News Archive
July 29, 2014
UC San Diego Engineering Graduates Aim For Game-Changing Green Chemistry
San Diego-based company Genomatica, co-founded by UC San Diego bioengineering alumnus Christophe Schilling, sustainably produces chemicals essential in the manufacture of thousands of products from fabrics to plastics. Full Story
July 28, 2014
Jacobs School Faculty Among the World's Most Influential Scientists
Several Jacobs School professors have been named among the most influential scientists in the world by Thomson Reuters. Congratulations to Bernhard Palsson in bioengineering, Yuri Bazilevs in structural engineering and Joseph Wang in nanoengineering. The list compiles the most highly cited researchers in the sciences and social sciences from 2002-2013. Full Story
July 17, 2014
A GEM of a Prize
Two physician-engineer teams from UC San Diego have been selected as the 2014 recipients of the Galvanizing Engineering in Medicine (GEM) awards from the Clinical and Translational Research Institute (CTRI) and the Institute of Engineering in Medicine (IEM). GEM, an initiative of UC San Diego's CTRI and IEM, supports projects that identify clinical challenges for which engineering solutions can be developed and implemented to improve health care. Full Story
June 27, 2014
Anouchka Mihaylova Bioengineering Award
An award for bioengineering students at UC San Diego has been created to honor Anouchka Mihaylova. A project scientist in the bioengineering department, Mihaylova died on May 17 after being struck by a hit-and-run driver while walking with her husband in Rancho Bernardo. Full Story
June 18, 2014
Outstanding Graduates from Class of 2014 Share Their Stories
Engineering swept the outstanding student awards at this year's All Campus Graduation Celebration. Damini Tandon, a bioengineering major, was recognized as outstanding undergraduate student for her efforts to make health education and medical treatment accessible. Michael Porter, a Ph.D. student in the research group of materials science professor Joanna McKittrick, received the outstanding graduate student award for his academic achievements and his mentoring. Full Story
June 4, 2014
Get Involved: Q&A with JUMP Mentoring Program Co-founder
Margie Mathewson, a Ph.D. student in bioengineering, is the co-founder of the Jacobs Undergraduate Mentoring Program, better known as JUMP. Within the past three years, the program went from serving 70 students to more than 300. Mathewson is getting ready to graduate and go out into industry. She will be starting work as a consultant for global management consulting firm McKinsey and Co. in Los Angeles in the fall. In this Q&A, she talks about her experiences here at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and what decided her to get involved. Full Story
May 21, 2014
Remembering Anouchka Mihaylova
Anouchka Mihaylova, a project scientist in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, San Diego died on May 17 after being struck by a hit-and-run driver while walking with her husband in Rancho Bernardo. Mihaylova joined the department in 2000, where she was a researcher in the Cardiac Mechanics Laboratory led by bioengineering professor Andrew McCulloch in the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Mihaylova was a key investigator of the National Biomedical Computation Resource. Full Story
May 12, 2014
An Interview with 2014 Research Expo Winner Ya-San Yeh
Ya-San Yeh, a University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering graduate student won the grand prize at Research Expo 2014 on April 17 for her research on silica nanoparticles for cancer treatment. Yeh received the Rudee Outstanding Poster Award as well as the best departmental poster in bioengineering. We caught up with Yeh after the big win to talk about her research and what it is like to work on a problem as big as cancer. Updated May 14 with videos of Research Expo faculty talks. Full Story
May 6, 2014
Nanoengineers develop basis for electronics that stretch at the molecular level
Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego are asking what might be possible if semiconductor materials were flexible and stretchable without sacrificing electronic function? Full Story
April 18, 2014
Silica Nanoparticles for Cancer Treatment Take Top Prize at Research Expo 2014
Ya-San Yeh, a University of California, San Diego graduate student working in the laboratory of electrical engineering and nanoengineering professor Sadik Esener, won the grand prize at Research Expo 2014 for her research on silica nanoparticles for cancer treatment. Yeh received the Rudee Outstanding Poster Award as well as the best departmental poster in bioengineering. Full Story
April 9, 2014
Researchers Develop Bacterial 'FM Radio'
Programming living cells offers the prospect of harnessing sophisticated biological machinery for transformative applications in energy, agriculture, water remediation and medicine. Inspired by engineering, researchers in the emerging field of synthetic biology have designed a tool box of small genetic components that act as intracellular switches, logic gates, counters and oscillators. But scientists have found it difficult to wire the components together to form larger circuits that can function as “genetic programs.” One of the biggest obstacles? Dealing with a small number of available wires. A team of biologists and engineers at UC San Diego has taken a large step toward overcoming this obstacle. Their advance, detailed in a paper which appears in this week’s advance online publication of the journal Nature, describes their development of a rapid and tunable post-translational coupling for genetic circuits. This advance builds on their development of “biopixel” sensor arrays reported in Nature by the same group of scientists two years ago. Full Story
April 4, 2014
Engineering a New Biomaterial Therapy for Treating Heart Attacks
Bioengineering professor Karen Christman's new injectable hydrogel, which is designed to repair damaged cardiac tissue following a heart attack, has been licensed to San Diego-based startup Ventrix, Inc, which is planning the first human clinical trials of the technology. Full Story
April 2, 2014
Understanding How the Brain Controls Movement
A University of California, San Diego research team led by bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs is working to understand how the brain circuitry controls how we move. The goal is to develop new technologies to help patients with Parkinson's disease and other debilitating medical conditions navigate the world on their own. Their research is funded by the National Science Foundation’s Emerging Frontiers of Research and Innovation program. Full Story
March 27, 2014
Cymer Co-Founder Richard Sandstrom and Wife, Sandra Timmons, Give $1.2 Million for Students
University of California, San Diego alumni Sandra Timmons and Richard Sandstrom, co-founder of Cymer, Inc., are passionate about their alma mater and helping future students achieve the same world-class education they received at UC San Diego. That’s why the couple recently pledged a gift of $1.2 million to the campus for student support through their charitable Timmstrom Family Fund. The gift will be split, per the donors’ wishes, to support graduate students in the Jacobs School of Engineering and undergraduates through the Chancellor’s Associates Scholars program. Full Story
March 26, 2014
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a...pie?
Move over watermelons and pumpkins! There’s a new addition to the list of things that are being dropped from the top of UC San Diego’s buildings—pie. To be more precise, a 13-inch, 4.5 pounds cherry pie from Costco, which was dropped from the third floor of the Structural and Materials Engineering building. It was all part of Pi Day celebrations March 14 at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. Fun for the day also included the third annual Pi-Mile Run and Walk, which set a record for turnout, with more than 200 people taking part. Full Story
March 17, 2014
Study finds that fast-moving cells in the human immune system walk in a stepwise manner
A team of biologists and engineers at UC San Diego applied advanced mathematical tools to answer a basic question in cell biology about how cells move and discovered that the mechanism looks very similar to walking. Their discovery, published March 17 in the Journal of Cell Biology, is an important advance toward developing new pharmacological strategies to treat chronic inflammatory diseases. Full Story
March 11, 2014
New UC San Diego Biosensor Will Guard Water Supplies from Toxic Threats
Supported by a $953,958 grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), researchers at the University of California San Diego will develop a sophisticated new biosensor that can protect the nation’s water supplies from a wide range of toxins, including heavy metals and other poisons. The project, led by Jeff Hasty, director of the BioCircuits Institute at UC San Diego, will combine next-generation sequencing, synthetic biology, and microfluidic technologies to engineer a highly specific array of biosensors that will continuously monitor water supplies for the presence of toxins. Full Story
March 7, 2014
Dive into Technology's Future at Research Expo 2014
Research Expo will be held on Thursday, April 17, from 1:30 p.m. to 6p.m. Register today. The annual event features research posters by more than 200 engineering graduate students from UC San Diego, faculty talks, and a networking reception with faculty, students, industry partners and alumni. Full Story
February 28, 2014
Bioengineering Students Recognized for Outstanding Research
Several bioengineering students have been recognized for their outstanding research. Full Story
January 30, 2014
Studying Stem Cell Diets to Make Better Heart Cells
What nutrients are needed for stem cells to grow and function as heart cells? That’s the question at the heart of research led by bioengineer Christian Metallo at the University of California, San Diego. He is one of eight UC San Diego researchers to receive a combined total of $8.165 million in funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine in a new round of Basic Biology awards announced Jan. 29. Metallo’s share is $1.124 million. The awards were made by CIRM’s Independent Citizens Oversight Committee. Full Story