Thanassis Rikakis named new dean of USC Iovine and the Young Academy

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Thanassis Rikakis, an educator and researcher who has dedicated his career to removing barriers between academic disciplines, has been selected as the new Dean of USC Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young Academy.

Rikakis comes to USC from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, where he is a professor of bioengineering and performing arts. Rikakis, who served as executive vice president and rector at Virginia Tech, is the university’s founding director of innovative transdisciplinary honor programs and adaptive lifelong learning programs. He was also co-leader of the Interactive Rehabilitation Lab, which develops interactive computer programs and semi-automatic assessment methodologies to help individual patients rehabilitate in a clinic or at home.

As a musician and engineer, Rikakis has enhanced convergent research and educational opportunities so that both students and faculty can build intellectual muscles that position them for discovery and innovation. He led convergent research and educational initiatives first as founder of Arizona State University’s School of Arts, Media and Engineering and later as vice president of design, arts and technology at Carnegie Mellon University.

Throughout his career, Thanassis Rikakis has been passionate about connecting creativity and technology and seeing the overlap between different disciplines, from the arts to engineering, said USC President Carol L. Folt. As a musician, engineer and educator, he blotted out the lines that separated academic disciplines through his spirit of reimagination. This spirit aligns directly with the academy’s mission at the intersection of art, entrepreneurship, technology and communication.

Creating a space for people to learn differently will be an important goal for education in the 21st century.

Thanassis Rikakis

A researcher in systems design, engineering and art, Rikakis is the author of publications on computer science, health, education and design.

Technology, design and business creation are being integrated in new ways at the Iovine and Young Academy, said Chancellor Charles Zukoski. Dr. Rikakis has a vision on how these areas can be merged to create distinct educational pathways critical to the success of the academy and the future of higher education.

Founded in 2013 with a gift from Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young, USC Iovine and the Young Academy for Arts, Technology and the Business of Innovation became the university’s newest professional school in 2018. Its undergraduate courses focus on art and design, business, technology and communications.

I am really excited to participate in such a well-structured and forward-thinking initiative, said Rikakis, which will start at USC on August 23. Creating a space for people to learn differently will be an important goal for education in the 21st century, both at the university level and at the high school level. These people can act as catalysts for how we expand the vocabulary of knowledge.

The new dean of USC Iovine and the Young Academy supports the progressive search for knowledge

The new dean credits academy founders Jimmy Iovine and Andre Young, as well as his predecessor Erica Muhl and the USC, for creating a forward-thinking space like no other in higher education. Muhl, who was inaugural dean and founding executive director, has shaped the Academy’s curriculum, which combines interdisciplinary collaboration with hands-on learning. University leaders also announced that Willow Bay, dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, will also serve as the academy’s acting dean. Bay has led USC Annenberg as principal since 2017.

It’s great to be in a university that has created a community for math experts, so we don’t have to be immigrating through silos, Rikakis said. It is extraordinary that as early as 2013, USC and the founders said: There is a different way to approach knowledge, we can do it. Thanks to that kind of progressive openness, areas of human intelligence have been discovered that have been somewhat overlooked, which will allow us as a society to do better with collaboration, connecting different kinds of knowledge and different kinds of people.

Born in Greece, Rikakis underwent an art-centered education in the UK before earning his bachelor’s degree in music composition from Ithaca College. He received postgraduate degrees in music composition from Columbia University, where he became an assistant adjunct professor of music.

Many of us who made music in the 1980s and 1990s, when personal computers and digital media began to grow, were in a unique position to humanize computer knowledge and then link it to education, said Rikakis, who is was associate director of the Columbias Computer Music Center in the late 1990s. Anyone who learns music learns logical structures, mathematical structures, and communication structures that can be applied to any field if you can figure out how to transfer that knowledge.

It is the community that makes us aware of what is needed next, and we were expressing it.

Thanassis Rikakis

In 2015, he joined Virginia Tech to focus on transdisciplinary learning and research, as well as expansion plans for the Virginia Tech Carilion Health Sciences and Technology campus. He went on to found the Calhoun Honors Discovery program, created thanks to an important gift from Boeing’s CEO. The program is an interdisciplinary collaborative initiative that combines industry and academic experience and offers full scholarships to those who have been accepted. As director of the Calhoun Center for Higher Educational Innovation, he has developed methodologies and tools to promote inclusive and adaptive lifelong learning.

The academic world has achieved significant advances in knowledge through the targeted approach of disciplines. But the integration of different disciplines, different approaches, is where many future advances in human intelligence would be seen, Rikakis said. Solving complex problems across many interacting dimensions is something computers cannot do well because these processes are not analytical or deterministic. They are really highly probabilistic decision-making spaces that they require [unique human ability] summarize the difference.

Rikakis was drawn to USC in part because of its place in the center of one of the most culturally vibrant cities in the world. He plays piano, trumpet and recorder and has written 30 compositions. Music is the connective tissue that binds the academic character of a man whose expertise spans many disciplines. He attributes to the composer Olivier Messiaen, with whom Rikakis attended composition seminars decades ago, a philosophy of collective genius.

One of the students at a seminar asked: How do you become an original creator? and Messiaen said: There are no original creators. We are all gifted transmitters and receivers, Rikakis said. It changed my life because you walk away from this idea of ​​individual genius. It is the community that makes us aware of what is needed next and that expresses this forward movement and the creation of a more equitable, inclusive and sustainable society.

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