Dean's message
SPEC-tacular News
February 2024
|
I have SPEC-tacular news to share! The world-class researchers in our Sustainable Power and Energy Center (SPEC) have inspired entrepreneur and philanthropist Aiiso Yufeng Li (Jeff) and Dongdong Guo (Doreen) to make a very generous gift. Their philanthropy will accelerate the sustainable-energy research being done at SPEC and also strengthen our ability to empower UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering startups to bring their innovations to society. Li is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the biotechnology company CorDx, a leader in the manufacturing of in vitro diagnostics with an important footprint here in San Diego. In recognition of this wonderful gift, we have named the research collaboratory in Franklin Antonio Hall that houses SPEC the “CorDx Yufeng Li Collaboratory.” Jeff and Doreen, please accept my most sincere thanks!!!
I also have spectacular news! I’m thrilled to announce that we just doubled the size of our Accelerating Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations for Early-Career Faculty program. The big-picture goal of the program is to help early-career faculty build interdisciplinary research collaborations to the point that they are competitive for multi-year research funding. And the support for the early-career faculty comes in an unexpected way: we fund one graduate student from each of the two collaborating labs. That’s the magic: we give faculty a bit of breathing room and graduate students a unique project-building experience. By funding two students from different labs, we create new opportunities to build promising cross-disciplinary research collaborations. The big goal is to advance these teams to the point that they are competitive for external team-research funding.
SPEC-tacular and spectacular. That’s how I describe our collective efforts to accelerate engineering and computer science for the public good. That’s how we make bold possible here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and all across campus. Let’s do this, and do this together!
Read our full February 2024 news email here or read it as a PDF.
As always, I can be reached at DeanPisano@ucsd.edu
Sincerely,
Al
Albert ("Al") P. Pisano
Dean, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Special Adviser to the Chancellor for Campus Strategic Initiatives