory’s resources. “I look forward in future years to having additional flexibility and maybe even collaborating with my co-chair holders.”

Igor Mezić

Mezić, one of the founding members of UCSB’s Institute for Energy Efficiency, focuses his research on dynamical systems, which have applications in microfluidics and biological nanotechnology, and also allow Mezić and his colleagues to study larger-scale fluid systems such as highway traffic and oceanographic flow. A Fellow of IEEE, ASME, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the American Physical Society (APS), he has used his expertise to contribute to energy-efficient building design, including the design of UCSB’s Henley Hall, where his algorithms transform sensor data into significant energy savings. In 2021 he was awarded the J.D. Crawford Prize from SIAM, the top mid-career prize for the dynamical systems research community worldwide, awarded biennially.

“It is a great honor to receive the Mosher Endowed Chair in Mechanical Engineering,” Mezić said. “This appointment strengthens my commitment to advancing dynamical systems research and training for the next generation of engineers and scientists. I also view it as recognition of the growing importance of dynamical systems in solving complex problems across engineering and society.”

Henry Yang

Yang, the third Mosher Chair recipient and the longest-serving chancellor in UC history, has been involved in a wide range of research pursuits during his career, including aerospace engineering, structural dynamics, composite materials, finite elements, transonic aeroelasticity, wind and earthquake structural engineering, and intelligent manufacturing systems. He has authored or co-authored close to 200 papers for scientific journals, as well as a widely used textbook on finite element structural analysis. In April 2026, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of ASME, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the American Society for Engineering Education.

Yang currently collaborates with Paul Hansma, a professor emeritus of physics, to pioneer research on bio-inspired sensors and actuators for structural control. Such bio-inspired actuators are also being applied in passive control of aeroelastic flutter of aircraft wings and panels, even in the rare case of a power outage. 

He is also doing interdisciplinary research on the development of biofeedback devices to help relieve chronic pain, including developing and building devices that are then tested by leading chronic pain experts. In parallel, he is developing an experimental imaging method for quantifying subsurface deformation in soft materials under indentation. The approach uses digital image correlation to extract full-field internal strain data and represents a noteworthy methodological advance in experimental mechanics. These fundamental computational and experimental studies support investigation of the extent to which chronic pain can be quantified with physiological sensors. This research advances the field by demonstrating that physiological signals such as pulse, temperature, and motion — collected from multiple body sites — can be meaningfully correlated with chronic pain levels.