Dr. James “Dave” Cone offers a unique perspective to the College of Letters & Science Dean’s Advisory Council as a nontraditional alumnus of UC Davis. He began his career at IBM in Palo Alto and in 1984 started his own software company, Camstar Systems, Inc., which eventually grew to $25M per year in revenue and 250 employees and was later acquired by Siemens AG.

Dr. Cone was a Morehead Scholar and graduated in mathematics at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. He holds two master’s degrees: a Master of Science in operations research from Stanford University and a Master of Business Administration from UC Berkeley. Dr. Cone left Camstar in 2007 and moved to Davis to pursue a Ph.D. in physics, completing his degree in 2013 in condensed matter theory. He joined the Dean’s Advisory Council in 2017.