UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge / Elevator Pitch Winners / Jacobs School Students and Alumni

Several of winning pitches from the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge “Elevator Pitch” competition have connections to the Jacobs School of Engineering. 

Check out videos of Jacobs School affiliated winners below. All the elevator pitch videos, as well as event photos, are available here. (A big high five to the  UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge organizers for recording and posting the elevator pitches!)

Wolf Biosciences founded by Bioengineering PhD candidate Adam Young won the audience award in the “BioTech & MedTech” category. Watch Young’s two minute pitch on YouTube below: 

Uzair Mohammad, a Jacobs School freshman, won the judges award from the Technology/Innovation track. Watch YouTube video below:

Judges: John Yamauchi (Jacobs School bioengineering BS alumnus) and his ChemoTactics won the judges award in the “BioTech & MedTech” category. Watch the video on YouTube below: 

 

 Be sure to check out the next event of the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge: The 2013 Startup Job Fair on Weds March 6 from 3 to 7 PM in the Price Center on the UC San Diego campus.

MAE Alum to be Recognized During Alumni Weekend

Jim Rohr, a research scientists at SPAWAR Systems Center, lecturer at UC San Diego and MAE alum, will be recognized for his distinguished service to the campus during the university's annual Alumni Celebration June 8.
Quoting from the UC San Diego press release:

For the past 10 years, he has been deeply committed to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education, demonstrating remarkable initiative, leadership and dedication in implementing K-12 outreach programs with UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering. In 2008, he worked with Jacobs in launching the Enspire Program, Jacobs largest outreach program, focused on introducing and inspiring middle school students to the field of engineering.

The Alumni Celebration is open to the public, with proceeds benefiting the UC San Diego Invent the Future student support campaign.  For award recipient and event details, please visit www.alumni.ucsd.edu/awards or call (858) 534-3900. Information about Alumni Weekend, June 6-9, can be accessed atwww.alumni.ucsd.edu/alumniweekend.

It May be Called DECaF, But It's Got Students Buzzing

More than 1500 students dressed in their best business attire took the Price Center by storm Friday, Feb. 22 for a chance to talk to some of the 95 companies taking part in the Disciplines of Engineering Career Fair, better known as DECaF. Some were looking for summer internships, others for that all-important first job out of undergrad.
"We hope that they come and they get what they came for," said Pooja Makhijani, president of the Triton Student Engineering Council, which organizes the event every year.
Below are some of our best pictures from the event. For more, go to our Facebook album here.

Photo of the Week: Enspire, Electrical Engineering Style

Janelle Shane, electrical engineering PhD student teaches kinds about lasers as a  part of Enspire 2013.

Electrical engineeringgraduate student Janelle Shane is pictured in the latest Photo of the Week. Janelle participated in Enspire (part of Engineer’s Week at the Jacobs School) and was busy showing a group of middle school students how the invisible light from an infrared laser would show up as a spot on an infrared-sensitive card.

A question for Janelle:

“What do you think the students responded to most in your demo?”

Her answer:

“Once I explained to them that I didn't know how to make a light saber, they were excited most about the fact that visible light, infrared light, radio waves, and microwaves are all the same thing—it’s just that our eyes can only see the visible light. They were excited to hear that if our eyes could see microwave radiation, a microwave oven would appear to be glowing.”

Janelle’s demo was in the Nanoscale Optics Lab of Shaya Fainman, professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, among many other labs. The demo introduced middle schoolers to tiny, yet powerful, lasers used to create the optical circuits of the future.

Read the full Enspire 2013 story and watch a quick video on the Jacobs School website.

Read about some big news on tiny lasers from this lab: UC San Diego Engineers Demonstrate Smallest Laser to Operate at Room Temperature

Tracking the buzz over Prof Coleman's Wearable Electronics Research

It’s been a great week for news on brain-machine interfaces. Bioengineering Professor Todd Coleman was in Boston last weekend at the annual AAAS conference, where he participated in a panel discussion about the possibilities and ethics presented by new advances in technology that can “communicate with the body.”  The panel discussion generated some buzz in the media thanks in part to Professor Coleman’s research into wearable electronics for pregnancy monitoring, neonatal neuroscience and performance-enhancing, brain-machine interfaces.

Txchnologist foresees a future where these types of electronics could enable telepathy and telekinesis. That story was also picked up by io9. NBCNews.com's Cosmic Log reports this kind of research is opening up new frontiers. Here's another story by Discovery. And one by Smithsonian. Irish Times tackled the ethics angle. And Science Update paid a visit to the Coleman Lab.

You can hear all about it straight from Todd Coleman himself in this video below, produced for the AAAS conference. Or, this one, from a talk he gave at UC San Diego for the Founders' Symposium. Just in case you missed it, Dr. Coleman was featured in San Diego Magazine's 50 People to Watch feature in January.

Jacobs School Alumni: Join the Jacobs School LinkedIn Group

Jacobs School Alumni: Join the Jacobs School of Engineernig LinkedIn Group.

Once you join, you'll find there are a number of more specific subgroups within the main group, if you are looking for more targeted discussions.

Prof. Christman's heart attack treatment in the news

Media outlets around the globe are covering exciting new results from the laboratory of bioengineering professor Karen Christman on a treatment for scarred heart tissue -- a major problem for heart attack survivors that affects their long-term survival. Christman’s lab has developed a hydrogel that forms a scaffold around damaged heart tissue, encouraging regeneration. It can be injected through a catheter, so it’s less invasive for patients. Read our story here. 

In a study published Feb. 20 in Science Translational Medicine, Christman reported on a study in pigs that found that the gel can repair damaged tissue, help the heart grow new tissue, including blood vessels, and gets the heart moving more closely to how it should. The story has been covered this week by Bloomberg, U.S. News & World Report, UT San Diego, Xconomy, and internationally here, here and here. 

In this photo, tissue spins in a beaker, as part of the process of making the hydrogel.  

Reuters TV covered Christman's research last summer. Or you can watch our own video above for more info on the making of this hydrogel.