Themed Entertainment Association hosts Wonderland haunted maze

Students in the UC San Diego chapter of the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) hosted their third Haunted Maze on campus in November. The 500 available tickets to the Wonderland-themed event sold out in a matter of minutes. 

The haunted maze included complicated technical elements such as the Pepper's Ghost illusion technique and several animatronic features, as well as creative costumes, several-rooms worth of set design, and storyboarding for the overall flow of the event. Students in TEA spend a year planning, designing and building the maze each year.

The TEA club draws students from across campus, including many engineers, who are interested in theme park design. In addition to the annual haunted maze, students in TEA participate in national theme park design contests, meet with engineers and creatives currently working at various themed entertainment venues, and have even collaborated with larger theme parks to co-design and build new exhibits. 

Learn more and get involved: https://tea.ucsd.edu/ 

Professor emeritus Shu Chien earns accolades, asteroid

Shu Chien, a professor emeritus of bioengineering at UC San Diego, is known as a superstar: he's won the National Medal of Science and been voted into all three National Academies (Science, Medicine and Engineering) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the newly established National Academy of Inventors, for his discoveries that underpin our understanding of how blood flows in the cardiovascular system. But now, he has his very own asteroid, too! 

In recognition of his scientific contributions to the field of mechanobiology—ranging from uncovering a key reason why sedentary lifestyles can be unhealthy even with short daily bursts of exercise, to how to more efficiently screen for adverse effects of small molecule drugs in patients—the International Astronomical Union has named asteroid 2008 YX9 as Chienshu.

The Chienshu asteroid was discovered in 2008 by X.Y. Hsaiao and Q.Z. Ye, and the name was made official in September 2021. 

In addition, Chien was recently elected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a sister institution to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, of which he is already a member. He is also a member of Academia Sinica in Taiwan, thus making him a member of all eight U.S. and Chinese Academies. 

Chien was also named an inaugural Fellow of the International Union of Physiological Sciences' new Academy. The goal of the IUPS Academy and its 30 Fellows is to represent the diversity and excellence of physiology worldwide. The Academy is intended to serve as a resource for physiologists, as well as a source of information and contacts for journalists, funders, charities, politicians, allied health professionals or members of the public.

Learn more about Chien’s 62-year academic career here.

Edward Wang awarded NIH grant for work on smartphone-based Alzheimer's screening

Edward Wang (left), Eric Granholm (right)

Edward Wang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego who directs the Ubiquitous Data and Computing Lab, has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a smartphone app that can screen for early signs of cognitive decline indicative of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).

Wang, who has a joint appointment in the Design Lab at UC San Diego, will be leading the project with co-investigator Eric Granholm, a professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and director of the university's Center for Mental Health Technology (MHTech). The National Institute of Aging selected the team for an NIH R21, also known as the Exploratory/Development Grant, which provides support in the early and conceptual stages of a project’s development. As part of a national push towards combating the debilitating effects of AD, the National Institute of Aging looked towards funding novel ways to screen for AD through the use of digital technologies. 

In the team's proposal, titled, “Smartphone Pupillometer for At-Home Screening for Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease,” Wang and Granholm aim to leverage camera systems found in smartphones to capture pupillary responses to cognitive tests as an indicator of the integrity of a specific part of the brain, the locus coeruleus, that has been shown to be one of the first sites affected by AD-related processes. By taking advantage of the smartphone as the vehicle for conducting such a test, Wang and Granholm believe that this approach of using digital technologies to capture physiological signals has the potential of significantly driving down the cost of deploying these screening solutions widely to combat public health challenges like AD.

“By further enhancing the signals that are captured using just your phone with signal processing and machine learning, we are able to derive, what are known as, digital biomarkers,” Wang says.

This approach strongly aligns with the National Institute of Aging’s Notice of Special Interest, which states that “current biomarkers for early detection of prodromal AD [...] are costly and invasive”, and digital biomarkers “can be used to inform disease prediction and management at both the individual and populational level.”

AD is a progressive degenerative disorder of the brain and is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, with the latest statistics showing that at least five million Americans over the age of 65 suffer from the disease. Not only is it the most common form of dementia of elderly adults, it is projected that cases of AD will double by 2025. By 2050, it is projected that a total annual cost for health care for people with AD will be more than $1 trillion. AD is clearly a public health crisis.

“Our solution is based on previous findings in our research with older adults with mild cognitive impairment, where we studied how differences in pupil dilation in response to memory tests are associated with very early signs of AD,” Granholm says. “It is based on these findings that we are developing this smartphone solution.” If successful, Granholm notes, it would be possible for older adults to perform this test even in the comfort of their own homes or by their primary care providers. This is compared with what is available today, which are far more invasive solutions like PET/MRI imaging and lumbar puncture for biomarkers in the spinal fluid.

As a faculty member in the Design Lab, Wang has a particular interest in developing technologies through a lens of human centered design. Wang has had a record of inventing new smartphone-based health monitoring solutions such as hemoglobin/anemia screening, blood pressure monitoring, and ocular disease. In developing these solutions, Wang has worked with a wide range of collaborators across the world to develop and test these systems with end users to make sure that the purported solutions truly can work with the target users and in realistic conditions. “Sometimes what we find is that an idea works well in lab settings where we can control the lighting and temperature of the room, but completely fails in realistic conditions that screening tools like these have to operate under,” Wang says.

Wang working in a village in the Amazon Jungle of Peru testing his smartphone hemoglobin monitor.

In a previous workaround anemia screening, Wang worked with NGOs in Peru to bring his prototype app into villages nestled in the Amazonian Jungle, where NGO staff regularly travel to in order to perform anemia screening and treatments.

"It turns out, we never considered that the main use case for our technology is really to screen for anemia in kids under 3 years old. Although the physics still holds, behaviorally, kids at that age are so different that we basically couldn’t get the kids to stay still long enough to be able to measure them with our app,” Wang reflects. “One of the common misconceptions in engineering research is that we can always build it to work better with enough resources once a technology leaves the lab,” Wang says. “The issue with that kind of approach is that sometimes that can lead us into solutions that don’t have a chance of working. That is why human centered design being a central loop in the research is so important.”

Wang notesthat keeping the elder user base in mind is crucial in the success of this research endeavor. “One of the things I think is particularly interesting in working on digital technology for the older population is that it requires a lot more nuances around usability,” Wang explains. “Our big hope is that [our app] works with little to no training with either home care providers or with the older adults themselves.”

Wang cautions, however, that these solutions are far from ready and requires extensive research on how well such digital biomarkers can differentiate diseases and how they will ultimately serve in the entire ecosystem of healthcare. “Our research aims to solve big healthcare problems by looking for creative ways to invent new ways our society can screen and treat diseases. But this shift that brings healthcare closer to everyday life, literally into our pockets, means that we will have to be very intentional in our designs of how people will use these technologies to be not only useful, but safe as well,” he says.

Read more about Wang’s research on digital health technologies at UC San Diego.

Bioengineering alumna earns SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member award

Recent UC San Diego alumna Elizabeth Heyde, who earned her master’s in bioengineering in 2021, is one of 10 students in the country honored with the Society of Women Engineers’ Outstanding Collegiate Member Award. Heyde will be recognized at the SWE national conference on October 21-23 in Indianapolis. 

Heyde has been involved in SWE from her undergraduate years at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, through her time as a graduate student at UC San Diego, and even now as a working professional. Her main goal through SWE has been to reach out to the next generation of engineers, to help them have a better understanding of their options. 

As an undergraduate, Heyde helped develop the SWENext outreach program for students in grades K-12, launching 11 local SWENext clubs. SWENext provides young students with access to programs, mentors, and resources designed to develop the leadership skills and self-confidence to succeed in engineering and technology careers.

She continued to be involved in outreach through SWE at UC San Diego, where she advised the chapter on their SWENext activities, and served on the Edge and Envision outreach event committees. 

At the SWE national level, Heyde is a work group lead for SWENext Clubs on the SweNext and Student Programs committee, and is a work group lead for Training Adult Advocates on the Outreach Committee. 

“I'm really passionate about outreach to younger students in general,” said Heyde. “I was really lucky because my parents made sure I was exposed to all sorts of different things. I got to really choose what I was interested in, and STEM was one of those things. I realize that’s not something everyone has the benefit of, which is why I'm passionate about outreach and why I got involved with SWE.”

Though she initially joined SWE to help young students learn about engineering, Heyde said she wound up finding a vital sense of community through the organization, as well.

“I’ve had a lot of great experiences through SWE in general,” she said. “It was a community I didn’t realize I was lacking until I joined, and realized there were a lot of other like-minded people, especially women, who had similar industry and career goals. They really resonated with things I wanted to do in my future so I got to be around a lot of those like-minded individuals, and I made a lot of friends.”

As a student at UC San Diego, Heyde, who is now a research and development engineer at Medtronic working in their structural heart group on heart valve therapies, was part of a team of engineers and physicians rapidly developing an emergency ventilator for COVID-19 patients. The team developed a low-cost, easy-to-use device built around a ventilator bag usually found in ambulances. The UCSD MADVent Mark 5, as it’s called, cost just $500 per unit, compared to $50,000 for state of the art models. 

“This was a cool project because there was an immediate impact, which resonated with me and is why I’m interested in medical devices in general,” said Heyde. “I think a lot of times with research, the length between working on something and seeing its impact on patients can be huge. I was lucky to work on a project that had such an immediate impact.”

Students get hands-on with Summer EnVision Experience

Blake Iwaisako and Zoe Tcheng work
in the EnVision Arts and Engineering
Maker Studio

 A team of five UC San Diego undergraduate students spent the summer developing a device to help TaylorMade Golf study how minute differences in the golf balls they produce affect the balls’ performance. The 10-week Summer EnVision Experience (SEE) internship brings students from across campus and from various engineering disciplines together to collaborate on a project sponsored by a partner company or organization.

SEE was designed by the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering to provide sophomore and junior students with hands-on experience creating, pitching and developing a project from start to finish. During the internship, students gain hands-on experience with the wide array of tools available in the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio. For Zoe Tcheng, a bioengineering student, SEE gave her the opportunity to develop her computer modeling skills, and ultimately confirmed her choice of major.

Ariel Navarro builds
a prototype of the
manufacturing pipeline

“I definitely got better at soldering, I soldered most of this printed circuit board here,” Tcheng said. “It was rough at the beginning but I got a lot better. And I learned some modeling, which is what I was really interested in. I learned a lot of arduino coding, which I had done in class before, but not as fleshed out as this project and not with as many components.

“What I figured out from this is that I definitely don’t want to do mechanical engineering,” said Tcheng, laughing. “The track I’m in as a bioengineer is biosystems, so we’re more kind of more electrical engineering focused. This experience reinforced that I prefer that, and enjoy the soldering and programming.”

Yichen Xiang works on electrical
components of the team's device

For electrical engineering student Ariel Navarro, SEE not only helped him develop more skills using the tools and machinery at EnVision, but helped him see the reality of their limits, as well.

“At first it was a lot of knowledge to dig into, because there are so many different things to learn; we’re 3D printing, using CAD for parts, laser cutting. It was a little overwhelming,” said Navarro. “But thankfully we were taking it one step at a time. One of the things you don’t understand until you experience it, is that a lot of machines aren’t as precise as you think. And even though it’s just a little bit off, it can throw the whole piece off. Right now for example, we have to redo a component because the hole a pipe will fit in is just a little bit too big, and the pipe is wobbling inside. So even though we measured it, it’s not always exactly precise.”

The students also said they came away with a greater understanding of what it means to collaborate as a cross-disciplinary team.

Caitlin Kim uses the laser cutter
at EnVision

“I learned a lot, especially with teamwork,” said Tcheng. “Because we were here together four days a week, for 10 weeks.”

Navarro agreed, noting that no matter how technically skilled you are, communication is still key.

“Working on a project like this, I learned to communicate,” he said. “You’ve got to make sure you’re letting people know what you’re doing and your timing. You have to maintain constant communication when you’re working with other people.”

In previous years, SEE interns have worked with the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography to develop the aquarium’s first virtual reality exhibit; a sound-matching game to share complicated whale call research with the public; and an exhibit focused on the albedo effect and an interactive RFID system. The internship was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID-19.

STARS summer research program goes virtual

The ongoing pandemic didn’t stop students from gaining valuable hands-on research experience this summer through the SummerTraining Academy for Research Success (STARS) program at UC San Diego. Melissa Lepe, an aerospace engineering student at UC Irvine, got creative with her STARS mentor—UC San Diego structural engineering professor Ingrid Tomac— to find ways to gain data analysis skills while advancing our knowledge of mudslides.

“When there are forest fires, mudflows often occur after the fire,” said Lepe. “And in Tomac’s Geo-Micromechanics Research Group, we wanted to study the exact patterns of behavior during those mudflows, so we studied the soil particles and how they attach to air particles, to try and really see what we can learn about their movement, and what we can predict to establish better building infrastructure and warning signals for mudslides.”

 Since the research experience was virtual, Lepe and her graduate student mentor, UC San Diego structural engineering PhD student Wenpei Ma, tag teamed the research process. Ma would conduct experiments using very high resolution cameras in Tomac’s lab, and send some of the resulting images and footage to Lepe to analyze. 

“My graduate mentor is working on different types of samples, testing different types of sand to see how fine, coarse and medium sand behave during a mudslide. He takes high resolution footage of these particles moving around during tests so we can see how they bind with each other and make aglomerate, a combination of sand and air particles. He uploads the videos remotely to a drive, and I analyze them from here.”

 From this high resolution footage, Lepe is able to track these very small particles as they move during the experiment, following a single particle across a span of time to see how it behaves, which particles it is drawn to, or if particles in the aglomerate separate when they come in contact with another particle. Tomac’s team will use this information to try and answer questions about how the size of sand particles impacts the speed of mudslides; how gravity impacts different sizes and shapes of particles; and ultimately what we can do to mitigate the impacts of mudslides. 

In addition to this research, the STARS program provides students with GRE and grad school prep; a series of speakers on topics ranging from imposter syndrome to different paths to grad school and the breadth of careers possible with a graduate degree; leadership activities; and a community of students to support one another.

 “I’m a first generation college student so I didn't even know what to expect when it came to applying to graduate school,” said Lepe. “I thought the GRE was just another SAT, and in some ways it is, but there are other components. So having the GRE class definitely helped me see what to expect, but also learn ways that I could effectively study and approach the exam.” 

Lepe said the community building aspects of the STARS program, even virtually, were also particularly helpful.

 “It’s more than just a one summer research program--it’s about finding a community with other like minded individuals and finding ways to build up one another and potentially become more than just people you met during the program, but a resource in the future or someone you could reach out and talk to. It’s definitely about making connections that are more impactful than one summer.”

 Lepe, who has conducted research on renewable energy and power plants at UC Irvine, plans to earn a PhD with a focus on energy systems and propulsion in aerospace, working toward energy alternatives to create more sustainable airplanes. 

 Learn more about the STARS program: https://grad.ucsd.edu/diversity/programs/stars/index.html 

Cameron Yenche: a summer of automation

Alpacas, cancer diagnostics, and autonomous trash-collecting robots, oh my! It’s been a busy summer for mechanical engineering student Cameron Yenche, who interned at medical-grade genetic testing company Invitae in Boulder, Colorado, while also interning remotely for San Diego-based Clear Blue Sea, building a robot to autonomously collect trash in the ocean. 

Yenche, who has a concentration in renewable energy and environmental flows, and a minor in entrepreneurship and innovation, said these two experiences helped solidify why engineering is the right field for him.

“I was able to see that the solutions of engineering can have an impact on so many people,” he said. “I see engineering as the way to have the most impact with my work.”

At Invitae, which provides a variety of genetic testing for medical decision making, including testing of tumors to better treat specific types of cancers, testing for genetic illnesses and prenatal screenings, Yenche worked to develop an autonomous pipetting system to streamline the company’s manufacturing process. He also worked on projects utilizing computer vision to increase production quality control, as well as many other projects that support or enhance diagnostic production capacity. 

“It’s all over the place because the manufacturing process is quite interesting," he said. "Essentially you’re going from proteins and enzymes to capsules, and the process of getting there requires lots of physical processes that involve liquid nitrogen and freeze drying, while being maintained in a certain environment with regards to humidity...it’s complex.”

Outside of automating this manufacturing process, he also spent time working to design a 50-foot version of Clear Blue Sea’s autonomous Floating Robot to Eliminate Debris (FRED). Yenche started with the non-profit in November 2020, and was able to continue his role remotely over the summer. 

“This summer we’ve been focused on scaling up the models of the smaller vessels they already have. I initially came on as a mechanical design engineer-type role–essentially developing the conceptual design of a 50-foot version of the FRED–and it has led into a more project management oriented position, where I am leading the team and also working beside everyone as an engineer.”

The ultimate goal is to have a large mother ship with a fleet of 50-foot FREDs out in the ocean collecting trash autonomously, and bringing it back to the vessel to be processed for recycling there, or stored for processing later.

His biggest surprise of the summer didn’t have anything to do with work, though. 

“Probably the most interesting part about this internship is that I’m living in an AirBnb that’s an alpaca farm,” he said. “It’s kind of crazy. There’s alpacas, and then a bunch of chickens, a pair of ducks. It's really cool. Every morning there’s a rooster that crows, and the alpacas come up and sniff your nose.”

On campus, Yenche was part of the Social Entrepreneurship Association, which introduced him to several of the internships he’s had over the course of his undergraduate years. 

Team Internship Program helps alumnus land industry job

Every summer since 2003, small teams of two to five UC San Diego engineering students have been sent out to local companies, tasked with applying their skills and collaborating with each other and company engineers to complete a real-world project. For Robert Moroto, who earned his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD in mechanical engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering, his Team Internship Program (TIP) experience was so positive that he not only participated for three summers with the same company, but wound up working for the sponsor company, Solar Turbines, once he completed his PhD. 

Jacobs School alumnus
 Robert Moroto

Moroto is now a development engineer in systems and analytics at Solar Turbines, the San Diego-based designer and manufacturer of industrial gas turbines for electrical power generation, marine propulsion, natural gas production and a variety of other uses. He said his TIP experiences were crucial in preparing him for this role. 

“There are probably too many ways TIP was beneficial to list them all,” Moroto said. “If a student’s goal is to do engineering full-time, then, in my opinion, TIP is as close as you can come to getting that experience in a realistic setting with the additional benefits of working in a very close-knit team while in the context of a well-structured program.”

Moroto didn’t know many engineers growing up, so participating in the Team Internship Program helped him get a sense of what a day-in-the-life could be like for an engineer, gaining a better understanding of the workflow, expectations, constraints, and opportunities of engineering in a commercial setting. 

Over the course of the three summers that he participated as a TIP intern with Solar Turbines, Moroto and his teammates were able to develop a virtual sensor to estimate fuel density from data measured by existing non-density sensors on gas turbine engines; investigated an algorithm for estimating the energy content of fuel entering a gas turbine engine; and studied several different methods for reducing the start-up time of Solar Turbines’ gas turbine engines. 

“The biggest reason I decided to pursue a TIP opportunity was because each project is focused on a small team operating in a non-academic setting,” said Moroto. “The advantages of this style of internship really cannot be overstated. The commercial/non-academic setting of TIP is important because projects need to satisfy realistic types of complexity that will not be encountered in school, such as making sure their work can be applied to an entire existing product line, where each product has its own specifications, for example.”

Moroto recommends that any student even slightly curious about TIP keep an eye on the projects listed each year, and take the leap to apply for any that are of interest.  

“If you don’t succeed, the interview process alone is a great experience. If you land a project, then you will probably be given a rare opportunity that may potentially kick start your career.”

Students interested in participating in the Team Internship Program next summer can find more information here. TIP recruitment runs from October through April, so it’s not too early to start thinking about applying!

For companies looking to sponsor a team of two to five engineering students for a summer project, get more information and complete the project description form here. 

Jacobs School engineers recognized as photonics Rising Stars

Two Jacobs School of Engineering affiliates were among the 13 researchers recognized by Laser Focus World’s inaugural Rising Stars Award program. Bioengineering Professor Lingyan Shi, and electrical engineering alumna Sonika Obheroi, were recognized by the magazine for their contributions to the photonics industry. 

Shi, an assistant professor of bioengineering, uses ultrafast optical imaging, including stimulated Raman scattering and multiphoton fluorescence, to look inside cells to answer biological and medical questions, and even diagnose disease. Read her Rising Star showcase here, and learn more about her research in this profile. 

Obheroi, who earned her master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from UC San Diego, is now a product manager for near-eye display test products at Gamma Scientific. These devices emulate the human eye for accurate characterization of AR/VR/MR and heads-up displays. Read her Rising Star showcase here. 

High throughput screening of biosensors directly in mammalian cells enables live cell imaging and drug screening

by Longwei Liu

Fluorescent biosensors based on fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET), a microscope imaging technology that uses fluorescent color changes to measure active molecular actions, have revolutionized biomedical science by enabling the direct measurement of signaling activities in living cells.

However, scientists face a big challenge when developing FRET biosensors—they are largely developed by trial and error, making it cumbersome for scientists to identify high-performance FRET biosensors. Now, bioengineers at the University of California San Diego developed a technology that can identify such biosensors with ease.

The technology, called FRET-Seq platform, is the first to accomplish this feat. It couples FRET signals to next-generation sequencing techniques that are capable of screening large-scale libraries directly in mammalian cells. The FRET readings from single cells expressing the biosensors are then used to screen and sort cells into different groups. The sorted cells then get analyzed by next-generation sequencing, which helps scientists to identify the biosensor sequences.

The UC San Diego team, led by postdoctoral researcher Longwei Liu and former Ph.D. student Praopim Limsakul from the lab of bioengineering professor Peter Yingxiao Wang, detailed their work in a paper published Aug 19 in Nature Communications.

FRET-Seq also uses a new self-activating FRET (saFRET) design, in which a kinase domain is linked to the conventional biosensor and causes the activation. This design can overcome difficulties in mammalian-cell library screening caused by the heterogenic kinase activities from individual cells. Counter-sorting strategy associated with this design further improves both sensitivity and specificity of biosensors during the screening process.

The biosensors developed through this platform have better sensitivity when applied in live-cell imaging, which allows applications evaluating immune T cell functions and screening drugs. In fact, ZAP70 is a critical kinase involved in many diseases, including autoimmunity, organ transplant rejection, graft-versus-host disease, or B cell CLL. Using the ZAP70 biosensor designed in this work, Liu and colleagues have screened a kinase inhibitor library and identified several inhibitors, including FDA-approved cancer drugs, that can be repurposed to inhibit ZAP70 activity and hence, related autoimmune diseases.

Looking into the future, the team is extending this FRET-seq technology as a general platform for the development of other high-performance and ultrasensitive biosensors for single cell imaging. The team is also integrating the high content screening platforms equipped with fully automated cellular imaging apparatus and analysis algorithms to screen large-scale compound libraries for drug discovery.

Other contributors of this work include: Yan Huang, Reed E. S. Harrison, Tse-Shun Huang, Yiwen Shi, Yiyan Yu, Krit Charupanit, Sheng Zhong, Shaoying Lu, Jin Zhang, and Shu Chien as well as the team of Xianhui Meng and Jie Sun from Zhejiang University.

Faculty assistant in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering is recognized with Exemplary Employee of the Year Award

 

Lusia Veksler, a faculty assistant in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has received an Exemplary Employee of the Year award. Veksler is being recognized for her service to the department’s faculty, graduate students and operations. 

Veksler founded and leads a Communication in English program for graduate students in mechanical and aerospace engineering, who are using English as a second language. Her aim has been to encourage greater engagement by students new to the community, who find communicating with other students to be a challenge. Faculty said they found her efforts to be beneficial as these graduate students become more outgoing, assertive, and positive. 

Veksler also provided graduate student assistance and advice for a faculty member’s large research group of about a dozen graduate students when that faculty member ended up unexpectedly in the emergency room. This helped to avoid significant struggles for the entire group.

She supported a PhD student in an mental health crisis emergency by personally speaking with her on the phone no fewer than 10 times and no fewer than five times in person in a two-week period. She also escorted the student to Counseling and Psychological Services (UCSD CAPS) to seek counseling and avoid self-harm. The student has since recovered and returned to graduate studies.

On the operations side, Veksler led an initiative to obtain software for pre-submission plagiarism detection in research-related publications to avoid adverse impact on UC San Diego and our faculty. Over a six-month period, she negotiated on behalf of a group of faculty that grew to include research groups across the Jacobs School of Engineering to obtain a per-user license for iThenticate for $10/year, significantly reduced from an incredibly expensive $100/use fee that some faculty were paying. The software streamlines assessment of plagiarism to a few second effort via an online interface.

Veksler also recorded several brief video training programs for faculty and students to cope with the changeover to SAP Concur travel and expense service, tailoring them to the attention and time-crunched people in these groups. 

She has no doubt saved the university substantial costs and helped the faculty and students under her care adhere to university practices, procedures and policies, researchers said.

Veksler also participates in the department’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusiveness (EDI) Committee as a staff member of her own accord. She is a vocal member of this committee and an invaluable advocate for traditionally underrepresented groups in the department, faculty said.

Nate Linden: Rock climber, engineer, Sloan Scholar

Nate Linden has been curious about how things work for as long as he can remember. From a young kid pretending to be a plumber, to a high school intern developing an app to monitor blood loss during surgery, he figured out that engineering and math could help explain a lot of the mechanics behind the way the world works. After earning a degree in bioengineering and a minor in applied math at the University of Washington, Linden is now a PhD student at UC San Diego, where he found it was possible to pursue both his love of biology, as well as computational science. 

“My curiosity to understand how things work has always driven my passion for learning and made a career in research an obvious decision. I decided to pursue a Ph.D. because it enables me to pursue this career and to solve problems that impact our understanding of biology and medicine,” said Linden. “I chose UC San Diego because of the unique opportunity to work with both Professor Boris Kramer and Professor Padmini Rangamani. Entering my undergrad in bioengineering, I was passionate about tackling problems in biology and medicine. However, I quickly developed a passion for math and computation as I took more mathematics and computational science classes. When I was choosing where to do my PhD I was looking for opportunities to combine my interests in biology and computational science. At UC San Diego I get to study fascinating biology and medicine by developing and using sophisticated mathematical methods.”

Linden is working with Kramer and Rangamani, both in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, to build mathematical models of intracellular signaling systems, allowing us to study how cells respond to external stimuli. He is a Sloan Scholar, a fellowship awarded to 12 incoming UC San Diego graduate students each year. The fellowship is meant to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists of outstanding promise. Sloan Scholars receive a $40,000 award to be used over four years.

“A major challenge in constructing these models is ensuring that the responses we predict align with the responses we observe in experiments. To address this challenge, I develop and employ computational methods that calibrate our models to accurately predict the biology observed in the lab. We can then use these models to study how changes in cellular systems lead to complications such as cancer. My work ensures that we can 'trust’ the results that we obtain by simulating the biological system.”

Linden climbing in Red Rocks, outside of Las Vegas

Outside of research, Linden is an avid rock climber who ranked nationally in youth competitions. Though he doesn’t compete at that level anymore, he said that making time to climb not only helps him feel his best physically, but mentally too.

“I have been rock climbing since I was 10 years old, and I began competing a few years after that. Since high school, I have not competed on the national level, but I still try to enter local community events when I can. I do try to go climbing outside whenever I have spare time on the weekend. It definitely took some work to figure out how to manage my time between work and going climbing. The most important thing for me is realizing that I am more productive when I take time to get away from research. Climbing has been a hugely important part of my life, and making sure that I balance my time between work and climbing helps me be more focused at work.”

Unusual “cool flames” documented aboard International Space Station

A team of researchers, including engineers at UC San Diego, documented an entirely new class of fire aboard the International Space Station. The spherical cool diffusion flames, or simply "cool flames," could ignite development of the combustion engine of the future. Read the full release from the University of Maryland.

Cool flames are aptly named: They burn at extremely low temperatures and emit a near-invisible blue glow. (For comparison, a natural gas burner at high heat on a conventional stove top can burn at around 3100 degrees Fahrenheit/2000 Kelvin; a typical cool flame hovers around 900 degrees Fahrenheit/800 Kelvin.) They are also somewhat mysterious: As recently as 10 years ago, cool flames had only been theoretically predicted. First observed during an experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2012, the cool flames appeared only briefly before the liquid fuel was depleted. The sighting catalyzed an emerging, rapidly growing field in combustion research.

Forman Williams, a professor emeritus of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC San Diego, has been working on fire research and fire safety with NASA since the 1970s. For this most recent experiment and discovery, he collaborated with researchers from the University of Maryland and Washington University in St. Louis. The team launched to the ISS in late 2020 an experiment designed to generate controlled cool flames that burn, steadily, for at least two minutes. 

In a first for microgravity flame research, they achieved this feat—with the help of astronauts aboard the ISS testing a variety of gas fuels—on June 23, 2021. 

"This may help improve our knowledge of cool-flame chemistry, which is involved in the design of better internal combustion engines," said Williams. "I didn't expect to find these stable cool flames because the stabilization mechanism for them in droplet combustion is absent, but apparently there is a related stabilization mechanism for these gaseous fuels."

Williams has been involved in these experiments to better understand fire here on Earth by pushing the limits in space for decades, including leading experiments to improve fire-fighting techniques in space and better understand combustion on Earth, and leading the design of the experiments that led to the first observation of this new type of cool burning flames.

ISPE hosts Ideathon to bring student projects to life

By Melissa Hernandez

The International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering student chapter at UC San Diego is dedicated to advancing pharmaceutical manufacturing professionals, and educating interested students about the field and career opportunities. The student organization provides opportunities for members to connect with industry professionals and further develop their skills, and the group found a way to do both simultaneously through their first Ideathon.

Participants at the first ISPE Ideathon

Anahid Foroughishafiei, a bioengineering student and ISPE project team chair, was inspired to develop the Ideathon event after her experience creating a student project team based on research she was conducting in the field of metastasis. Foroughishafiei thought that those types of opportunities should be shared with the broader student community at UC San Diego.

“I was working on a project where I wanted to make a computer model of what I was working on in the lab at Moores Cancer Center, and I thought it would be cool to work on something similar with other students,” Foroughishafiei said. “I didn’t want to be the only student who makes their own projects, so I thought ‘How do we make interdisciplinary projects with other undergraduate students?’ That is how the Ideathon first came to be.”

The International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering recently held their first Ideathon where students, no matter their field of study, were encouraged to create projects within the pharmaceutical field while taking into account sustainability and socioeconomic factors. 

“We asked students to submit a proposal of a project they wanted to work on, and they could apply as a team or individuals that would be paired together based on preferences on the application,” Foroughishafiei said. “We had judges from different fields of engineering industry, and after the competition, three teams are now being supported and the upcoming board will help pair them with faculty.”

Foroughishafiei and the Ideathon team arranged for three industry judges from Nova Engineering, BD BioSciences and D&K Engineering, to determine the top three teams who will receive funding through the next school year for their projects.

One of the three winning projects was a 
telemedicine booth for patients from
low-resource settings.

Ultimately, the judges selected three winning project proposals: a telemedicine booth for patients from low-resource settings to virtually visit and have a private setting to receive medical care and guidance; a sensor that identifies pollutants in the air to help guide the user’s behavior outside based on air quality; and a wearable device to monitor the user’s health powered by using their body heat.

The organization is actively pairing each finalist team with a faculty member who will serve as a mentor, to begin working on their projects during the upcoming summer and school year. After a successful Ideathon--held virtually on Zoom-- Foroughishafiei hopes to continue this competition next year in person.

“Currently we are working on getting more funding for the team’s projects so that is the focus, but once we get the ball rolling and the projects started we can move forward,” Foroughishafiei said. “ISPE is really all about collaboration. I want the future to hold more opportunities like Ideathon, but to be very interactive and collaborative across campus.”

The Ideathon competition is a prime example of how ISPE provides opportunities for its members to be a part of a project and connect with industry professionals. Not only does the Ideathon do that, but it allows ISPE members to share these opportunities with students from across campus as well.

Sloan Scholar Kristen Susuki: keeping our structures safe through better analysis

Structural engineering PhD student Kristen Susuki is a fourth-generation Japanese American who came to San Diego by way of the Midwest: she hails from St. Louis, Missouri and earned her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At UC San Diego, Susuki is researching a type of numerical analysis called meshfree methods, which are used to more accurately understand and model the durability of structures during catastrophic failure.

“Normally when you need to analyze a structure, you are looking to find stress, displacement, etc,” said Susuki. “To do that, you try to break down the structure into simple geometry. You may not know how an airplane will deform when loaded because its geometry is complex, but you can approximate it by using a bunch of simpler shapes like cubes and tetrahedra.” 

While this method of using smaller shapes to break down a larger, more complex problem—which is called finite element analysis—works, it isn’t as effective when testing a large deformation.

“That's where meshfree methods come in. Meshfree methods are really good at analyzing these types of problems because they treat everything like individual particles, so they have applications to a lot of "extreme" events—landslide problems, fracture, explosive welding, etc,” said Susuki. 

Susuki studies these analytical methods in the lab of JSChen, a professor of structural engineering at UC San Diego. The story of how she came to work in this lab is a lesson in taking advantage of every opportunity thrown your way and not letting fear get in the way.

“Right before I started applying to PhD programs, I drafted up a list of groups and PIs that I was really interested in working with. As if by a stroke of luck, one of the professors that was high on my list came to my university for a guest lecture. There was an email floating around asking people in my department to host the guest professor for an hour during the day to fill out his schedule. I signed up, but then started getting so nervous because I realized that the email was meant for faculty members and current grad students. I almost took my name off the list because I felt so underqualified to even talk to this professor. Thank goodness I didn't though. That professor was Prof. JS Chen of the Structural Engineering department at UC San Diego, my current PI. In that hour that I was hosting, we chatted about research and food and life. We really hit it off, and from then on I was pretty certain that UC San Diego was my top pick.”

Not only is Susuki now a student in Chen’s lab, but she also received a Sloan Scholar fellowship, awarded to 12 incoming UC San Diego graduate students each year. The fellowship is meant to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists of outstanding promise. Sloan Scholars receive a $40,000 award to be used over four years.

Outside of research, Susuki loves to travel—she’s been to 43 states and 23 countries spanning four continents. While she doesn’t have a favorite location—“every place I’ve been has been so unique”— she’s most excited for a trip to Japan that was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

She’s also passionate about increasing female representation in her field of mechanics and in STEM in general.

“I remember in college, especially in my last two years, how few women were in my classes. The first time it happened, I was shocked. By the last time, I barely noticed because that had become the norm. Oftentimes, I was both the only woman and the only person of color in my classes, which felt overwhelming. Having mentors that looked like me really helped me overcome the self-doubt I was feeling because I was able to talk to them about their experiences as female engineers and relate to some of their struggles/frustrations. Representation played such an important role for me in my educational career, and I really want to pay it forward because it's hard to envision yourself doing something if you haven't seen anyone else like you do before.”

Mechanical Engineering Ranks #4 in USA

Congratulations to everyone in our Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department here at UC San Diego. We just ranked #4 in the USA and #8 in the world. This mechanical engineering ranking is from the 2021 Global Ranking of Academic Subjects from Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) from ShanghaiRanking. 

This ranking reflects the world-class excellence and real-world impact of the research we pursue everyday. This ranking also reflects the fact that our entire community of students, staff and faculty knows how to work together toward common goals in education, research, and the transfer of innovations to society.

~ George R. Tynan

Professor and Chair

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

UC San Diego computer scientist wins UC San Diego Chancellor's Dissertation Medal

UC San Diego computer science PhD student Zexiang Xu has been selected as this year's Chancellor's Dissertation Medal recipient within the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Xu is currently a research scientist at Adobe Research. 

 

Zexiang Xu was advised by computer science professor Ravi Ramamoorthi, who is Director of the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing.

 

Zexiang Xu's abstract: Sparse Sampling for Appearance Acquisition

 

Dissertation Abstract

Modeling the appearance of real scenes from captured images is one key problem in computer graphics and computer vision. This traditionally requires a large number of input samples (e.g. images, light-view directions, depth hypotheses, etc.) and consumes extensive computational resources. In this dissertation, we aim to make scene acquisition more efficient and practical, and we present several approaches that successfully reduce the required number of samples in various appearance acquisition problems.

 

We exploit techniques to explicitly reconstruct the geometry and materials in a real scene; the two components essentially determine the scene appearance. On the geometry side, we introduce a novel deep multi-view stereo technique that can reconstruct high-quality scene geometry from a sparse set of sampling depth hypotheses. We leverage uncertainty estimation in a multi-stage cascaded network, which reconstructs highly accurate and highly complete geometry with low costs in a coarse-to-fine framework. On the material side, the reflectance of a real material is traditionally measured by tens and even hundreds of captured images. We present a novel reflectance acquisition technique that can reconstruct high-fidelity real materials from only two near-field images.

 

Moreover, we exploit image-based acquisition techniques that bypass explicit scene reconstruction and focus on realistic image synthesis under new conditions. We first present a novel deep neural network for image-based relighting. Our network simultaneously learns optimized input lighting directions and a relighting function. Our approach can produce photo-realistic relighting results under novel environment maps from only five images captured under five optimized directional lights. We also study the problem of view synthesis for real objects under controlled lighting, which classically requires dense input views with small baselines. We propose a novel deep learning based view synthesis technique that can synthesize photo-realistic images from novel views across six widely-spaced input views. Our network leverages visibility-aware attention information to effectively aggregate multi-view appearance. We also show that our view synthesis technique can be combined with our relighting technique to achieve novel-view relighting from sparse light-view samples.

Jacobs School faculty, lecturers named Distinguished Teachers

 Three members of the Jacobs School community were selected to receive Distinguished Teaching Awards from the UC San Diego Academic Senate. The prestigious Distinguished Teaching Award is bestowed upon up to five members of the Academic Senate, three non-Senate faculty members, and three graduate students at UC San Diego each year, to recognize and honor the important role excellent teaching plays at the University. The Committee on Distinguished Teaching seeks to select those who exhibit creativity, innovative teaching methods, the ability to motivate students to actively seek out knowledge, and an extraordinary level of teaching commitment.

James Friend, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Joe Gibbs Politz, an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, received Distinguished Teaching Awards for Senate Members. Katya Evdokimenko, a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received a Barbara and Paul Saltman Distinguished Teaching Award, Non-Senate Members.

Learn more about all three Jacobs School of Engineering recipients below. 

James Friend, professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Q: What do you teach?

A: I teach a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses, including dynamics, acoustofluidics, computer aided analysis and design, and cardiovascular fluid mechanics, to name a few. 

Q: What do you enjoy about teaching?

A: I think I most enjoy seeing students eager to learn develop in the time I have with them to learn the topics we cover and become better at them than I ever was. I also enjoy learning myself, and teaching new courses gives me the opportunity to really learn the material well enough to be able to teach it. 

Q: Why is teaching an important, integral part of your job?

A: I love teaching! While research is satisfying, and I enjoy the experience of personal and professional growth that it gives me, I really enjoy the consistent reward of seeing students advance week to week, asking questions, seeing the light turn on and them applying what they’ve learned to new things, to things I’ve not considered. And to witness them talking to each other about the material with excitement and new ideas. It’s most gratifying.

Joe Gibbs Politz, assistant teaching professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Q: What do you teach?

A: An explicit goal of mine has been to teach courses across our whole curriculum to get a thorough firsthand picture of what students experience in our program. I've taught a wide variety of courses in our lower division, ranging from majority non-major courses for folks just getting into CS, to discrete math, to core programming and data structures courses. I also teach our senior-level and graduate compilers courses, which are about creating and improving programming languages, an area that I find has a wonderful synthesis of theory and engineering.

Q: What do you enjoy about teaching?

A: Lots of things! One of the most impactful is hearing from students that something they learned in my classes showed up in their work or helped them accomplish something in another context. We put a lot of effort into making our courses and projects teach fundamental concepts through practical applications. Seeing that pay off is always gratifying.

Q: Why is teaching an important, integral part of your job?

A: Our students are so inspiring! The come from all kinds of backgrounds, work hard, and take advantage of the opportunities in our classes. Teaching is important to me because it's the most direct way I can use what I know to support them.

Evdokimenko with her students

Ekaterina "Katya" Evdokimenko, lecturer in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Q: What do you teach?

A: I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on topics ranging from the Elements of Materials Science, to Biomaterials and Medical Devices and Mechanical Behavior of Materials. I also teach several enrichment classes for the IDEA Engineering Student Center, including Fundamentals of Engineering Applications and Introduction to Engineering Research.

Q: What do you enjoy about teaching?

A: The students’ motivation, their genuine interest and their wonderful questions! Those questions are the key part of the whole entire teaching process, since they promote conversation and help to understand the subject on the next level of complexity. 

When not teaching, Evdokimenko 
can be found scaling rock walls!

Q: You've developed a post-lecture question component to your classes, can you talk about that?

A: I incorporated a daily “extra-credit part” into most of my classes. This part consists of  questions/problems/free responses at the end of every lecture on the topic covered at the previous lecture. I grade this part myself and study the answers before the next lecture to see what students understood and didn't understand, and modify my next lecture accordingly. Also, I am providing my personal feedback to every student for this extra-credit part, which helps them a lot to comprehend the material covered in the class more deeply. This process also gives me the idea on what parts should be discussed in more detail.