Undergraduate News
2008 News Releases
ARCS Foundation Gives UC San Diego Science, Engineering and Medical Students $3 MIllion in Scholarships
December 17, 2008
The United States is a worldwide leader in science and technology, but it is predicted that foreign countries will soon outpace our nation unless we become more competitive in science education. With Europe and China graduating more university-educated engineers and scientists on a yearly basis than the United States, the ARCS Foundation, Inc. is dedicated to facilitating the graduation rate of as many elite scholars as possible. Full Story
Hands-on Engineering Design Course Presentations: Monitoring Heart Rate Variability and More
December 15, 2008
ECE 191, Engineering Group Design Project, is an upper-division class that provides undergraduate students with hands-on experience working in a team to design, build, demonstrate and document an open-ended engineering project. Full Story
Calit2 Inventor Creates Estimating Calculator to Help Hone Students' Math Skills
December 12, 2008
QAMA, or Quick Approximate Mental Arithmetic, is a new kind of calculator designed and developed by Ilan Samson, an "inventor-in-residence" at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego. Full Story
Intro to Computer Programming Gets a Makeover
December 8, 2008
UC San Diego undergrads taking an intro-to-computer-programming course put on a campus art show recently. The art? Glossy collages that pairs of students created as a week-four homework assignment for Beth Simon’s CSE8A class Full Story
UC San Diego Engineers Work to Make Historic Buildings Safer During Strong Earthquakes
November 25, 2008
Recent simulated earthquake tests conducted by UC San Diego engineers are expected to lead to retrofit schemes that make historic buildings safer. The structural engineers tested a structure similar to those that were built in California in the 1920s that have masonry-infilled walls and reinforced concrete frames. Full Story
San Diego Universities, Government and Industry Rally Around Local Clean-Tech Cluster
November 5, 2008
San Diego professors who are developing technologies that will fuel the continued growth of the region’s “clean tech cluster” recently received a financial boost through the 2008 Clean Tech Innovation Challenge. Full Story
Chemical Engineering Student Wins Library Research Prize
November 4, 2008
Steven Shimizu, a chemical engineering undergrad is among the four undergraduate students at the University of California, San Diego who recently received the 2008 Undergraduate Library Research Prize for their outstanding research skills. Full Story
Keys Can be Copied From Afar, Jacobs School Computer Scientists Show
October 30, 2008
UC San Diego computer scientists have built a software program that can perform key duplication without having the key. Instead, the computer scientists only need a photograph of the key. Full Story
Microsoft Leader, Craig Mundie, Connects with UC San Diego
October 14, 2008
Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, visited UC San Diego on Friday to meet with faculty and students and share his vision of where technology is moving. Full Story
Ripple Effect: Water Snails Offer New Propulsion Possibilities
October 8, 2008
A UC San Diego engineer has revealed a new mode of propulsion based on how water snails create ripples of slime to crawl upside down beneath the surface. Full Story
MAE Undergrad Goes Nano and Makes the Cut
September 15, 2008
Michael Clark, an aerospace engineering major at the Jacobs School, joined Calit2’s Nano3 Cleanroom Facility staff last year and became one of the dozens of undergraduate student engineers and researchers at the UCSD division of Calit2. Full Story
UC San Diego Engineers Part of Nationwide Effort to Make Buildings Earthquake Safe
August 20, 2008
Engineering researchers from UC San Diego and the University of Arizona have concluded three months of rigorous earthquake simulation tests on a half-scale three-story structure, and will now begin sifting through their results so they can be used in the future designs of buildings across the nation. Full Story
UC San Diego-based iBotics Team Competes in Underwater Unmanned Vehicle Competition
August 12, 2008
The San Diego iBotics team, led by Electrical and Computer Engineering Ph.D. student Gideon Prior and populated primarily by students from the Jacobs School, got "cool points" for its sleek, biomimetic "Stingray" craft at last week's annual competition of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. Full Story
Images for 3D Video Games Without High Price Tags or Stretch Marks
August 11, 2008
The images of rocks, clouds, marble and other textures that serve as background images and details for 3D video games are often hand painted and thus costly to generate. A breakthrough from a UC San Diego computer science undergraduate now offers video game developers the possibility of high quality yet lightweight images for 3D video games that are generated “on the fly” and are free of stretch marks, flickering and other artifacts. Full Story
Bioengineering Undergrad Explores Other Side of World
July 22, 2008
A bioengineering undergraduate documents her experiences as a summer researcher in New Zealand. Full Story
UC San Diego Launches Institute of Engineering in Medicine to Accelerate Innovative Health Care Technologies
July 21, 2008
The world’s top engineers, physicians and scientists are joining forces to conceptualize, develop and bring to reality the future tools and treatments of 21st century health care through UC San Diego’s new Institute of Engineering in Medicine. Full Story
UC San Diego Undergraduates Forge New Area of Bioinformatics
July 2, 2008
Undergraduate students from the University of California San Diego have forged a new area of bioinformatics that may improve genomic and proteomic annotations and unlock a collection of stubborn biological mysteries. Their work will be published in the July 2008 issue of the journal Genome Research. Full Story
Jacobs School Ring Ceremony 2008
June 20, 2008
More than 350 graduating seniors from the Jacobs School participated in the annual Ring Ceremony on Saturday, June 14. Full Story
Rise in Student Mental Health Challenges Prompts Campus Initiative to Help
June 18, 2008
About 60 UC San Diego faculty and staff attended a panel discussion on May 27 titled “Helping Students with Emotional Difficulties,” which was sponsored by the Jacobs School of Engineering. Violent incidents involving students at Northern Illinois University, Virginia Tech and other university campuses have prompted UC San Diego to address the issue of how to identify and assist students in emotional distress. Full Story
ViaSat-Sponsored ECE 191 Project Takes Engineering Design Course Honor
June 18, 2008
A team of electrical engineering students in ECE 191, sponsored by ViaSat, was singled out as the spring quarter's best project for developing a mobile broadcast system for the chase-vehicles that accompany bicyclists iin the Race Across America. Full Story
Physics of Surfing Class Introduces Students to Research
June 16, 2008
A class titled “The Physics of Surfing” is co-taught by Professor David Sandwell at UCSD’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Professor Stefan Llewellyn Smith at the Jacobs School of Engineering's Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Full Story
UCSD Computer Science Undergraduates Showcase Multiplayer Online Games at Calit2
June 10, 2008
An SRO crowd of more than 250 students packed into the Calit2 Auditorium at UCSD to watch and play networked, multiplayer 3-D video games designed from scratch by four teams of computer-science students. Full Story
UC San Diego Entrepreneurship, May Madness and the Final Five
May 30, 2008
On Saturday May 31, 2008, five UC San Diego teams – including two from the Jacobs School of Engineering – will compete for $50,000 in cash prizes in a completely-student-run business plan competition called the UCSD $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. Full Story
UC San Diego Unveils Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics
May 29, 2008
Cymer Inc. has provided major sponsorship of a novel educational and research program at UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering designed to train engineers to improve the performance of wide variety of industrial products and processes. The new Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics (CCSD), which will educate many of the finest students in the country in the field of controls, is designed to put UC San Diego’s Jacobs School on the fast track to industry partnerships in numerous high tech arenas. Full Story
Mad Dash for Trash, Then Junkyard Derby Bash
May 20, 2008
It's Junkyard Derby week at UC San Diego. The junkyard opens on Wednesday night, May 21 at 7:30 pm, and the races start on Friday at 11:30 AM. Full Story
ECE 191 Design Teams Report Progress on Projects Funded by Calit2 and Other Sponsors
April 6, 2008
A project adding two-way wireless audio capability to a remote-controlled vehicle called Gizmo -- designed for disaster response communication -- was awarded best project of the winter quarter ECE 191 team engineering design course when the students made their final presentations. Full Story
Alumni Association Recognizes Engineering Student
April 2, 2008
The UCS San Diego Alumni Association gave its Outstanding Senior Award to Jeffrey Mounzer, president of the Triton Engineering Student Council and a Warren College student graduating with a double major in Electrical Engineering and Economics. Full Story
Need New Look? Online Makeover is fan-taaz-tic
March 18, 2008
Thanks to a Jacobs School startup company whose site, Taaz.com went live today, the cosmetics counter isn't the only place to try out the latest makeup trends. The new way is easier, faster, and much more private. Anyone with a digital photograph can now apply more than 4,000 makeup products with the click of a mouse. It's all at www.taaz.com - the creation of two Jacobs School computer scientists turned entrepreneurs. The site went live on March 18. Full Story
Hopping Robot Captures Top Research Expo Honor
February 22, 2008
The two-wheeled robot called “iHop” developed by Christopher M. Schmidt-Wetekam, a Ph.D. candidate in the Jacobs School’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, won top honors at the Jacobs School of Engineering’s annual Research Expo on Feb. 21. Full Story
National Engineers Week at UCSD
February 12, 2008
They say that everyday should be Mothers Day. Considering how crucial technology is for everything we do from communication and banking, to environmental sustainability and health care, everyday should also be Engineers Day. Nevertheless, Feb 18-22 is the one week out of the year that is carved out as National Engineers Week – and the students at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering took part in a big way. Full Story
UCSD Undergraduates Apply for Hands-on Summer Research Jobs
February 6, 2008
More than two dozen UCSD undergraduate students, many from the Jacobs School, will get the chance next summer to work in labs affiliated with the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). And they'll get paid in the process. Full Story