UC San Diego Space and Rocket Science Makes Strong Showing at Barrio Logan Event

Space science and rockets built by UC San Diego students were front and center at the Barrio Logan Science and Art Expo on April 16, 2022. 

The event is an inclusive, annual art, science and culture fair for families from southern San Diego, organized in partnership by the Barrio Logan Association, the San Diego Festival for Science and Engineering, UC San Diego and other community partners. 

This year, two student organizations joined Professor Boris Kramer from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to crew a booth themed "Space Research at UCSD."

"We got a lot of attention," said Boris Kramer, a professor in the department, who was also in attendance. "It is incredibly rewarding to take part in these outreach events." 

Kramer's research group, whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation, showed recent research in space weather forecasting. They also investigate how holes in the sun's corona and solar storms can cause disruptions to satellites and GPS as well as cause Earth-based power outages. 

SEDS@UC San Diego showed off Vulcan I, the world's first rocket powered by a 3D printed engine to be designed and launched by undergraduate students in 2016. The organization has also developed a testing set up for static firing, various rocket engines, a lander testbed and more. 

The Rocket Propulsion Laboratory showcased their Phoenix rocket, designed to reach up to 50,000 ft in altitude, as well as their Marginal Stability rocket, which is designed to reach the Von Karman line typically considered the edge of space, at 52 miles above the surface of the Earth. 

 

Tara Javidi awarded $1M NSF grant to make wireless networks more resilient

Tara Javidi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego, has received a $1M award from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Computer and Network System as part of NSF’s new Resilient & Intelligent NextG Systems (RINGS) program.

Javidi, who is a founding co-director of the Center for Machine-Intelligence, Computing and Security (MICS) at UC San Diego, was awarded the grant to design a new generation of wireless networks that are resilient to unforeseen disruptive events, such as a weather event that can disable base station operations. The specific aim of the project is to design intelligent and actively vigilant networks that are in a constant state of preparedness, continually adapting their view of the world by actively sensing the environment, learning from the past, and counterfactually reasoning about the system’s future.

To bring intelligence and vigilance to these wireless networks, Javidi’s team will work on providing a novel active resiliency paradigm that senses both the internal system state and the external environment to learn and reason about anomalies. The inclusion of sensing into a future physical layer will be a cornerstone of realizing next generation wireless networks such as 6G. Joint sensing and communication will enable high performance allocation of limited resources and create the ability for the network to reason about itself and its environment.

Project title: LARA: Layering for Active Resiliency and Awareness in Next-generation in Wireless Networks

Rebecca Gow: using bioengineering to study movement and injury prevention in athletes

 By Kiran Kumar

Rebecca Gow as an undergraduate
rugby player. Now, she's using
bioengineering tools to prevent
injury in athletes.

UC San Diego bioengineering graduate student Rebecca Gow is currently working on a project to study movement competency in athletes, specifically female soccer players. Movement competency refers to how a certain movement or physical task is performed, and how it can correlate to injury. Gow, a student in bioengineering Professor Andrew McCulloch’s Cardiac Mechanics Research Laboratory, was particularly excited to contribute to this research since she’s been an athlete her whole life.

“I played softball for about 12 years, all the way up through high school, and then played rugby in college,” said Gow. “I was very much interested in conducting research with athletes.”

After receiving Institutional Review Board approval, Gow and researchers in McCulloch’s lab will work directly with athletes to study movement competency using a novel screening approach. These movement screen tests are crucial for training and injury prevention; however, most existing screening tools are visual assessments, and can miss minor functional deficits when observing movement competency and identifying asymmetries and postural deficiencies in athletes.

“Movement quality is currently assessed visually so this can be subjective and affected by how well trained the reviewer is,” said Gow.

Instead, Gow will use Inertial Measurement Units (IMUs) to provide a less subjective, mathematical alternative to the existing visual screen tests.  IMUs are small devices used to determine the orientation of, for example, a body segment. Athletes will wear them while performing a set sequence of actions and the data will be used to calculate joint angles. With a physics based analysis, this data will help explain the link between movement patterns and incidence of injury.

Another benefit of using IMUs is that these movement tests could then be done in a natural athletic setting, instead of having athletes come into a lab for a traditional motional analysis screening.

Ultimately, this new way to study movement could explain how different movement patterns lead to injury in the short and long term, helping prevent injury for athletes, as well as people performing everyday tasks.

Gow met McCulloch at a bioengineering department social, where she was also introduced to the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, which this project is part of. The Alliance is a scientific collaboration among six universities including UC San Diego, that aims to transform human health on a global scale through the discovery and translation of the biological principles underlying human performance. For Gow, that means playing a role in injury prevention.

“I think that the Alliance is a great opportunity to make connections and collaborate with researchers all over the United States to do groundbreaking research,” said Gow. “It is an incredible group of people that I can learn more from.”

Help us reach our goal for Franklin Antonio Hall

 Maybe you’ve joined the virtual hard hat tours. Maybe you’ve read about the new construction. Maybe you've even seen it for yourself along Voigt Drive. But the big news is that Franklin Antonio Hall is nearly open and you can help support it. Franklin Antonio Hall is nearly 200,000 square feet of research, education, and creation space that is helping make bold possible at the Jacobs School. 

Alumni, corporations, and community members have truly stepped up to help make Franklin Antonio Hall a reality. We’ve raised over $59M toward our $60M goal for the new building. Thank you to all of our supporters. 

You can help, with a gift of your own. You can make a tax deductible gift online HERE. If interested, naming opportunities begin at $25,000 and can be paid over a five-year period. If interested, please contact (518) 331-1120 or sburns@eng.ucsd.edu 

Watch live as the Hall is being built: 

https://app.truelook.com/?m=156948519641077310033550