Undergraduate News
2016 News Releases
Dennis Abremski appointed as Executive Director of the Institute for the Global Entrepreneur at UC San Diego
December 13, 2016
The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is pleased to announce the appointment of Dennis Abremski as the Executive Director of The Institute for the Global Entrepreneur (IGE). The Institute is a collaboration between the Jacobs School of Engineering and Rady School of Management, dedicated to training global technology leaders and translating university discoveries to market. Full Story
Israel's Journey to the Moon
December 12, 2016
In 2010, Yonatan Winetraub, a citizen of Israel, sat down with two friends at a bar and said, “I have a crazy idea. Why don’t we be the first Israelis to land a spacecraft on the moon?” Six years later, the company they founded, SpaceIL, is making history as part of the Google Lunar XPRIZE competition aimed at placing an unmanned spacecraft on the moon's surface before the mission deadline of December 31, 2017. Full Story
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
Engineering teams get a boost at Triton Innovation Challenge competition
December 6, 2016
Three teams with ties to the Jacobs School were recognized at this year’s Triton Innovation Challenge at the University of California, San Diego. LifeCycled Materials, led by two Jacobs School alumni, won the competition and a $10,000 prize. Evolution Solutions, a startup cofounded by students at the Jacobs School and the Rady School of Management, came in third and received $2,500. Finally, One Village Philippines, a team that is part of the Jacobs School’s Global TIES program, won the competition’s social venture track and $2,500. Now in its fifth year, the Triton Innovation Challenge is an annual business competition focused on fostering creativity and developing environmentally focused technologies generated by members of the UC San Diego community. This year’s event boasted a record crowd of more than 250 attendees. The challenge organizers accepted submissions in October which were reviewed by an expert panel. Ten teams were selected to pitch at the final event held on Nov. 29. Full Story
Coming Home: Alumni Faculty Share Why They Came Back to Campus
December 2, 2016
It’s no secret that UC San Diego’s reputation as a top-ranked university is a major draw for prospective students—but it’s also pulling many graduates back to campus to serve as members of the faculty. In classrooms and labs across the university, our alumni are leading new directions in research and helping to train the next generation of innovators. 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
Scientist, Entrepreneur, Robotics Expert Will Speak to Downtown Collaboratory 'Game Changers'
November 22, 2016
The fourth presentation in the Game Changers Series features Todd Hylton, a professor of practice at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and executive director of the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Institute.The presentation, free and open to the public, will be held 5-7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 30, at the Downtown San Diego Partnership offices at 401 B St., Suite 100.The field of robotics is poised to change all aspects of modern life, from driving to housekeeping to our jobs. Hylton -- who has worked at Brain Corporation and DARPA, cofounded 4Wave, and is an inventor and entrepreneur who has earned 19 patents throughout his career -- is well-positioned to explain what is fueling the increased interest and investment into robotics and how this emerging field will affect not only our region but also the global economy. Full Story
Bioengineer Among Five UC San Diego Professors Named 2016 AAAS Fellows
November 21, 2016
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation’s largest general science organization, has awarded the distinction of fellow to 391 members, including five from the University of California San Diego.New fellows will be honored for “their efforts toward advancing science applications that are deemed scientifically or socially distinguished” on Feb. 18 during the 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston. Continuing a tradition started in 1874, AAAS members are considered for the rank of fellow if nominated by a steering group of their respective sections, by three existing fellows or by AAAS’s chief executive officer. Full Story
Hacking for Defense: UC San Diego Students Tackle Military Challenges as Part of New Program
November 17, 2016
A new program at UC San Diego called Hacking for Defense gives students opportunities to leverage the culture of rapid innovation to address national security challenges. Full Story
UC San Diego Graduate Students Bring the Sparkle of GEM to Preuss Students
November 15, 2016
The Galvanizing Engineering in Medicine (GEM) program has launched a series of monthly talks at the Preuss School with the goal of inspiring the next generation of scientists. GEM, a program supported by UC San Diego Altman Clinical and Translational Research Institute (ACTRI) and UC San Diego Institute of Engineering in Medicine (IEM), brings engineers and clinicians together to develop innovative technology solutions to challenging problems in medical care. In the talk series, UC San Diego graduate students share research highlights from GEM projects with Preuss students. Full Story
Hacking a Revolution in Biology
November 10, 2016
Graduate studies within any single scientific discipline are challenging endeavors on their own. But imagine combining graduate school-level training in physics and mathematics with advanced research in engineering and biology.That’s the challenge of a new graduate program at UC San Diego that’s teaching Ph.D. students how to combine the power of physics and math-based reasoning with practical engineering skills and biology in an effort to unravel the fundamental principles of living systems—principles that will likely encompass concepts reaching well beyond those of traditional biology. Full Story
UC San Diego Hosts Wearable Sensors Summit
November 9, 2016
The Center for Wearable Sensors at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering recently hosted its annual research summit.“The summit was a great opportunity for us to discuss and chart the future of wearable sensors with the forward-looking faculty we have as well as industry who know the field,” said Center co-director and electrical and computer engineering professor Patrick Mercier. Research in the Center features interdisciplinary collaborations to produce innovative technologies in the field of wearable sensors. For example, Center co-director and nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang’s lab have worked with electrical engineers in Mercier’s lab to develop a mouth guard sensor and an alcohol sensor. 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
Robotics for Exploration at the Contextual Robotics Forum on Oct. 28
October 19, 2016
Underwater camera traps used to photograph the rare vaquita porpoise in Mexico and drones used to conduct radio collar tracking missions in the Cayman Islands are just two of the technologies that will be presented at the technology showcase for the UC San Diego Contextual Robotics Forum on Oct. 28, 2016. Full Story
UC San Diego Students and Alumni Win San Diego 'Zoohackathon'
October 13, 2016
Over the weekend, a small group of programmers participating in the inaugural Zoohackathon had the opportunity to go behind the scenes at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and see firsthand some of the species the San Diego Zoo Global has rescued from illegal wildlife trade. “The zookeepers brought out two monitor lizards that were brought into the United States illegally and confiscated,” said Utkrisht Rajkumar, a third year computer engineering major at the University of California San Diego. “It added a lot of context to the problems that we were trying to solve.” Full Story
The Secret (Code) for Getting Kids Excited About Engineering
October 12, 2016
You can find publications written by Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Pamela Cosman in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, the International Journal of Computer Vision and, as of this past May, in the children’s section of the UC San Diego bookstore. Full Story
UC San Diego breaks income boundaries in engineering
October 7, 2016
“This is just the beginning of what technology like this can do,” said Gabriel Davalos, an incoming aerospace engineering major. Davalos was referring to a miniature table lamp he and some of his peers built that turned on when something nearby made a loud noise. The students also fabricated a tiny house to protect the lamp using 3D printed materials and rapid prototyping tools. Full Story
Coding Under Pressure: Students Prototype Ideas in 36-Hour Hackathon
October 6, 2016
Close to 1,000 students from around campus and the country gathered to share ideas, network with companies and take technological inventions from start to finish at SD Hacks. Students had 36 hours to invent, build and iterate on their hack. The student-run event is one of the largest student hackathons in Southern California--and 2016 was just the second year. The event was launched, and is run, by a group of dedicated students who decided to put UC San Diego and the region’s innovation ecosystem on the map with SD Hacks. Full Story
From Satellites to Biodegradable Surfboards
October 6, 2016
UC San Diego showcases real-world applications of research at Maker FaireA surfboard made of algae-based foam. A small satellite that could be put into orbit around the moon. A balloon that carries experiments to the outer reaches of the atmosphere. These were some of the innovations that students, faculty and alumni from UC San Diego showed off this weekend at San Diego Maker Faire, a gathering of more than 200 innovators in a festival-like atmosphere at Balboa Park. 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
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, SDSU to Roll Out Research Platform to Improve Hearing-Aid Technologies
August 10, 2016
Engineers from UC San Diego, including Patrick Mercier from the Center for Wearable Sensors, and audiologists from SDSU have set out an ambitious timetable for delivering two new electronic platforms to dramatically improve and accelerate research on better hearing aids. Full Story
Crowdsourcing the Transformation of Mass Spectrometry Big Data into Scientific Living Data
August 9, 2016
In a landmark paper published in the August issue of Nature Biotechnology, 127 scientists from a consortium of universities and research labs in the U.S. and worldwide report for the first time on the establishment of an online, crowdsourced knowledge base and workbench that could be a game-changer for the study of natural products that could potentially be useful in the development of the next antibiotic, better pesticides, or more effective cancer drugs. Full Story
The Fast Track to Success after Graduation: From MBA to UAV
July 26, 2016
Rady School MBA alumnus Dan Bosch’s drones are focused on helping with agriculture, construction, security, search and rescue, and emergency response. His company, SICdrone, grew out of Rady Lab to Market and is currently working on developing high-speed "tiltrotor" drones that fly faster and further than anything currently on the market. Full Story
Dreaming Big at the 5G Wireless Forum and Connected Health Workshop
July 19, 2016
“To me, 5G is really our first opportunity for a network not defined by numbers, but built for experiences that we have not seen before -- not just good audio or video experiences, but life-changing experiences, similar to what the Internet provided when it first arrived,” says Electrical Engineering Professor Sujit Dey, Director of the Center for Wireless Communications (CWC) at the University of California San Diego and the organizer of the CWC’s 5G Wireless Forum, which was held recently at UC San Diego. Full Story
Engineering students try to become pinball wizards in this class
July 7, 2016
The vaguely sweet smell of laser-etched wood. Repeated pings and the laughter of students. Pairs of students huddling over their projects, connecting wires and poking and prodding. This was the scene on a recent afternoon in the basement of Jacobs Hall here on campus. The room was filled with students enrolled in ECE 115, a design and rapid prototyping class taught by electrical and computer engineering professor Michael Yip here at the University of California San Diego. Full Story
Curbing the HIV Epidemic: UC San Diego Students Design Low-Cost HIV Viral Load Monitoring System for Tijuana, Mexico
July 6, 2016
Two teams from UC San Diego’s Engineering World Health (EWH) student organization and Global TIES program are combining forces this summer to bring a low-cost device they created to monitor viral load in HIV patients to a clinical setting in Tijuana, Mexico for testing. Full Story
Machine Learning Method Differentiates Between Healthy Male, Female Microbiomes
June 27, 2016
The week-long International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) ended June 24, and the last day included the 2016 ICML Workshop on Computational Biology. CSE professors Larry Smarr and Rob Knight as well as Qualcomm Institute data scientist Mehrdad Yazdani were represented in a poster presentation and paper on “Using Topological Data Analysis to find discrimination between microbial states in human microbiome data.” Borrowing a statistical method originally from topology, the co-authors applied Topological Data Analysis (TDA) as an “unsupervised learning and data exploration tool to identify changes in microbial states.” Full Story
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UC San Diego Students Fabricate Device to Protect Seniors from a Fall
June 21, 2016
Falls are the leading cause of death from injury among people 65 and older killing more than 400,000 people each year. A team of engineering undergraduates at the Jacobs School is working to address the situation thanks to AirSave, an impact protection system they designed. Full Story
Engineering students compete for first place in Robolympics
June 13, 2016
The Olympics may be in Rio de Janeiro this summer, but students in mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Nate Delson’s Introduction to Engineering Graphics and Design (MAE3) course competed in their very own version of them right here at the University of California San Diego – the Robot Olympics – with robots that they designed and built themselves. Full Story
NSF-Funded Program Helps UC San Diego Startups
June 13, 2016
The National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps program (I-Corps) at UC San Diego is helping entrepreneurs determine whether their idea could turn into a viable company. Full Story
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Startups Take Advantage of Entrepreneurism and Leadership Resources at UC San Diego
June 9, 2016
From apps to medical devices and electronics, the University of California San Diego is helping students translate their technology to the market. Through entrepreneurism and leadership programs such as NSF I-Corps at the Jacobs School of Engineering and accelerator programs such as the Rady School of Management’s StartR, both undergraduate and graduate students are getting the training they need to launch a successful company. Full Story
UC San Diego engineering undergraduates one step closer to lunar orbit
June 9, 2016
A team of engineering undergraduates at the University of California San Diego is one step closer to sending a satellite into orbit around the moon after placing third in a NASA satellite design competition. The win comes with a $30,000 award and gives their design a good shot at a spot aboard NASA’s Orion capsule as part of its first unmanned lunar flyby, planned for 2018. Full Story
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Global Change Makers
June 8, 2016
Nick Forsch relies heavily on clinician feedback for his research. As a bioengineering Ph.D. student at the University of California San Diego, he is developing computational tools to enable doctors to better understand their patients’ diseases. The challenges of translating his research to real-world doctors and patients led Forsch to join a new program at UC San Diego that places Jacobs School of Engineering graduate students and MBA students in the same Rady School of Management classes, including the Rady’s signature Lab to Market program. Full Story
American Gut Project Expands to Asia
June 2, 2016
University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers are expanding the American Gut Project into Asia. The goal of American Gut, the world’s largest crowdfunded citizen science project, is to sequence as many human microbiomes — the unique collection of bacteria and other microbes that live in and on us — as possible.American Gut Project participants are “citizen scientists.” They learn how many of which types of bacteria inhabit their bodies, and in doing so also contribute valuable data to researchers around the world who want to know how microbiomes influence human and environmental health. Full Story
Gordon Center Hosts the 7th Annual Engineering Leadership Awards Celebration Featuring Linden Blue
April 22, 2016
Gordon Scholar students, alumni and industry professionals, UC San Diego faculty and staff filled the Great Hall on March 9, 2016 to recognize the awardees of the annual Gordon Engineering Leadership Awards. Full Story
Two UC San Diego Professors Named Fellows to Prestigious Math Society
April 1, 2016
Two professors at UC San Diego have been named 2016 Fellows of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics “for their distinguished contributions to the disciplines of applied mathematics, computational science and related fields.”William M. McEneaney, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, and Michael Holst, a professor of mathematics and physics, were among 30 scientists and mathematicians selected this year by members of the society, known as SIAM, to receive this distinction. Full Story
A Day in the Sun
March 31, 2016
When UC San Diego undergraduate students Josh Hill, Victoria Santos and Alexander Han first became involved with the Solar Chill project, they never thought that they would one day have the opportunity to talk about the unique solar-powered charging station at Clinton Global Initiative University. But they did just that when the annual conference took place at UC Berkeley, April 1 to 3. Full Story
UC San Diego Electrical Engineer Awarded Young Investigator Award from U.S. Office of Naval Research
March 23, 2016
The U.S. Office of Naval Research has awarded a Young Investigator Award to electrical engineering professor Duygu Kuzum of the University of California, San Diego, for her work to construct a computational model of signal processing in the hippocampus. The research is expected to provide a greater understanding of the mechanisms and microcircuits implicated in how the human brain processes information, which – when applied to computing – could lead to systems with more scalable, efficient and brain-like cognitive skills. Full Story
Electrical Engineering Undergrads Build and Race Robots
March 23, 2016
The EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio at UC San Diego teemed with excitement on the day of the final in an electrical engineering class called Making, Breaking and Hacking Stuff. Instead of a typical test, the class culminated in a cumulative final project – teams of two or three students used the knowledge and some of the parts they had acquired during the class’s previous projects to build a line-following robot. The teams competed to see who programmed their robot to follow a line most closely, and at the fastest speed. Full Story
New Apple Watch App Provides Best Time to Cross International Borders
March 21, 2016
A team of three computer science undergraduates helped develop an app for the Apple Watch that provides users with wait times to enter the United States from its northern and southern borders at 70 different points of entry. The app is believed to be the first specifically for the Apple Watch developed by UC San Diego researchers. Full Story
Arts and engineering students collaborate in new course at UC San Diego
March 11, 2016
Students from a structural engineering and a visual arts class are working together, shoulder to shoulder, on a collaborative final project despite the fact that they are in different classes. This visual arts and engineering mashup is happening in the new EnVision Maker Studio at UC San Diego and involves students in Structural Engineering 1 and Visual Arts 40. 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
Making, Breaking and Hacking in Electrical Engineering
March 8, 2016
From a single resistor to LEDs, audio amplifiers and robots, freshman and sophomore students in Electrical Engineering’s new ECE5 class at the University of California, San Diego make and break as they get hands-on exposure to electrical engineering fundamentals. Full Story
UC San Diego engineers build flexible battery packs in new EnVision Maker Studio
March 8, 2016
Groups of freshmen Nanoengineering undergraduates from the University of California, San Diego are creating flexible battery packs the size of a credit card, from scratch. The students will test their batteries by attaching an LED bulb and looking for a glow. 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
Andrew Viterbi, Wireless Pioneer and UC San Diego Professor Emeritus, Wins Draper Prize
February 18, 2016
Andrew Viterbi, a renowned wireless pioneer, co-founder of Linkabit and Qualcomm, and UC San Diego professor emeritus has been awarded the prestigious Draper Prize—often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Engineering”—from the National Academy of Engineering. Full Story
Online Course on Mastering the Software Engineering Interview
January 28, 2016
Students and anyone interested in interviewing for a job in software engineering will now be able to take a course on how to ace the interview – whether the student is enrolled at the University of California, San Diego (where it was created) or not, and whether the potential interviewee is located in the United States or anywhere around the world. Full Story
The robotic Force awakens at UC San Diego
January 14, 2016
The movie premiere was still more than a week away, but Star Wars fever was already peaking at UC San Diego Dec. 9 during the campus’ semi-annual robotics competition. This year, the event was themed after the movie—of course—with teaching assistants dressing up as Jedi Knights and professor Michael Tolley donning a Star Wars rebel helmet. A total of 45 teams and 165 students vied for the big win. 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
Gadgetron Robot Factory allows students to create and learn
January 4, 2016
Students unleashed “robot mayhem” during the last day of CSE 91 at UC San Diego. Robots with funny monikers, such as “Bash Ketchum,” ran loose in a miniature arena, where they spun around, played music and generally created creative chaos. It was all part of a class designed to teach students how to design and program robot. All student teams used the Gadgetron Robot Factory, a tool developed at UC San Diego to design the robots. Full Story
Experience Chemical Engineering course gives students a taste of engineering in the real world
January 4, 2016
In a brightly-lit laboratory room just east of Warren Quad, seventeen students pored over their iPad-based lab reports and put the finishing touches on their engineering projects. These students, mostly freshmen, were part of Professor Aaron Drews’ CENG 4 Experience Chemical Engineering seminar, a course designed to give students a rich hands-on introduction to chemical engineering. The class, which is currently in its pilot phase, is part of Jacobs School Dean Albert P. Pisano’s vision for experiential learning activities that expose students to “real-world challenges that require them to integrate theory and practice.” Full Story