News Archive

July 30, 2015 — The boxfish’s unique armor draws its strength from hexagon-shaped scales and the connections between them, engineers at the University of California, San Diego, have found. Engineers also describe how the structure of the boxfish (Lactoria cornuta) could serve as inspiration for body armor, robots and even flexible electronics.

February 2, 2015 — The governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) has awarded two University of California, San Diego researchers almost $3 million in combined funding to pursue new technologies intended to accelerate advances moving stem cell therapies out of the lab and into the clinic.

December 2, 2014 — Three members of the Jacobs School of Engineering faculty at the University of California, San Diego have been elevated to be Fellows in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Prof. David Kriegman was honored for his contributions to computer vision, and CSE Prof. Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou was cited for her “contributions to scalable algorithms and tools for computer reliability.” Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Prof. Young-Han Kim was honored for his contributions to feedback communication and network information theory. All three faculty members are also affiliated with the Qualcomm Institute.

November 25, 2014 — The bacterium Helicobacter pylori is strongly associated with gastric ulcers and cancer. To combat the infection, researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Jacobs School of Engineering developed LipoLLA, a therapeutic nanoparticle that contains linolenic acid, a component in vegetable oils.

November 7, 2014 — After a two-year hiatus, a team from the Center for Networked Systems (CNS) at the University of California, San Diego came roaring back to set three new world records in a data processing competition for industry and academe. CNS associate director George Porter, former CNS director Amin Vahdat (now at Google), and Computer Science and Engineering Ph.D. student Michael Conley set a world record in the 100 Terabyte Daytona (think speed) GraySort category. They outperformed everyone else, sorting 100 TB in less than 23 minutes, but tied with the startup company Databricks (which sorted the same amount of data in 23.4 minutes). Both used the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

October 30, 2014 — A multidisciplinary engineering team at the University of California, San Diego developed a new nanoparticle-based material for concentrating solar power plants designed to absorb and convert to heat more than 90 percent of the sunlight it captures. The new material can also withstand temperatures greater than 700 degrees Celsius and survive many years outdoors in spite of exposure to air and humidity. Their work, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot program, was published recently in two separate articles in the journal Nano Energy.

October 30, 2014 — What does it take to fabricate electronic and medical devices tinier than a fraction of a human hair? Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego recently invented a new method of lithography in which nanoscale robots swim over the surface of light-sensitive material to create complex surface patterns that form the sensors and electronics components on nanoscale devices. Their research, published recently in the journal Nature Communications, offers a simpler and more affordable alternative to the high cost and complexity of current state-of-the-art nanofabrication methods such as electron beam writing.

October 1, 2014 — Researchers at University of California, San Diego School of Medicine are co-recipients of a $4.1-million grant from the National Institutes of Health to advance treatments for type 1 diabetes. Using human stem cells, the team plans to culture bits of human pancreas in a dish and, using microfluidics, mimic blood flow through the islet.

August 14, 2013 — A team of researchers, led by Colorado State University engineering professor John van de Lindt, has spent the last month shaking a four-story building on the world’s largest outdoor shake table at the University of California, San Diego, to learn how to make structures with first-floor garages better withstand seismic shocks.

July 15, 2013 — The University of California, San Diego has named professor Albert P. (Al) Pisano, a highly accomplished mechanical engineer from UC Berkeley, as the next dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.