The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is meeting employer needs in STEM

At the U.S. News STEM Solutions 2017 conference, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Dean Albert P. Pisano participated in the closing keynote session. Pisano shared the stage with Rep. Scott Peters; Debra Reed, Chairman, President and CEO of Sempra Energy; Francis deSouza, President and CEO of Illumina; and Mark Dankberg, Chairman of the Board and CEO of ViaSat.

The high-powered group discussed the importance of meeting the STEM challenges in San Diego and beyond, as well as the key roles that community colleges play in filling the STEM pipeline.

“I spend a lot of time listening to corporate executives to learn from them exactly what their workforce needs are, so that we at the Jacobs School can be preparing students to the best of our ability,” said Pisano.

Increasing and supporting STEM-related degree programs at institutions of higher education is crucial, but it’s the not whole picture, Pisano noted. If students don't know what types of STEM jobs are available to them, how will they know to choose a STEM field of study?

Pisano highlighted the need to introduce to students at a young age the various types of STEM careers that are available to them.

The Jacobs School of Engineering helps in this important task through a variety of outreach programs, some of which are run by the Jacobs School’s IDEA Engineering Student Center. In addition, the Jacobs School administers UC San Diego’s instantiation of the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, or COSMOS.

COSMOS is a four-week residential program for high school students with demonstrated achievements in math and science that gives this kind of introduction to a career in engineering. COSMOS is offered at four University of California campuses and aims to encourage high school students interested in science, technology, engineering and math to continue pursuing these fields in college.

At UC San Diego, COSMOS has been in place for 12 years. Students who are admitted to the program select from nine clusters depending on their interests, which range from computers in everyday life and the amazing red blood cell, to tissue engineering and robot inventors.

Read about COSMOS 2016 here.

Learn how to apply to COSMOS here.

Ph.D. alum helps make robotics and programming accessible

As a Ph.D. student at the Jacobs School of Engineering, Nick Morozovsky built many robots, including SkySweeper, a power line inspector, and Switchblade, a roving and balancing robot. And he worked on bringing robotics to everyone, especially young students.

Morozovsky worked with Solana Beach-based Rokenbok Education on a robotics kit that teaches children as young as 8 how to program Arduino microcontrollers. The ROKbuino Programmable Robotics Set is now available on Kickstarter for $99 off its retail pricing. Morozovsky designed the original prototypes on a low-cost 3D printer. Rokenbok is now seeking funding to mass-produce the kits by using injection molding, which is much faster but requires a significant upfront capital investment. The company hopes to bring the sets to homes across the country as well as under-served schools where children have limited access to STEM opportunities.

The kit allows students to connect motors and a variety of sensors to build and program a beetle bot, a scorpion hunter and a Ferris Wheel. It includes more than 400 building components. The Kickstarter campaign runs until June 30.

After earning his Ph.D. in 2014, Morozovsky co-founded start up Accel Robotics with fellow Jacobs School alum Marius Buibas. 

Morozovsky with SkySweeper, a robot designed to inspect power lines.

Robot and computer scientists featured on Innovate 8 TV show

MiP, the robot created by the UCSD Coordinated Robotics Lab and WowWee and ThoughtSTEM, a company founded by two Jacobs School computer science grad students were recently featured on Innovate 8, a program produced by CBS News 8 in partnership with UC San Diego and the San Diego County Office of Education. 
Watch below:

COSMOS celebrates 10th anniversary

It's a good way to celebrate your 10th anniversary: for the first time this year, there are more girls than boys at COSMOS, a four-week residential STEM outreach program here at UC San Diego. This summer, girls made up 52 percent of students in the program for the first time in history.

Students have the choice between nine different tracks, or clusters, to study, including making their own biodiesel from renewable resources; tissue engineering and regenerative medicine; and new this year, music and technology, where they're learning to manipulate sound electronically and make their own instruments.

We dropped by the biofuels cluster Tuesday, July 8, with a local TV crew. Students were learning all about washing their biofuel to discard impurities. A few pictures of the fun below. That cluster is led by chemistry teaching professor Skip Pomeroy, with the help of Renee Williams, a UC Presidential postdoctoral fellow.

Each cluster also works with high school teachers, who get to bring the curriculum back to their campuses. Julie Baker-Conte, a high school biology teacher at San Pasqual High in Escondido, is working with Pomeroy this year.

"The students get some really good hands-on lab experience with equipment that's not available at the high school level," she said.

This Jacobs School Ph.D. student is now a toy maker

Just because you're about to get a Ph.D., it doesn't mean you have to stop playing with toys--or at least making them. That's the lesson we take away from the career trajectory of one of our graduate students here at the Jacobs School.
We caught up with Nick Morozovsky at the booth for the toy company Rokenbok at the Bay Area Maker Faire May 17 to 18. The Solana Beach-based company recently partnered with Kid*Spark, an organization that aims to make STEaM and Maker education more accessible and fun, and created an Open Source Library of building parts that can be 3D printed. That's where Morozovsky comes in. He set up the library for Rokenbok and created an interface that allows users to 3D-print customizable parts as well.
While a 3D-printer hummed nearby, Morozovsky explained how the library worked. Meanwhile, kids were building catapults made of Rokenbok pieces and playing with remote controlled vehicles.
The booth later won an editor's choice award from Make magazine. Morozovsky plans to graduate sometime this year. We'll see where his next adventure in toy land takes him.