Have a Green Idea? Ready to Commercialize It?

If you are working on a project that will benefit the environment, and if you have have an idea of how to turn that idea into a commercially viable product, then next week's TriNet Mixer at UC San Diego may be for you...you's have the opportunity to win funding & business mentoring.

The event is on November 13, 2012 at the Jacobs School of Engineering, in the Qualcomm Conference Room.

Register for TriNet here.

This is a von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center event. 

The goal of the Challenge, sponsored by the Scripps Foundation, is to promote innovation and commercialization within the three schools and provide entrepreneurially-minded scientists and engineers with the opportunity to develop and advance their technology's commercialization plan while providing an avenue for potential funding. The Challenge provides networking opportunities - bringing together scientists and engineers with entrepreneurs - and personalized mentoring by experienced businesspersons. The top three projects will also receive cash prizes. See flyer for more details.

November 13th 2 pm - 4 pm: Come to the TriNet Mixer! Join us for pizza, snacks, and an opportunity to network with scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. See flyer.

Free Event / Meet a Brackets lead contributor and the co-founder and CEO of Geeklist

Lunch and Learn: Building a Desktop-Quality App on Web Technologies

Brackets is an MIT-licensed open-source code editor for web design and development. It’s built on top of open web standards (JavaScript, HTML and CSS) so if you have the skills to use Brackets, you have the skills to contribute, extend and hack on Brackets. In this session, Jason from the Brackets team will describe the overall architecture of Brackets as it stands today, and share some of their early experiences with large-scale JavaScript development. 

• Jason San Jose, Computer Scientist at Adobe and a lead contributor to the Brackets open source project
• Reuben Katz, Co-founder and CEO of Geeklist 
• Hosted by Teradata

Startup Weekend San Diego / Nov 16 - 18

Startup Weekend San Diego is coming up...it starts a week from tomorrow...Nov 16.

Check out the video below, or learn more at http://sandiego.startupweekend.org/

Curiosity Engineer Talks About "Seven Minutes of Terror"

NASA researchers called it the "seven minutes of terror:" the time difference between the moment when the Mars rover Curiosity would actually touch down on the red planet and the moment when the ground crew, on Earth, would find out if everything had gone according to plan.

Brian Schratz, the engineer in charge of telecommunications during Curiosity's descent and entry relived some of these moments during a talk to the Jacobs School of Engineering Friday. He spoke to an audience of about 200 students, faculty and staff members at the new Structural and Materials Engineering building. He even brought props, including some spare rover tires, spare fabric from the rover's supersonic parachute and a miniature replica of Curiosity.

Here are some interesting and fun quotes from Schratz's talk:

"Mars is our best chance to find life itself...or its building blocks."

On the importance of communications: the only thing worse than losing a Multi-billion dollar mission is not knowing why.

Landing Curiosity while monitoring other Mars orbiters is like an orchestrated ballet.

On landing day: it was just a really weird day when everything when the right way.

On orbiter pictures of Curiosity: We basically made a mess of the surface. It's really cool to see where we are on Mars from something else than us.

The landing was a mix of relief and worry: "Yes!" when something worked. "Oh no!" immediately after as engineers were worrying about something else.

I didn't realize how far in the pond the ripples would go (from the landing).

Study hard and come work for us!

Want more information on internships and fellowships at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena? Go here: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/education/internships/

Curiosity Engineer to Speak at UC San Diego

The engineer in charge of telecommunications during Curiosity's entry and descent into the Martian atmosphere is speaking from noon to 1 p.m. Nov. 2 at UC San Diego's new Structural and Materials Engineering building. 

Brian Schratz will give a first-hand account of what it was like to work in mission control the night Curiosity, also known as the Mars Science Laboratory, landed. He also will present an overview of the spacecraft's mission.

At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Schratz is responsible for ensuring that Curiosity's hardware and software is designed correctly to transmit critical entry, descent and landing data in real time. He also coordinates communications with the three Mars orbiters, and NASA and European Space Agency tracking stations on Earth.

Schartz joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory full-time in 2009, after receiving his master's in electrical engineering from Penn State in 2008 and serving as a Fulbright fellow in Norway. He also was a fellow in NASA's graduate Student Research Program. As a student, he led and developed instruments used for several balloon, rocket and satellite projects.

The event is sponsored by The California Space Grant Consortium, headquartered at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, and The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. For more information, email  tlazzouni@ucsd.edu or call  (858) 822-1597.

Free Student Tickets / “What’s Past is Prologue: Creating the Life Sciences Industry in San Diego”

UC San Diego students who are interested in attending “What’s Past is Prologue:  Creating the Life Sciences Industry in San Diego” just might get free tickets. Keep reading to find out more about the event. For info on getting a hold of free tickets, contact Andy Newsham at anewsham@ucsd.edu

San Diego’s Biotech Industry Legends to Discuss Insights into Past & Future Nov. 7

Three legendary San Diego venture capitalists will discuss past lessons learned and thoughts about the future of local commercial biotech ventures during the first in a series of planned “conversations” Nov. 7 in Calit2’s Atkinson Hall at UC San Diego. The event is being billed as the first of its kind in San Diego.

“What’s Past is Prologue:  Creating the Life Sciences Industry in San Diego” is sponsored by the Life Sciences Foundation and the UC San Diego Library, and is co-sponsored by Connect and Sughrue, with community partners Biocom and San Diego Venture Group.  The panelists, who will offer their insights into the past and future of San Diego biotech, will include Jim Blair of Domain Associates, Kevin Kinsella of Avalon Ventures, and Tim Wollaeger of Sanderling Partners. Ivor Royston of Forward Ventures will serve as moderator. The 4 p.m. discussion will be followed by a reception at 5 p.m.

Blair, Kinsella and Wollaeger helped to create the San Diego life sciences industry more than 30 years ago, and remain active today. Creating such high profile companies as Dura Pharmaceuticals, Vertex and Pyxis, they will discuss the birth of San Diego’s life sciences cluster, current conditions, and their vision for the future.

Moderator Ivor Royston, M.D., is a founding managing partner of Forward Ventures. Dr. Royston has been involved in the biotechnology industry in San Diego from its inception in 1978 with the founding of Hybritech, Inc., later acquired by Eli Lilly, and with the founding of Idec Pharmaceuticals in 1986, which later merged with Biogen.

Jim Blair has been a partner of Domain Associates since its founding in 1985. Dr. Blair has over 40 years’ experience with venture and emerging growth companies. He has been involved in the creation and successful development at the board level of over 40 life sciences ventures, including Amgen, Aurora Biosciences, Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Applied Biosystems, Dura Pharmaceuticals, GeneOhm Sciences, Molecular Dynamics, NuVasive, Pharmion and Volcano.

Kevin Kinsella founded Avalon Ventures in 1983. He has specialized in the formation, financing and/or development of more than 100 early-stage companies. Kinsella was the founding chairman of Athena Neurosciences, Aurora Biosciences Corp., Landmark Graphics, NeoRx, Onyx Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Synaptics, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, X-Ceptor and Sequana Therapeutics.

Timothy Wollaeger has more than 30 years’ experience in the medical products and biotechnology fields in both corporate management and venture capital. Wollaeger joined Sanderling Ventures as a managing director in 2002, and opened the firm’s San Diego office. He founded Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Biosite, Columbia Hospital, Digirad Pyxis, Senomix, Sotera Wireless and Vical.

Over the last 20 years, San Diego has developed to become one of largest and most dense biotechnology hubs in the nation.  Regional clusters in telecommunications, information and software technology are also continuing to take grow and take shape. To increase scholarly and public understanding of San Diego’s culture of innovation, the UC San Diego Library has launched the San Diego Technology Archive (SDTA), an online, interactive archive documenting the history, development, and growth of the companies and entrepreneurial entities that make up San Diego’s technology clusters.  The archive focuses on San Diego’s life sciences and information technology clusters. For more information on the SDTA: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/sdta/

Tickets for the Nov. 7 event are $25. For more information and to register, please visit: lifesciencesfoundation.org/sandiego

The Life Sciences Foundation is dedicated to capturing the history, preserving the heritage, and sharing the stories of biotechnology. The foundation collects and organizes historical information to educate and inspire future innovators, to engage the general public, and to provide lay audiences with an understanding of life sciences and biotechnology.

The UC San Diego Library, ranked among the nation’s top public academic research libraries, provides access to more than 7 million digital and print volumes, journals, and multimedia materials to meet the knowledge and information needs of faculty, students, and members of the public.  For more information: http://libraries.ucsd.edu/

Students Vie for Prizes-and Glory-at Programming Contest

Fifty UC San Diego computer science students took part in the Fall 2012 UCSD Programming Contest Saturday, Oct. 13. They were vying for cash prizes, including $1,000 for first-place.
During a pizza-fueled five hours, contestants had to solve eight programming problems. Finally, Julaiti Alafate come out on top, by solving six of the eight. James Mouradian placed second, Deepak Arulkannan third, Josh Tobin fourth and Manoj Mardithaya fifth.
The prizes, food and drink were provided by the Dini Group, a La Jolla-based hardware and software engineering firm specializing in high performance digital circuit design and application development.
Graduate student coaches Whitney Maguffee, Mohammad Moghimi, Do-Kyum Kim and David Michon and Faculty Coach Michael Taylor, from the computer science department, ran the contest.
More details and a list of the top 25 finishers can be found here.