Alumni News
2016 News Releases
Creating Clinical Bioengineers
December 8, 2016
In a clinical bioengineering class, students observe physicians, identify problems in their clinical practices, and propose engineering-based solutions to bridge the gap between the bench and the bedside. In some cases, students have even obtained funding to turn their solutions into reality. Full Story
UC San Diego Alum Wins Global Competition Aimed at Fighting Wildlife Trafficking
December 8, 2016
A new tool for fighting wildlife trafficking developed by a team led by a UC San Diego mechanical engineering alum has been selected as the overall winner of the inaugural global ‘Zoohackathon” sponsored by the U.S. Government’s Task Force on Combating Wildlife Trafficking.Called WildTrack, the new text-messaging system was developed by a team led by Nick Morozovsky, who received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from UC San Diego in 2014. Full Story
Free Coding Faire for Kids at UC San Diego Computer Science Department
December 5, 2016
A heads-up for alumni, staff and faculty of the University of California San Diego and other San Diegans with young kids: the university’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering will be the venue for a free Coding Faire that will introduce students from ages 7 to 12 to the joys of software programming through hands-on activities. The Coding Faire will take place on Sunday, December 11 from 10am to noon in the CSE building between Warren Mall and the landmark granite Bear statue in the Engineering Courtyard. The free event is being organized by ThoughtSTEM, a local computer-science education startup company co-founded by three UC San Diego students prior to completing their Ph.D. degrees: Sarah Guthals (Ph.D. ’14) and Steven Foster (Ph.D. ’15) in Computer Science, and Lindsey Handley (Ph.D. ’15) in Biochemistry. Full Story
A Conversation with ThoughtSTEM co-founder and co-author of Learning to Mod for Dummies, Sarah Guthals
December 5, 2016
When University of California San Diego alumna Sarah Guthals (Computer Science BS ’10, MS ’12, Ph.D. ’14) got into the pre-med program at UC San Diego, she thought she was prepared for a lot of hard work. Full Story
Alums Take on Emerging Field of Nanoscale Virtual Reality
December 1, 2016
Virtual reality (VR) headsets such as the Oculus Rift will line store shelves this holiday season, and UC San Diego alumni startup Nanome, Inc. plans to capitalize on that by creating VR apps for the consumer market, the classroom, and beyond. Full Story
Future NASA rovers could be sporting new gears, thanks to work by UC San Diego alumni
November 30, 2016
Moving a research lab can be a huge headache. Equipment needs to be dismantled. Experiments are put on pause. But for former UC San Diego materials science and engineering Ph.D. student Laura Andersen, her lab’s move opened up an exciting opportunity—a summer internship at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, better known as JPL, developing wear resistant gears for spacecraft. Full Story
Metallic Glass Gears Make for Graceful Robots
November 28, 2016
Douglass Hofmann, a 2004 University of California San Diego graduate from the Jacobs School of Engineering, is leading efforts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California to build better gears for robotics and spacecraft. Hofmann is the lead author of two recent papers on gears made from bulk metallic glass, a specially crafted alloy with properties that make it ideal for robotics and space applications. Full Story
Lead Engineer for Pokemon GO Nabbed Game-building Skills at UC San Diego
October 20, 2016
Next time you see someone playing Pokémon GO, the popular mobile-phone based game, keep this in mind: an engineer who graduated from UC San Diego leads the game’s technical team. Ed Wu, senior product manager at Niantic, the company that makes Pokémon GO, earned a bachelor’s degree from the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego in 2004. What he learned here is the basis of his success as an engineer, he said during a talk on campus Oct. 13. Full Story
Four UC San Diego Physician-engineer teams receive the 2016 Galvanizing Engineering in Medicine awards
October 12, 2016
Four physician-engineer teams from UC San Diego have been selected to receive the 2016 Galvanizing Engineering in Medicine (GEM) awards, which were created to bring engineers and clinicians together to develop innovative technology solutions to challenging problems in medical care. One engineer-physician team is developing battery-free wireless wearable sensors for sleep monitoring that could eventually be widely deployed at minimal cost. Full Story
Maker Faire San Diego: Celebrating 'Geekdom' of Every Stripe
September 29, 2016
It’s billed as “The Greatest Show (&Tell) on Earth,” and researchers from the University of California San Diego will once again be part of the spectacle as Maker Faire San Diego takes over Balboa Park. Full Story
UC San Diego's First Solar Car
September 29, 2016
During the summer of his third year at the University of California San Diego, electrical engineering major Ari Chatterji was taking classes and felt the need to get experience doing something more hands-on before his senior year. Full Story
EnVision Interns: The Power of Volunteer Student Teams for a Maker Space
September 23, 2016
LED lights in the shape of a 3D printer head light up the word “3D” in the window of the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio, visible to passersby. Besides being visually appealing, the display is also providing information: the speed of the animation increases depending on how many 3D printers are being used in the Maker Studio. Full Story
Engineer, Father, Philanthropist: Bhavin Shah
September 19, 2016
It was 1994, the Internet revolution was just getting started and California was on the forefront of innovation and technology. Bhavin Shah’s father and many of his friends had gone to UC Berkeley, but Shah chose to study computer science at UC San Diego. “I had friends that went through four years of undergraduate at other schools with very little contact with their professors. Once I saw the intimacy between the students and the engineering professors at UC San Diego, I knew that was the place for me.” Full Story
UC San Diego Gearing Up for Major Hackathon
September 16, 2016
The University of California San Diego will host over 1,000 students at SD Hacks 2016 for 36 hours of technological collaboration. This will be the second time SD Hacks will take place at UC San Diego. The student-led hackathon is one of the largest in California, along with those of UC Berkeley and UCLA. After a successful inaugural hackathon in 2015, thousands of students from all over the world have applied to attend this year’s event. Full Story
UC San Diego Alum Defining the Future of Movies with New Mobile Ticketing Platform
September 14, 2016
Ameesh Paleja, a 2001 University of California San Diego graduate of with a bachelor’s in computer science and engineering, is revolutionizing the movie industry with Atom Tickets, where he serves as CEO and co-founder. Recently launched, Atom Tickets is a first-of-its-kind theatrical mobile ticketing platform and app, allowing moviegoers to skip lines by preordering tickets and concessions, and invite their friends without having to pay for their tickets via its social invitation features. Full Story
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Coming Full Circle: An Engineer's Journey to Entrepreneurship
August 26, 2016
Ben Pouladian (BS, Electrical Engineering, ’04) was always a tinkerer. With small business owners for parents, he also learned to work hard. He wanted to challenge himself in college, so he set his sights on engineering. Full Story
Startup Founded by UC San Diego Alumni Receives $750,000 NSF Small Business Grant
August 2, 2016
The U.S. National Science Foundation has announced it is awarding $750,000 Small Business Innovation Research grant to Thought STEM, a startup founded by alumni of the University of California San Diego in 2012. The award will allow the company to accelerate the development of its Minecraft modding and computer science education software, LearnToMod. Full Story
Big ideas that solve problems
July 12, 2016
On June 2, Daniel Kaufman spoke about Google ATAP at the launch event for the UC San Diego Institute for the Global Entrepreneur, a collaboration between the Jacobs School of Engineering and Rady School of Management. Full Story
Engineers Launch Cross-Border Center to Create Materials that Withstand Extreme Environments
June 3, 2016
The CaliBaja Center for Resilient Materials and Systems officially launched May 24, 2016 during a ceremony featuring academics, officials and industry representatives from both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The center brings together researchers from UC San Diego, the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and also the Center for Scientific Research and Higher Education, headquartered in Ensenada. Full Story
No. 1 From the Start
May 26, 2016
Bioengineers at the University of California San Diego have helped us understand why atherosclerosis develops and how it is impacted by blood flow. They have pioneered the development of very thin, small and flexible sensors that stick to the skin and monitor vital signs, such as the brain activity of a newborn. They also developed injectable hydrogels that can help muscle tissues heal after a heart attack. Researchers celebrated their achievements over the past five decades and looked to the future during a three-day 50th anniversary celebration May 19 to 21. Full Story
Alumna named first chief distinguished scientist for SPAWAR center
May 4, 2016
Wadad Dubbelday, a physicist and electrical engineer with a 35-year career at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific was selected as the center’s first Chief Distinguished Scientist. In this role, she will also serve as the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) Deputy Chief Technology Officer, further developing the command’s science and technology portfolio and working to improve technology transition. Full Story
Former Cyber Security Grad Students Seal $3 Million Deal for Drone Security Venture
April 25, 2016
Grant Jordan and Paul Wicks (M.S. ’14) are former students in the master's program in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California San Diego. In 2015, they co-created a security-related company called SkySafe to protect organizations from illegal or dangerous incursions from commercial drones and their owners. Now, one of the top venture-capital firms in Silicon Valley, Andreessen Horowitz, has agreed to lead a $3 million investment in the fledgling company.After earning his undergraduate degree in computer science at MIT and testing anti-drone technology at the Air Force Research Lab, Jordan enrolled at UC San Diego to focus on computer security and its potential. While working in the lab of CSE Prof. Stefan Savage, Jordan and Wicks co-founded their first startup -- an IT-security consulting firm called Somerset Recon. But with the rapid proliferation of commercial drone technology, it became clear that airspace security offered a huge potential market if Jordan and Wicks could come up with the right solution. Full Story
Stretchable, flexible, wearable solar cells take top prize at Research Expo 2016
April 18, 2016
Solar cells that are stretchable, flexible and wearable won the day and the best poster award from a pool of 215 at Research Expo 2016 April 14 at the University of California San Diego. The winning nanoengineering researchers aim to manufacture small, flexible devices that can power watches, LEDs and wearable sensors. The ultimate goal is to design and build much bigger flexible solar cells that could be used as power sources and shelter in natural disasters and other emergencies. Full Story
Record-breaking steel could be used for body armor, shields for satellites
April 4, 2016
A team of engineers has developed and tested a type of steel with a record-breaking ability to withstand an impact without deforming permanently. The new steel alloy could be used in a wide range of applications, from drill bits, to body armor for soldiers, to meteor-resistant casings for satellites. The material is an amorphous steel alloy, a promising subclass of steel alloys made of arrangements of atoms that deviate from steel’s classical crystal-like structure, where iron atoms occupy specific locations. Full Story
Lasers could make the Internet faster and cleaner
March 9, 2016
Researchers at UC San Diego think they might have found the way to faster internet: lasers. "As we are trying to fit more and more data on wires that we send from place to place, we are running up against the limit of what electricity can do," said Janelle Shane, an alumna of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Full Story
UC San Diego Alumna Speaks to the Power of the Individual Contributor
February 24, 2016
University of California, San Diego alumna and Cisco Greengineer Shraddha Chaplot never imagined she’d be where she is now – an engineer at a tech giant and an inspirational speaker, recently featured in Vogue India as a Silicon Valley Girl. Full Story
UC San Diego Electrical Engineering Professor Gabriel Rebeiz Elected to National Academy of Engineering
February 11, 2016
In order to get internet service to airline passengers five or six miles up in the air, airlines mount antenna systems to the tops of their planes. The systems are bulky and generate drag which reduces fuel efficiency. In the next five years or so, electronically steered antennas that are lighter, generate less drag and are more reliable will replace today’s mechanically driven airplane internet systems. Advances in the development of these types of arrays of electronically steered antennas, known as phased arrays, are part of what earned electrical engineering professor Gabriel Rebeiz at the University of California, San Diego a spot in the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), one of the highest professional honors an engineer can receive. Full Story
Seeing where energy goes may bring scientists closer to realizing nuclear fusion
January 14, 2016
An international team of researchers has taken a step toward achieving controlled nuclear fusion—a process that powers the Sun and other stars, and has the potential to supply the world with limitless, clean energy. The team, led by scientists and engineers at the University of California, San Diego and General Atomics, developed a new technique to “see” where energy is delivered during a process called fast ignition, which is an approach to initiate nuclear fusion reactions using a high-intensity laser. Visualizing the energy flow enabled researchers to test different ways to improve energy delivery to the fuel target in their experiments. Full Story
Alumni Spotlight: Q&A with Mary Bui-Pham (Chemical Engineering, PhD '92)
January 13, 2016
When Mary Bui-Pham completed her PhD in Chemical Engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, she never dreamed she’d be the Chief-of-Staff for a division of Yahoo!, Inc. Learn about her career path and her role at Yahoo! in this Q&A. Full Story
Brain monitoring takes a leap out of the lab
January 12, 2016
Bioengineers and cognitive scientists have developed the first portable, 64-channel wearable brain activity monitoring system that’s comparable to state-of-the-art equipment found in research laboratories. The researchers are working toward a world where neuroimaging systems work with mobile sensors and smart phones to track brain states throughout the day and augment the brain’s capabilities. Full Story
Move Over, Droids
January 8, 2016
Meet the real-life robots of UC San Diego, leading the way for a world of robot helpers, teachers, maybe even friends. Full Story