Madeline Bell Hauenstein spent the last nine months working in South Africa and is curious about how nonprofits and the public sector work together to improve lives. Jessie Hernandez-Reyes wants to serve in Congress to confront inequities, representing the 51st district of California. Nancy Nguyen — who experienced economic inequity firsthand while growing up — wants to break the cycles of poverty concentrated in communities of color.
Sensors that tell you if Chinese food from last weekend is still safe to eat. An app to let your professor know you have no idea what he’s talking about. A grocery store guide to find the exact aisle and shelf location of your favorite cereal. These aren’t just crazy ideas — they’re actual startups currently in development in The Basement, UC San Diego’s two-year-old incubator and accelerator program managed by the UC San Diego Alumni Office.
Being a woman can mean many things. That’s what Maria Elena Hewett discovered when she became one of the first student staff members of the UC San Diego Women’s Center in 1998. During her tenure, she met and was inspired by women who were in arranged marriages; single moms; women who were not born female; and those who embraced femininity as a form of activism. The experience taught Hewett about herself, what it means to be a Latina woman, and how to see the world through a critical lens.
With a three-minute talk entitled “Using Geometry to Build Better Birth Control,” engineering graduate student Geoff Hollett took first place at the UC San Diego Grad Slam competition held April 5. Now in its fourth year, the event challenges graduate students across campus to break down their research into bite-sized, jargon-free presentations that can be enjoyed by a broad audience.
How can California better prepare for droughts and floods? Tashiana Osborne, a graduate student at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is studying atmospheric rivers—the primary source of rainfall in the region. These ribbons of water in the atmosphere make the difference between a prolonged dry spell and an unusually wet winter.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego has been granted a supplemental award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to double the number of graphic processing units, or GPUs, on its petascale-level Comet supercomputer in direct response to growing demand for GPU computing across a wide range of research domains.
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