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.