Research Expo 2009

Search student abstracts and learn more about Research Expo by following the link below:

http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/

Amazing Man-Made Nanomachines

March third is the word.

Jacobs School NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang is giving a public lecture geared to the general public on March 3rd here on the UC San Diego campus.

Where? UC San Diego, Geisel Library (lower level...in the Science & Engineering Events Room)

When? March 3, 2009

Time? 11 AM till noon

Cost? It's free...but please register online here:

http://www.tinyurl.com/ucsdnanolectures

Science and Engineering Blog Link

You can learn things like, how to find a chemistry dictionary for your word processor at UC San Diego's Science & Engineering Library Blog.

Alex Snoeren Snags Sloan Research Fellowship

Congratulations to computer science professor Alex Snoeren. Alex was awarded a 2009 Sloan Research Fellowship today, Feb 17 2009. You can read the press release from the Sloan Foundation here.

The full list of 2009 Sloan Research Fellows is here.

We have profiled Snoeren's research a couple of times in the last few years. His research took center stage in a story covering the winter 2007 Center for Networked Systems (CNS) Research Review.

In summer 2007, Snoeren and grad student published an award winning paper in SIGCOMM focused on controlling bandwidth in the clouds. A profile of that work is here.

Snoeren is in good company, when it comes to computer scientists from the Jacobs School winning Sloan Research Fellowships. Check out the list below:

Russell Impagliazzo (1994)
Daniele Micciancio (2003)
Amin Vahdat (2003)
Henrik Wann Jensen (2004)
Stefan Savage (2004)
Serge Belongie (2005)
Alin Deutsch (2006)
YY Zhou (2007) ...move to UC San Diego in progress

Alex Snoeren (2009)

Amped about Amplifiers

San Diego is amped about amplifiers lately. Electrical engineering assistant professor James Buckwalter published a ground breaking paper outlining the silicon-baled millimeter wave amplifier he invented that provides both high gain and high bandwidth.

The press release and 5 minute video are here.

Voice of San Diego ran a profile today.

The story of Buckwalter's Cascaded Constructive Wave Amplifier has been making the rounds on the tech Web sites, including NetworkWorld, and a tech Web site from China. Unfortunately, I can't read the Chinese news story, but the advertisement on the right side of the page for "iPhone earrings" is pretty cool.

Sultry Soul: A Computer Science Grad Student's Music Life

Tonight, at San Diego's Beauty Bar, the bar will live up to it's name, thanks to the vocal beauty produced by Carolina Galleguillos, a computer science graduate student in Serge Belongie's Computer Vision Laboratory.

Carolina is one half of the musical act Juna, which describes itself as a collision of two dreams. "Juna is an explosion of exceptional personalities, wisdom and mysteriousness --with a hint of peaceful obscurity and a communion of sound and consciousness."

Not sure what all that means? Don't worry. You can either listen to the music online or check them out (no cover!) tonight at Beauty Bar in San Diego. The show starts at 10:30 PM.

I'll see you there!

The UC San Diego student newspaper, The Guardian, ran a profile in today's paper.

Next monday at 3 PM...Lecture from Director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy, part of The Earth Institute at Columbia University

Managing Emissions from Fossil Energy Resources

Where? CMRR Auditorium (Center for Magnetic Recording Research)

When? Monday, February 9, 2009 3PM, reception to follow. The professional community is cordially invited.

Abstract:
Without a revolution in energy infrastructures, the world faces a stark choice between economic growth and a healthy environment. The world must stop the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere while improving energy services to a growing world population that strives for a high standard of living. New energy technologies must reduce CO­2 emissions by more than an order of magnitude. Among the different options that range from nuclear energy to solar energy, only carbon capture and storage can maintain access to the vast resource base of fossil carbon. Fossil fuels by themselves are plentiful enough to satisfy energy demand for centuries, but the associated CO2 emissions would be intolerable. Technologies for CO2 capture at concentrated emission sources like power plants, steel plants or cement plants already exist. However, optimizing a new generation of efficient and clean power plants that could capture their CO2 and deliver it for safe and permanent carbon dioxide storage will promote dramatically different designs. Even after addressing the large concentrated sources of CO2, the remaining half of present-day CO2 emissions from distributed and mobile sources is too large to be ignored. Either one replaces carbonaceous energy carriers with carbon free energy carriers like hydrogen or electricity, or one must compensate for their CO2 emissions by capturing an equivalent amount of carbon from the environment. Biomass growth offers one such option; direct capture of carbon dioxide from the air provides a more efficient solution. Carbon capture and storage technologies enable a closure of the anthropogenic carbon cycle and thus provide one possible avenue to reach a world that is not limited by energy constraints.

Speaker Bio:
Klaus S. Lackner joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2001, where he is the Ewing-Worzel Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering and a member of the Earth Institute. He is the director of the Gerry Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy and the Chair of the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Klaus Lackner received his Ph.D. in 1978 in theoretical physics from the University of Heidelberg, Germany and held postdoctoral positions at the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1983. At Los Alamos National Laboratory he held several positions, among them, the Acting Associate Laboratory Director for Strategic and Supporting Research, which represents about a third of Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Klaus Lackner’s scientific career started in the phenomenology of weakly interacting particles. Later searching for quarks, he and George Zweig developed the chemistry of atoms with fractional nuclear charge and a more recent participation in matter searches for particles with a non-integer charge in experiments conducted at Stanford by Martin Perl and his group. After joining Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lackner became involved in hydrodynamic work and fusion related research. His interest in self-replicating machine systems has been recognized by Discover Magazine as one of seven ideas that could change the world. He has been instrumental in forming the Zero Emission Coal Alliance, an industry led group that defined the zero emission concept.