Chancellor Khosla Visits TIP Team

From left: Graduate students Nick Morozovsky and Daniel Yang, TIP team members Kaylee Feigum, Parry Wilcox, Victor Balcer, Kevin Katz, Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla and  graduate student Yuncong Chen.

Chancellor Pradeep K. Khosla visited Aug. 22 with students who are part of the Jacobs School's Team Internship Program and work at the Sorrento-Valley-based Brain Corporation. TIP brings together teams of students from different majors who get real-world engineering experiences at companies around the world. The Brain Corp. interns got to build a drone and experimented with various robot prototypes.

Brain Corporation is a pioneer in developing novel algorithms that model the functionality of the nervous system and can be applied to robotics, computer vision, motor control and autonomous navigation. The TIP team aren't the only Jacobs School employees at the company. It also employs part-time two Jacobs School graduate students, Daniel Yang and Nick Morozovsky, who are part of the research group of Thomas Bewley, a professor in mechanical and aerospace engineering. The group connected with Brain Corporation via Jacobs School alum Marius Buibas, who is a scientist at the company.

Bewley, Morozovsky and Yang are household names here at the Jacobs School. In Bewley's lab, Morozovsky designed SkySweeper, a robot for power line inspection, and Switchblade, an agile robot that can balance and climb stairs. Yang is the designer of a fire-fighting robot known as FFR. Both robots have received ample media coverage and FFR's technology was recognized at this year's Student Infrared Imaging Competition, bringing $10,000 home for the Bewley lab.