Guest & Host Biographies

Pamir Alpay

Pamir Alpay serves as the Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Connecticut (UConn) where he oversees the University’s $375 million research enterprise at UConn’s main campus in Storrs, UConn Health in Farmington, the School of Law in Hartford, and UConn’s four regional campuses. UConn is a national research leader in energy, genomics, health behavior, cybersecurity, manufacturing, materials science, and neuroscience. UConn’s expansive research enterprise yields discoveries and innovations that contribute significantly to the economy, environmental sustainability, public health, and quality of life.

Prior to his appointment as vice president, he served as executive director of the UConn Tech Park, where he was the University’s chief advocate for industry-informed research and its primary liaison between the research community and government collaborators. In this role he established partnerships with industry, state government, and federal agencies resulting in investments of more than $300 million for applied research. Alpay also established partnerships with small to medium-size regional businesses as part of core outreach efforts, critical to UConn’s mission of supporting economic growth in the state.

Dr. Alpay is also a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of materials science & engineering and physics. Alpay’s research is at the intersection of materials science, condensed matter physics, and surface chemistry. As an investigator, Alpay has raised more than $45 million for research and development from federal and state agencies and industry. Dr. Alpay has served as PI and co-PI of a multi-year $28 million interdisciplinary Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) contract dedicated to optimization of high value-added manufacturing technologies for aerospace components. Dr. Alpay holds the rank of Fellow of the American Physical Society, ASM International, and the American Ceramic Society, and he is an elected member of the Connecticut Academy of Science & Engineering (CASE). He has authored over 200 peer-reviewed journal publications and conference proceedings, five invited book chapters, and a book on the physics of functionally graded smart materials.

Alpay earned his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from the University of Maryland and his B.S. and M.S. from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.

Michael Crair

Michael Crair is Vice Provost for Research and the William Ziegler III Professor in the
Departments of Neuroscience and Ophthalmology & Visual Science. As Vice Provost for
Research, he has University-wide oversight over research strategy, planning, policies and
administration, research infrastructure and core facilities, including Yale’s West Campus,
technology transfer and engagement with public and private sponsors of research. He works to
encourage and broadly support research at Yale, innovative interdisciplinary scholarship,
entrepreneurship, innovation, and enable groundbreaking discoveries across all schools and
departments at the university. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the E. Matilda Ziegler
Foundation for the Blind, Inc. and the Dan Lewis Foundation for Brain Regeneration Research.

Dr. Crair obtained his doctoral degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley,
and did postdoctoral training in physics and neuroscience at Kyoto University and Kyoto
Prefectural Medical School in Japan and in neuroscience at the University of California, San
Francisco. He was a faculty member at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, before
joining Yale as a member of the Department of Neuroscience in 2007. He has directed Yale’s
Vision Core Program, the Graduate Program in Neurobiology and was Deputy Chair of the
Department of Neuroscience until 2017, then Deputy Dean for Scientific Affairs (Basic Science
Departments) at the School of Medicine before becoming Vice Provost for Research at Yale
University in 2020.

Dr. Crair’s research program develops and employs advanced imaging techniques to examine the
basic mechanisms that mediate brain circuit plasticity, development and regeneration, with a
focus on the mammalian visual system. He has made fundamental contributions to our
understanding of neural activity in the developing brain, for instance by demonstrating that early
spontaneous neuronal activity is an essential part of normal brain development. He is currently
exploring the mechanisms by which this activity is generated and how it shapes brain circuit
development. He has been awarded numerous honors for his research and teaching, including the
Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Foundation Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences, the Marc
Dresden Excellence in Graduate Education Award, and a NARSAD-Sidney R. Baer Jr.
Foundation Young Investigator Award. He has also been named an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Research Fellow, a John Merck Fund Scholar and the March of Dimes Foundation’s Basil
O’Connor Fellow. His research is funded by the National Eye Institute, the National Institute of
Mental Health and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National
Institutes of Health.

Host, Tanimu Deleon

Tanimu Deleon has a BS, and MS in Computer Engineering, and a PhD. in Biomedical Engineering.  Dr. Deleon has well over a decade of experience in research and development, information technology, submarine design & manufacturing, sustainable investments, and human factors. Dr. Deleon is a Principal Engineer and Technical Lead for Human Factors Engineering and Warfighter Performance at General Dynamics Electric Boat. In this capacity Deleon works across various disciplines to ensure the human element is factored into the boats design.