Ducks in the Bay

The University of Oregon Alumni Association is heading back to San Francisco as a sponsor of the university’s Ducks in the Bay event. Join us for an engaging afternoon at the iconic Olympic Club featuring a series of interviews with esteemed members of the UO community.

This year’s program includes:

• President Karl Scholz, sharing an overview of the UO’s academic achievements over the past year
• Beth Plale and Ram Durairajan discussing the impact of the UO’s new School of Computer and Data Science
• Coach Dan Lanning and Athletic Director Rob Mullens reflecting on cultivating team culture and excellence in the evolving landscape of college football

Secure your place at this exclusive event, and be a part of the conversations that define UO’s culture, innovation, and community. 

John Karl Scholz

John Karl Scholz is the 19th president of the University of Oregon. He began his tenure on July 1, 2023, after the UO Board of Trustees unanimously selected him as president on March 13, 2023.

Prior to joining the UO, Scholz was the provost at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a position he had held since August of 2019. While at UW-Madison he also served as the dean of the College of Letters & Science from 2013 to 2019. He joined the university’s department of economics in 1988 and was later named the Nellie June Gray Professor of Economic Policy. He directed the Institute for Research on Poverty at UW–Madison from 2000–2004.

Scholz served in two presidential administrations. From 1990 to 1991 he was a senior staff economist at the Council of Economic Advisors, and from 1997 to 1998 he served as deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis at the US Department of the Treasury.

Scholz is an internationally respected economist who writes on diverse topics including household saving, the earned income tax credit, low-wage labor markets, financial barriers to higher education, and bankruptcy laws. His research has appeared in leading general interest economics journals.

He earned his economics undergraduate degree from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and his PhD from Stanford University.    

Dan Lanning

Dan Lanning was officially announced as Oregon's 35th head football coach on December 11, 2021. Athletic Director Rob Mullens brought one of college football’s brightest young coaches and top defensive minds to Eugene to lead the Ducks. 

Lanning has led Oregon to a terrific 35-6 overall record while posting double-digit wins in each of his first three seasons. He owns the most wins by any Oregon head coach through his first three seasons, and his 36 wins since 2022 rank third among all Football Subdivision head coaches. In his first season as the Ducks’ head coach, he led Oregon to a 10-3 record and a win over North Carolina in the Holiday Bowl. Lanning became the third Oregon head coach to win 10 games in his first season, and the first since Mark Helfrich in 2013. The Ducks took another step forward under Lanning in 2023, going 12-2 overall with an appearance in the final Pac-12 Championship Game and a win over Liberty in the Fiesta Bowl.

Lanning improved to 22-5 through his first two seasons in Eugene and became just the second Oregon head coach to win each of his first two bowl game appearances. He led the Ducks to a historic season in 2024, as Oregon went undefeated in the regular season before winning the Big Ten Championship in its first year in the conference. The UO earned the No. 1 seed in the newly-expanded 12-team College Football Playoff while matching the program record with 13 wins. Lanning joined Chip Kelly as the only Oregon head coaches ever to post back-to-back 12-win seasons.    

Rob Mullens

Rob Mullens, a highly respected leader in collegiate athletics, is entering his 16th academic year as the University of Oregon's athletic director. Under his guidance, Oregon Athletics has reached unprecedented heights, marked by 18 NCAA national championships during his tenure and the school's best-ever finishes in the National Association of College Directors of Athletics (NACDA) Directors' Cup—9th in 2016–17 and 10th in 2015–16. These two top-10 finishes are the only ones in Oregon's history, with the Ducks finishing in the top 25 nationally for a school-record seven consecutive years from 2012 to 2018. Mullens's leadership has ensured consistent excellence, with Oregon being a top 30 program in 14 of the last 15 years. 

One of Mullens's most significant achievements is leading the University of Oregon into the Big Ten Conference. On August 2, 2023, Oregon officially joined the Big Ten, positioning the Ducks for future success and ensuring that UO student-athletes continue competing at the highest levels. This move highlighted the strength of the Oregon brand and reflected the university's upward trajectory across academics and athletics. In the first year in the Big Ten, Oregon won eight conference championships, the most in the Big Ten in 2024–25, and a school record for conference titles in any academic year. 

In December 2025, the National Football Foundation presented Mullens with the John L. Toner Award, recognizing his superior administrative abilities and outstanding dedication to college athletics, particularly college football.

Beth Plale

Beth Plale is the executive director of the School of Computer and Data Sciences at the University of Oregon. Prior to coming to the UO, Plale was at Indiana University Bloomington where she held the Michael A and Laurie Burns McRobbie Bicentennial Chair in Computer Engineering, spent two years as the Chair of the Department of Intelligent Systems Engineering, and several years as the executive director of the Pervasive Technology Institute.

Plale is a computational and data scientist whose research interests are in software, hardware, and governance infrastructure for AI, high performance computing, open science, provenance and reproducibility, AI ethics, and data accountability.

Plale is a co-principal investigator of the US National Science Foundation (NSF) Intelligent Cyberinfrastructure for Computation in the Environment AI Institute. She served at the NSF as a science advisor in open science from 2017 to 2022. She is a founder of the international Research Data Alliance consortium, the Center of Excellence for Women and Technology at Indiana University, and the HathiTrust Research Center. Plale received the distinguished US Department of Energy Early Career award and is a senior member of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers professional societies.    

Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan 

Ramakrishnan (Ram) Durairajan is an associate professor in the School of Computer and Data Sciences and co-directs the Oregon Networking Research Group at the University of Oregon. Ram earned his PhD and MS in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his BTech in information technology from the College of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University.

Ram leads a team of talented graduate and undergraduate students in federal, university, and industry research projects totaling over $5 million. He has published over 75 peer-reviewed papers in various conferences, journals, and workshops. His research has been recognized with several awards including the NSF CAREER award, NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering Research Initiation Initiative award, Ripple Faculty Fellowship, UO Faculty Research Award, UO Golden Egg Innovator Award, and best paper awards from ACM CoNEXT and ACM SIGCOMM GAIA. His work has been featured by The New York Times, MIT Technology Review, Popular Science, Boston Globe, Gizmodo, and Mashable, among others. Recently, Ram's research on internet topology was used in the Federal Communication Commission's Spectrum Frontiers 2d Report and Order and won "Best of What's New" in the security category by Popular Science.

Ram routinely serves as a technical advisor and consultant for startups and companies on a wide variety of networking and cybersecurity issues, including network monitoring and analytics, network data science, cloud networking, secure network architectures, among others.