Undergraduate News
2012 News Releases
UC San Diego Campus on Display as Living Laboratory at Engineers for a Sustainable World Conference
October 11, 2012
About a hundred students from across the nation will converge on the UC San Diego campus Oct. 19 to 21 for the eighth annual Engineers for a Sustainable World national conference. The event brings together student leaders from the organization’s 31 chapters, experts and professionals to discuss engineering solutions and strategies to solve pressing environmental and socioeconomic problems. Full Story
Jay Kunin to Lead Moxie Center for Undergraduate Entrepreneurship
October 11, 2012
The Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego announced that Jay Kunin has joined the Jacobs School as the inaugural director of the new Moxie Center for undergraduate entrepreneurship. Kunin has had a long career as an entrepreneur, executive, investor and director of technology startups. Full Story
New Server Cooling Technology Deployed in Pilot Program at Calit2
September 19, 2012
The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego has become the inaugural test site for a new approach to cooling computer servers – a technology that could improve energy efficiency and enable higher-performance computing. Full Story
Engineers, Visual Artists and Medical Device Researchers Work Large and Small in New UC San Diego Building
September 5, 2012
Making buildings and bridges safer during earthquakes. Printed 3-D blood vessels and capillaries for regenerative medicine. Safer cardiac pumps for children born with heart defects. Giant art collections sorted with a click. Better composite materials for aircraft. In the new Structural and Materials Engineering building at the University of California, San Diego engineers, artists and medical device researchers who work at different scales and in different fields are pursuing these projects, and many more. Full Story
Engineers for Exploration: Pushing the Boundaries of World-Wide Field Research
July 2, 2012
“It’s the funniest sight, seeing a massive blimp driving down the street attached to a pickup truck. It looks like the truck will literally lift of the ground because the balloon is so huge. This particular balloon, as described by Albert Yu-Min Lin of the UC San Diego and National Geographic Society’s Engineers for Exploration program, is no party decoration. It carries a camera on a self-stabilizing aerial platform, and is capable of taking high-resolution composite photographs that span a mile or more. The Balloon Camera, along with the OctoCopter, the Terrestrial Vehicle, and the Camera Trap, were conceived, designed and built by UC San Diego undergraduates participating in Engineers for Exploration. Full Story
Calit2 Class of 2012: Undergraduate Scholars Begin Their Summer of Research
July 2, 2012
The UCSD division of Calit2 this week kicks off a summer of research opportunities for 30 undergraduates representing 17 academic majors. For the 12th summer in a row, Calit2 Summer Undergraduate Scholars are fanning out across campus to work full-time in the labs of Calit2-affiliated faculty members, doing research alongside graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and their advisors. Full Story
Students Ring In End of Academic Year
June 20, 2012
Close to 300 graduating seniors gathered at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego Saturday evening to celebrate the end of the school year—and their induction into the Order of the Engineer. Each student was given a ring to symbolize their new status as full-fledged engineers. Full Story
Students Showcase Eureka Moments at Undergraduate Research Expo
June 7, 2012
A new acne medicine; a better way to simulate the collapse of supernovae; and a better way to visualize chromosomes: these were just some of the research posters on display at EUReKA, an undergraduate research expo that took place Friday at the Jacobs School of Engineering. Full Story
A Vision to Help
June 5, 2012
Students at the Jacobs School of Engineering are working to develop a cheaper, lighter, multi-function microscope that could be used in clinics in developing countries. Their prototype will be flown to Mozambique this summer and field tested at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in the country’s capital, Maputo. Full Story
UC San Diego Receives $7 Million form DOD for Innovative Neural Research
May 24, 2012
An interdisciplinary team of scientists at UC San Diego composed of physicists, biologists, chemists, bioengineers and psychologists has received a five-year, $7 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to investigate the dynamic principles of collective brain activity. Full Story
Fun at the 2012 Junkyard Derby
May 17, 2012
One the morning of May 14, the tracks were set, the teams were excited and the crowds were pouring in as UC San Diego’s own version of Junkyard Wars was heading towards its culmination. The ‘Junkyard Derby,’ organized by the Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC), pitted 28 teams, in their home-made boxcars, against one another. Full Story
Computer Scientists Develop an Interactive Field Guide App for Birders
May 7, 2012
A team of researchers led by computer scientist Serge Belongie at the University of California, San Diego, has good news for birders: they have developed an iPad app that will identify most North American birds, with a little help from a human user. Full Story
UC San Diego Students to Demonstrate Smart Camera Trap at New Engineering Competition
May 1, 2012
Forget about building a better mouse trap. University of California, San Diego sophomore Riley Yeakle and his teammates have come up with a better camera trap, and they will be facing off with finalists from around the country when they unveil working prototypes of their visions for embedded systems at a new, national engineering student competition. Full Story
Workshop Convenes Best Minds in Data Storage to Break Computing Bottlenecks
April 18, 2012
Non-volatile memories (NVM) are crucial components of modern computing systems, components that make it possible to store increasingly large amounts of information in smaller spaces, at faster data transfer speeds and (if the industry has its way) at lower cost to the consumer. Full Story
From UC San Diego to the Moon
April 3, 2012
Children in more than 2,700 schools from 52 countries have started requesting in the past few weeks pictures of specific areas of the moon from two spacecraft orbiting the Earth’s satellite. But little do they know that their requests go to an operations center located on the campus of the University of California, San Diego and manned by undergraduate students, most of them engineering majors. Full Story
President Obama Visits Solar Power Plant Using Technology Developed by UC San Diego Engineers
March 21, 2012
When President Obama visited the Copper Mountain Solar 1 Facility in Nevada Wednesday, he got a first-hand look at the first large-scale solar facility equipped with solar forecasting devices called sky imagers. The devices are powered by sophisticated algorithms, which were developed by researchers at the University of California San Diego. The technology was funded by Sanyo Electric Corp., now Panasonic, the Department of Energy, California Energy Commission and California Public Utilities Commission. Full Story
Celebrating Pi Day With the Campus' First-Ever Pi-Mile Run
March 15, 2012
What’s more fun than celebrating March 14, Pi Day, by eating pie with an “e”? Getting rid of the guilt by running 3.14 miles and donating money to help science education. And that’s exactly what more than 180 students, faculty and staff members did Wednesday by taking part in the first-ever Pi-Mile Run and Walk at the Jacobs School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego. Some were experienced triathlon runners. Others were taking part in their first long-distance race. Many said they wanted to have fun and contribute to a good cause. Full Story
Students Use Engineering Know-how to Help People at Home and a World Away
March 6, 2012
A small village in the Philippines will soon be safer from typhoons, thanks to the work of a group of undergraduates at the Jacobs School of Engineering at University of California, San Diego. They are designing a model home for the village that uses new and sustainable technologies and will make the dwelling stronger against both typhoons and earthquakes. But the students won’t stop there. They also want to provide the village with safer drinking water and renewable energy. It’s all part of Global TIES, a program that allows undergraduates to work on ambitious projects with nonprofit organizations and government agencies throughout the world. Full Story
DECaF Career Fair Generates Buzz on Campus
March 1, 2012
Google, Cisco, Yahoo!, Facebook: the roster of companies featured at this year’s Disciplines of Engineering Career Fair, also known as DECaF, read like a Who’s Who of the hottest tech companies. The event also featured many local powerhouses, including ViaSat and Solar Turbines. In all, more than 80 companies and 1,600 students turned out for the event, packing the Price Center Ballroom. Lines of students decked out in their best business attire and waiting to enter the career fair snaked out onto the Price Center food court. Full Story
IDEA Student Center Wins Campus Diversity Award
February 27, 2012
The IDEA Student Center, which promotes inclusion and diversity at the Jacobs School of Engineering, received a 2011 Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Award from UC San Diego. The center, which opened in the Fall of 2011, is already making a positive impact on the campus. It was among the 25 recipients of the 2011 Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action and Diversity Awards at UC San Diego. The awardees were recognized for everything from chairing the Black Staff Association Scholarship fund, to heading a campaign to increase fruit and vegetable consumption among low-income African American families, to staging film festivals showcasing prominent African American artists as part of the campus celebration of Black History Month. The goals of the center are summed up by the four words that form the IDEA acronym: inclusion, diversity, excellence and advancement. The center aims to improve retention and graduation rates; attract more underrepresented students; encourage undergraduates to pursue research; and get students in elementary, middle and high school, as well as community college, excited about a career in engineering. Full Story
Middle School Students Find Engineering Inspiration at Jacobs School Event
February 23, 2012
About 400 middle school students built and decorated their own robots and toured engineering labs Wednesday at the University of California, San Diego. They were taking part in the biggest outreach event organized by the Triton Engineering Student Council, Enspire, which is part of E-Week. Full Story
Will Run for Pi(e)
February 23, 2012
TESC and the Jacobs Graduate Student Council are organizing a Pi-Mile Run and Walk, where participants will complete 3.14 miles on March 14. After all, Pi is 3.14—not counting the infinite number of digits that follow. The race’s route starts at the Bear Courtyard. Runners and walkers will also get pie, that’s right, with an “e,” at the end of the race. Full Story
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Faculty Elected to National Academy of Engineering
February 9, 2012
Three faculty members in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Peter C. Farrell, founder, chairman and CEO of ResMed, and a member of the Council of Advisors of the Dean of the Jacobs School, also was elected to the academy. Full Story
International Crowdsourcing Experts Team Up to Help Save Lives
January 31, 2012
Two international scientists who took home the top prize in a worldwide networking competition hope to once again harness the power of social media to improve emergency health preparedness – and in turn pay ‘the crowd’ their potential prize winnings. Full Story
New Faculty Director for the IDEA Student Center Talks About Outreach, Diversity and the Importance of Undergraduate Research
January 31, 2012
Carlos Coimbra, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, has been named the new Faculty Director of the IDEA Student Center at the Jacobs School of Engineering. He joined the Jacobs School in fall 2011. He is originally from Brazil, got his Ph.D. from UC Irvine, and has been on faculty at the University of Hawaii and UC Merced, where he was involved in many outreach and academic research programs for undergraduate students. Coimbra’s professional goal is to develop the smart solar power farms of the future. He uses a network of solar observatories throughout the University of California system to harvest data for forecasting solar power output. He analyzes this data using artificial intelligence methods and a new, sophisticated type of variable order differential equations he developed. He answered some of our questions about his new role, the programs he has been involved with and the importance of diversity. Full Story
Event Helps Girls Envision Career in Science and Engineering
January 25, 2012
They built their own robots. They learned about augmented reality and cardiovascular engineering, among many other things. They got to play a real-life version of the popular game “Angry Birds.” More than 100 girls from 33 middle and high schools around San Diego County and as far as Southwest Riverside County and Imperial County, took part in Envision, a student outreach event organized every year by the chapter of the Society of Women Engineers at the Jacobs school of Engineering at UC San Diego. The event took place Jan. 21. Full Story
Jacobs School of Engineering Receives Three Diversity Awards
January 19, 2012
One individual, a center and a committee at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego have each received a Diversity Award for their efforts to promote diversity and equity here on campus. The award winners will be recognized during the annual Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action Diversity Awards ceremony at 2 p.m. Feb. 14 at the Price Center. The three Jacobs School winners are the IDEA Student Center; Associate Dean Jeanne Ferrante, who also is the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Equity in Academic Affairs; and the 2010-11 school-wide ‘Excellence Search Committee’. Full Story