News Release

2018 student highlights

San Diego, CA, December 19, 2018 -- The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is home to 9,000 engineering and computer science students, each of whom make an indelible impact on our campus community and beyond through their class projects, extracurricular involvement and leadership efforts. This year was no exception. Here are just a handful of ways our students made an impact in 2018, with links to the full story:

 

The Jacobs School is #2 in the nation for bachelor’s degrees in engineering and computer science awarded to women, and #3 in the nation for bachelor’s degrees awarded in engineering and computer science overall, according to the American Society for Engineering Education data published in June 2018. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/about/rankings.sfe

 

 

 

Engineers showed up in force at the second annual Ignite Conference pitch competition at UC San Diego. Almost a third of the 29 startups pitching their innovative business ideas during the Entrepreneur Challenge elevator pitch competition were founded by engineers—including the first, second and third place winners. That’s right, it was an engineering clean sweep. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2498

 

Zhicong “Zack” Kong created a compostable, durable, and biodegradable fork and cutlery company that is unique for several reasons: the ingredients, a scalable manufacturing process and an innovative mold technology. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2542

 

 

 

Gopesh Tilvawala won the People’s Choice Award and 2^nd place overall at the Collegiate Inventors Competition for his work to develop a first-of-its-kind catheter that can be remotely controlled to navigate the tiny arteries in the brain, diagnosing and treating brain aneurysms. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2685

 

 

Ateios, a printable, stretchable and flexible battery startup, took home $50,000 and third place in the elevator pitch competition at the Rice Business Plan Competition. Ateios is the brainchild of a team of graduate and undergraduate students from nanoengineering Professors Shirley Meng and Joe Wang’s labs at the Jacobs School of Engineering. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2528

 

 

A team of 20 undergraduate students, most of them engineers, built a human-powered submarine and qualified to race it at the European International Submarine Races in England. A student, hooked up to oxygen, gets into the flooded 10-foot submarine and pedals it like a bicycle through an underwater slalom course. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2557

 

 

Students in UC San Diego’s chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) built a static rocket engine test stand and had a successful live fire test in the Mojave Desert. The test stand, called Colossus, is meant to make it easier for student groups and hobbyists to test their rocket engines, democratizing space research. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2569

 

 

Incoming freshman participating in the Summer Engineering Institute through the IDEA Center learned about helium-filled super pressure balloons. They launched two from Warren Mall, hoping they’d get picked up by the jet stream and travel 42,000 feet above Earth. https://www.facebook.com/UCSDJacobs/videos/895703310634530/

 

 

 

The Virtual Reality (VR) Club at UC San Diego organized and hosted HackXR, the university’s first virtual, augmented and mixed reality hackathon, planned and run entirely by undergraduate students. XR stands for extended reality, a catchall for virtual, augmented and mixed reality. The club hosted 100 students for the weekend-long hackathon full of tutorials, workshops, and time for teams to develop their own virtual, augmented or mixed reality project. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2488

 

Graduate students strengthened the community within the Association for Robotics Graduate Students. At their weekly seminar, graduate students from 16 departments across campus have given research talks. The idea is for students to be able to share their research and get feedback from people from other departments, schools and divisions. At the seminars, students also hear from speakers from industry and academia. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2500

 

Ten UC San Diego undergraduate students created a floor-ready, interactive museum exhibit in ten weeks, translating complicated research from Scripps Institution of Oceanography into an exhibit that is now installed at Birch Aquarium. It’s part of the Summer EnVision Experience (SEE), which brings together UC San Diego undergraduate students from multidisciplinary backgrounds to collaborate on a hands-on, real-world project from start to finish. The program is run by the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2668

 

Students learned about computer vision, machine learning, control systems, neural networks and tools like Python and TensorFlow by actually using them to build and test small autonomous vehicles. It’s part of the Introduction to Autonomous Vehicles hands-on engineering class. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2649

 

 

Students interned at companies around the country and world. In particular, students in the Field Study in Computer Science and Engineering course interned at 50 different companies, and shared what they learned at the Summer Internship Symposium.  https://www.uctv.tv/computer-science/search-details.aspx?showID=34076

 

 

Students working on Global Ties projects were selected to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative University. One of the teams that attended, One Village Philippines, designed and built an extremely affordable solar-powered lantern to provide not only light, but a source of income to their partner village in the Philippines. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2538

 

A team of 11 undergraduate students earned second place at the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) competition for their approach to creating an accurate liquid biopsy test for cancer. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2686

 

 

Aswini Krishnan, a fourth-year bioengineering major, was awarded a Winston Churchill Scholarship, one of the most prestigious and competitive awards available to American students pursuing science, mathematics and engineering fields. The award provides one year of funding to pursue a master’s degree at Winston Churchill College at the University of Cambridge. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2475

 

Seven UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering students were selected to receive the inaugural Galactic Unite Gavin Jones Prize, which recognizes undergraduate students at UC San Diego studying science, technology, engineering or math with a desire to make an impact on the space industry. The winners each receive a $1,500 cash prize, plus a mentor from either Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit or Thw Spaceship Company.  http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2663

 

Team TritonRoute won the 2018 Initial Detailed Routing Contest at the 22nd ACM International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD). ISPD is the premier forum for exchange of ideas and presentation of research on topics related to the physical design of very large-scale integrated circuits. The TritonRoute team consisted of Lutong Wang, a fourth-year Ph.D. student and Bangqi Xu, a third-year Ph.D. student, both from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=2524

 

UC San Diego’s Overwatch team, which includes two computer science students, battled their way through a pool of 318 teams to make it to the final four and the Fiesta Bowl Overwatch Collegiate National Championships. https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/feature/defenders-of-geisel-esports-team-gets-a-shot-at-national-title

 

Students took part in a variety of outreach events to engage and inspire the next generation of engineers. Many of the Jacobs School’s student organizations make outreach a component of their mission. A list of undergraduate engineering student organizations can be found here: http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/idea/studentlife/undergradorgs.shtml

Graduate student organizations are listed here: http://jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/idea/studentlife/gradorgs.shtml

 

Media Contacts

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Katherine Connor
Jacobs School of Engineering
858-534-8374
khconnor@ucsd.edu