Science Fair / a Life-Long Journey

Computer engineering alumna Shirley Miranda has been involved in the San Diego Science and Engineering Fair since she was 13. And no, this is not a recurring nightmare! Watch the video below.




Miranda is also deeply involved in COSMOS. Check out Miranda's Cosmos YouTube video here.

Envision 2011

We are working on a story about student-organized and student-run outreach event here at the Jacobs School. It's called Envision 2011 and it brings young women from local high schools to campus to experience engineering: lab tours, web programming, robot building and more.

Stay tuned.

Computer Science professor Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou in La Jolla Light

Computer Science professor Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou was included in a recent round up of local researchers in the La Jolla Light. Check out Lynne Friedman's full story here.

Calit2's Tiffany Fox wrote an interesting profile of Zhou in 2010.

YY Zhou / More Reliable Computing

Calit2's Tiffany Fox wrote a nice profile on Yuanyuan (YY) Zhou, a computer science professor here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

“People always ask why their systems fail, and the computer industry is starting to pay attention to this reliability issue,” explains Zhou, who joined the UCSD Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the Jacobs School of Engineering in the summer of 2009. “Fundamentally, my research is about making computer systems less vulnerable to attacks so they crash less. When Windows crashes, it’s more of an inconvenience, but when an e-commerce site crashes it can really be a problem.”


Zhou is the first holder of the Qualcomm Endowed Chair in Mobile Computing. The chair is one of four established in the Jacobs School of Engineering through Qualcomm’s original $15 million commitment to the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Read the story on the Calit2 news site.

Check out a few more great photos of computer sicnece professor YY Zhou taken by Erik Jepsen on the Calit2 Flickr site.

Experimental Batteries in the Works / NanoEngineers in Action

A student assembles an experimental battery in the Department of NanoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. The work is being done in the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion run by NanoEngineering professor Shirley Meng.

Check out more photos from the Meng lab on the Jacobs School Flikr site.

Read the full story on the Jacobs School of Engineering news site.

Hat Tip to Saura Naderi

UC San Diego alumna Saura Naderi wore a fantastic hat to the opening day for horse racing at Del Mar this week. But you don't have to take our word for it...Cindy McNatt from the Orange County Register captured it all...including Naderi's hat (see below)

NextGen Nano Sensors

UC San Diego NanoEngineering professor Jen Cha is using a $300,000 grant from the U.S Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop nanoscale materials for biological and chemical sensing for health and environmental monitoring. Cha and her research team are hoping to find routes to fabricate arrays of nanoscale materials for medical diagnostics or for security sensing that does not require high engineering costs. For these types of applications to make a “real world” impact, the production of the devices needs to be kept at an absolute minimum, Cha explained.

“If we can get around the problem of repeatedly needing an expensive tool, such as those used for semiconductor chip manufacturing (i.e. lithography), and still be able to achieve sub-50 nanometer resolution, that would be pretty revolutionary for applications such as low-cost diagnostics and chemical sensors,” she said.

Enhancing Heart Surgery For Children

UC San Diego mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Alison Marsden is working through an international collaboration to develop multiscale models for all three stages of the surgery used to treat children with single ventricle heart defects. The end goal of the $6 million project, funded by Fondation Leducq in France, is to produce software that can be used for clinical decision support. These surgeries are typically done with three stages starting from birth: the Norwood (or variant), Glenn procedure, and Fontan surgery. According to Marsden, these young patients are among the most challenging for pediatric cardiologists to treat, and they can develop a number of very serious morbidities.

“While our group at UCSD has done research previously on the Fontan surgery (stage three), we were not able to take advantage of closed loop models of the circulatory system,” she said. “This collaboration will allow us to model the surgical connection in detail as well as the response of the entire circulation. In addition, this is the first time in our research group that we are taking a close look at the engineering aspects of the first two stages of the surgery, and that will hopefully shed light on possibilities for earlier interventions that can help prevent poor outcomes. The network gives us access to a large pool of clinical data through several leading clinical centers that are participating in the grant.”

Marsden is an American core member of the international research team on this project, which also includes Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, Politecnico di Milano in Milan, The French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) in Paris, Medical University of South Carolina, University of Michigan, and Clemson University.

NanoEngineers Use DNA to Place Nano Scale Materials

NanoEngineering professor Jennifer Cha recently published new work on using biomolecules, such as DNA and proteins, to engineer the orientation and placement of nano scale materials into the desired device architectures that are reproducible in high yields and at low costs.

The paper titled “Large Area Spatially Ordered Arrays of Gold Nanoparticles Directed by Lithographically Confined DNA Origami,” appeared in Nature Nanotechology.

“Self-assembled structures are often too small and affordable lithographic patterns are too large,” said Albert Hung, lead author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper and a post doc working in Cha’s Biomolecular Materials and Nanoscale Assembly Lab. “But rationally designed synthetic DNA nanostructures allow us to access length scales between 5 and 100 nanometers and bridge the two systems."

This story recently appeared as the top news story on Semiconductor Online.