News Archive
April 2, 2008
Joint Symposium: UC San Diego and National Yang Ming University
The Second Joint Symposium between the National Yang Ming University (NYMU) of Taiwan and UC San Diego will be held at UCSD on April 9-11 at UCSD’s Department of Bioengineering. Full Story
March 27, 2008
US News Ups Ranking of Jacobs School
UC San Diego again was one of only a handful of universities to have both an engineering school and a medical school both ranked in the top 15 by US News annual ranking of graduate programs at colleges and universities. Full Story
February 22, 2008
Hopping Robot Captures Top Research Expo Honor
The two-wheeled robot called “iHop” developed by Christopher M. Schmidt-Wetekam, a Ph.D. candidate in the Jacobs School’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, won top honors at the Jacobs School of Engineering’s annual Research Expo on Feb. 21. Full Story
February 12, 2008
National Engineers Week at UCSD
They say that everyday should be Mothers Day. Considering how crucial technology is for everything we do from communication and banking, to environmental sustainability and health care, everyday should also be Engineers Day. Nevertheless, Feb 18-22 is the one week out of the year that is carved out as National Engineers Week – and the students at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering took part in a big way. Full Story
January 23, 2008
Kauffman Foundation Says von Liebig Center Fills Seed-Stage Funding Gap
A Kauffman Foundaiton study has highlighted two university "proof of concept" centers, the von Liebig Center at UCSD and the Deshpande Center at MIT, which since the two centers’ creation in 2002, have collectively awarded nearly $10 million in seed grants and launched 26 seed-stage companies that have accumulated more than $159 million in private capital. Both centers are funded from philanthropic donations. Full Story
December 5, 2007
A Unique Way To Lower Energy Costs
UC San Diego undergraduate students have designed, built and deployed a network of five weather-monitoring stations as a key step toward helping the university use ocean breezes to cool buildings, identify the sunniest rooftops to expand its solar-electric system, and use water more efficiently in irrigation and in other ways. Full Story
November 21, 2007
Flip-Flopping Gene Expression Can Be Advantageous
One gene for pea pod color generates green pods while a variant of that gene gives rise to the yellow-pod phenotype, a feature that helped Gregor Mendel first describe genetic inheritance. However, many modern-day geneticists are focused on the strange ability of some genes to be expressed spontaneously in either of two possible ways. UCSD researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that variability due to the phenomenon is larger and persists much longer than they had expected. Full Story
November 9, 2007
Renewable Plastics, Poster Initiative and E. coli: UCSD Bioengineering Grad Student Wins Leadership Award
The plastic containers Adam Feist uses to carry his lunch to his UC San Diego lab are petroleum based. This may change. Feist – a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate at UCSD – is doing fundamental research that could lead to more efficient ways to churn out renewable biopolymers for “green plastics” using microorganisms as factories. Within the bioengineering department at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, Feist is a natural leader, a dedicated team player and a top-notch metabolic engineer. This combination of leadership, service and scholarship has earned him the 2007 Woolley Leadership Award. Full Story
November 7, 2007
UCSD Engineering Honor Society Wins Most Outstanding Chapter Award
Flip through the 133 page record of the 2006-2007 activities of UCSD’s engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi, and you’ll see why they recently took home the “nation’s most outstanding chapter” award. Full Story
October 18, 2007
Undergrads Dream with QUALCOMM Chips
The biggest challenge for one of the four winners of last weekend's QUALCOMM Innovator Challenge came at a surprising moment: after his team won first prize and $5,000 in the engineering design contest. Over the phone, freshman David Wong had to convince his parents to hand over his social security number so he could fill out the necessary tax-related paperwork to get his cut of the $5,000. Money the team won for their ideas for what is possible with QUALCOMM’s new ultra powerful chip set for mobile devices, called Snapdragon. Full Story
October 16, 2007
Will Breast Cancer Spread? UCSD Bioengineers Answer
One of the many unknowns facing women who are diagnosed with breast cancer is the likelihood that the cancer will spread to other parts of the body – metastasize. Researchers from UC San Diego are looking to change that. UCSD bioengineering professor Trey Ideker is pioneering a more accurate approach for predicting the risk of breast cancer metastasis in individual patients. Full Story
October 8, 2007
Which came first, the chicken genome or the egg genome?
New research published in Nature Genetics provides the first evolutionary history of the duplications in the human genome that are partly responsible for both disease and recent genetic innovations. This work marks a significant step toward a better understanding of what genomic changes paved the way for modern humans, when these duplications occurred and what the associated costs are – in terms of susceptibility to disease-causing genetic mutations. Full Story
September 25, 2007
Primate Sperm Competition: Speed Matters
UC San Diego and UC Irvine researchers have reported that sperm cells from the more promiscuous chimpanzee and rhesus macaque species swim much faster and with much greater force than the sperm of humans and gorillas. Full Story
September 22, 2007
Donors Forge New Group to Support UC San Diego Center Championing Scientific Approach to Preserving Artistic Treasures
Private donors working closely with the JAcobs School have established "Friends of CISA3" -- a philanthropic initiative to support the activities of the Calit2-based research center devoted to innovating and using new technologies to better understand and preserve artistic treasures. Full Story
September 13, 2007
Learning How Embryonic Stem Cells Become Heart Cells
Three teams of San Diego scientists are using a comprehensive new systems-biology approach to learn how to prompt mouse embryonic stem cells to differentiate in the laboratory into cardiac muscle cells, results that could eventually be used to develop completely new treatments for human heart disease Full Story
August 9, 2007
Medical Devices Affinity Group Meets to Brainstorm New Technologies
Nearly 40 researchers, clinicians, basic scientists and engineers from the Jacobs School, Calit2 and UCSD School of Medicine's Department of Surgery met to brainstorm about potential collaborations to develop new medical and research devices. Full Story
August 3, 2007
How Cells Change the Pace of Their Steps
Scientists at UCSD have discovered how cells of higher organisms change the speed at which they move, a basic biological discovery that may help researchers devise ways to prevent cancer cells from spreading throughout the body. Full Story
August 3, 2007
SIGGRAPH in San Diego: Graphics, Video and Rock
American Idol and Comic-Con have come and gone, but fun in San Diego’s summer sun has just begun. From August 4 to 9, the top computer graphics and interactive media folks from around the world will flood San Diego for the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference – and UC San Diego is part of the action. Full Story
August 1, 2007
Ten New Faculty Members Join Jacobs School
The Jacobs School of Engineering is adding 10 faculty members who will enhance the school’s strengths in bioengineering, biomaterials, bio-fluid mechanics, security and networks, systems and controls, and nanoengineering. Full Story
July 3, 2007
UC San Diego Establishes Department of NanoEngineering
Seeking to capitalize on the potential of a new generation of multi-functional nanoscale devices and special materials built on the scale of individual molecules, UC San Diego has established a new Department of NanoEngineering within its Jacobs School of Engineering effective July 1, 2007. Full Story