Q&A with Chemical Engineering Alumna Emma Wong

Alumna Emma Wong (MS Chemical Engineering '04) works in the Spent Fuel Alternative Strategies Division of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC featured Wong in a recent post on their blog. One of the questions is excerpted below. But before we get there, here are a few insights from Wong, via a conversation with her on LinkedIn. 

The whole MS curriculum [in chemical engineering at UC San Diego] proved to be most useful in my current job. Incompressible flow, numerical methods, reaction engineering all help in my understanding of current methods, modeling, and concepts for systems I am reviewing.

The most interesting thing about chemical engineering is that it can be used, in my perception, in many different fields. I have worked in electrical areas, energy sectors, processing, materials.... and many of my chemical engineering friends have branched out with their degree and have succeeded. 

Check out the original blog post for the full Q&A and keep reading for one of her thoughtful responses.

And if you're not a member of the Jacobs School of Engineering group on LinkedIn, you can request to join here. 

What advice would you give to girls/young women considering a career as an engineer?

I have mentored many young women about the career path to becoming an engineer. While it can prove to be challenging, it is an area where women can thrive. Here is some of the advice I have provided to others:

Don’t be afraid to try new things, such as different types of engineering majors, internships. Keep trying until you find what fits best. Besides knowing what you want to do, it is also good to know what you don’t want to do.

Have multiple mentors and advisors. As you grow, don’t be afraid to find new mentors who fit your current needs. Besides, it’s always nice to have someone to talk to.

Engineering and science are not scary. All the numbers, symbols, and complex equations may make it seem that way, but all engineers and scientists had to start somewhere — one equation and theory at a time.

Being an engineer is a good career path. But if you find out later that something else fits better, an engineering education is a good foundation for many other careers, including medicine, law, business and regulation.

This video of turbulence and flow is mesmerizing

We recently visited the laboratory of Geno Pawlak, a professor of mechanical engineering here at the Jacobs School. Pawlak's laboratory is home to a flume, essentially a water tunnel, used to study different types of flow. Pawlak gave us a demonstration of the flume. Check out the video and prepare to be hypnotized.
Pawlak's research focuses on the turbulent mixing processes that happen at the coast and in estuaries. 

Contextual Robotics Forum at UC San Diego on Oct 10, 2014

Attend UC San Diego’s International Forum on ContextualRobotics Technologies on OCTOBER 10, 2014

Ubiquitous Consumer Robotics
Join us at this one-day forum. Explore the future of ubiquitous consumer robotics and its potential to revolutionize medicine, agriculture, environmental monitoring, disaster response and more.

Meet the Robotics Community
This interactive event includes multiple networking sessions with speakers, UC San Diego faculty and attendees. Learn more about UC San Diego’s vision and plans for robotics research and technology development. 

FORUM SPEAKERS

Matt Grob
CTO, Qualcomm

Vijay Kumar
UPS Foundation Professor, U. of Pennsylvania

Chris Anderson
Co-Founder and CEO, 3D Robotics

Gill Pratt
Program Manager, DARPA

Brad Nelson
Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, ETH-Zurich

Dean Kamen
Founder, DEKA Research
Founder, FIRST competitions

Daniela Rus
Director, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT

Rodney Brooks
CTO, Rethink Robotics

REMARKS

Pradeep K. Khosla
Chancellor, UC San Diego

Albert P. Pisano, Dean
Jacobs School of Engineering

Ramesh R. Rao, Director
Qualcomm Institute

Nanoparticle decoy therapies and immune disorders / new research in PNAS

UC San Diego NanoEngineering professor Liangfang Zhang and a team of collaborators have a paper this week in PNAS entitled "Clearance of pathological antibodies using biomimetic nanoparticles"

PNAS described the work in their "In This Issue" section under the title Nanoparticle decoy therapies and autoimmune disorders. Excerpt below:

"Jonathan Copp et al. (pp. 13481–13486) tested whether nanoparticles could act as decoys to lure potentially destructive IgG antibodies away from healthy red blood cells in a mouse model of antibody-induced anemia. The authors coated polymer-based nanoparticles with red blood cell membrane, consisting of molecules that are targeted by anemia-causing antibodies."

Visit Liangfang Zhang's research group on the web: Nanomaterials & Nanomedicine Laboratory. These researchers are also affiliated with the UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center. 

Nanoparticle decoys protect red blood cells from destruction by macrophages. Photo credit: PNAS 

UC San Diego students can attend CommNexus event for free. Keynote: Steve Mollenkopf, CEO Qualcomm Inc.

UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering students, you can hear (for free) Steve Mollenkopf Chief Executive Officer, Qualcomm Inc. give a talk discussing where the industry is going at an upcoming CommNexus event on Friday Oct 3. 

Registration/Event page

Location: Qualcomm Headquarters Building N, Irwin M. Jacobs Qualcomm Hall: (5775 Morehouse Drive, San Diego, CA 92121)

Time: 

5:00 PM - 7:45 PM

5:00PM – Registration/Reception/Networking/Demos

6:15PM - Program Begins7:45PM – Program Ends

Questions? Contact Brittany Bjerke at bbjerke@commnexus.org

This soft rubber robot is propelled by controlled explosions

And Mike Tolley, soon to be a professor of mechanical engineering here at the Jacobs School, does it again. This time, he presented a soft robot that uses controlled explosions to jump at the IROS 2014 conference in Chicago this week.
The three-legged robot made of silicon rubber is propelled by a butane-oxygen reaction. Check out the video to see it in action. Cool slow-motion shots start a little bit before the one-minute mark.
Full IEEE Spectrum story here.

Krstic Wins Chestnut Textbook Prize

Miroslav Krstic, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and associate vice chancellor for research at UC San Diego, has received the triennial Chestnut Textbook Prize awarded by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).

His book, Boundary Control of PDEs, earned the following citation from the award committee: “This textbook makes the difficult subject of control of partial differential equations accessible to engineering students for the first time. It fills a decades-long need in control education. It covers, at an introductory level, a wide spectrum of physically relevant topics. The clarity and thoroughness of the presentation have already earned it a broad audience and its impact is already exceptional and will continue to grow within and beyond the field of control engineering.”

Krstic also serves as Director of the Cymer Center for Control Systems and Dynamics at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

He received the award in Cape Town, South Africa, in late August. The award honors the memory of Harold Chestnut, the founding president of IFAC (1957), president of IEEE (1973), and member of National Academy of Engineering (1974).

IFAC, founded in 1957, is a multinational federation of national member organizations representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control.

The federation promotes the science and technology of control systems.