Engineering Graduate Students Help Uncover Hints of a Lost Da Vinci

Four graduate students from the departments of computer science and materials science at the Jacobs School of Engineering have helped Calit2 researcher Maurizio Seracini uncover tantalizing hints of a lost artwork by Leonardo Da Vinci in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence.

Samantha Stout, a materials science graduate student, and Tom Wypych, Vid Petrovic and David Vanoni, computer science graduate students, all worked in the Palazzo's Hall of the Five Hundred, where a Da Vinci mural is believed to be concealed behind another mural by Giorgio Vasari. Also on the team is Daniel Johnson, an alumni from mechanical and aerospace engineering, who is now on staff at Calit2.

Read more about the hunt for the lost Da Vinci here and here.

In the picture, from left: Stout, Wypych, Johnson, Petrovic and Vanoni.

Their work has been profiledon 

CNN

ABC News

BBC News

National Geographic

Los Angeles Times

and more...

Circuits, Cells, Balloons: It's Time for the Science & Engineering Festival

Circuits, a board game about cellular life, strawberry DNA: these are just some of the fun ingredients on display at booths from the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego at this year's San Diego Science and Engineering Festival Expo Day, March 24 at PETCO Park.

Learn more about this year's festival here. And here are some of the Jacobs School's contributions:

Visitors at the Department of Bioengineering booth will be able to play the Cellular Adventure Game and learn how the body uses unique cues to help immature cells "grow up" and replace damaged cells. At each checkpoint in the game, participants will roll a die to determine the next step in their cellular journey toward a specific type of mature cell (cardiac, neuronal, etc.)

Undergraduate students with IEEE will teach children how to make their own circuits. Children will work with snap circuits--small, low power circuit kits that can be used to build many things. They will also be able to take a look at Seaperch, a remote-controlled underwater robot.

The UC San Diego Near Space Balloon Team, led by aerospace engineering professor John Kosmatka, will show what conditions are like in near space using vacuum tubes. Team members might even run a live feed from a tethered balloon, with a camera that children will be able to control remotely.

The Jacobs Graduate Student Council will teach children about how engineering is involved in their every day lives. They will be able to extract DNA from strawberries, among other activities.

From Reseach Expo Best Poster Winner to CEO

Raj Krishnan won best poster at Research Expo in 2009. Check out the posters for Research Expo 2012.
Raj Krishnan earned his PhD in Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering in 2010. He recently came back to campus, and the Jacobs School of Engineering, to give a talk at a von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center 10th Anniversary event. Krishnan provided an overview of how we went from graduate student to entrepreneur, and how the von Liebig Center helped in this process. http://www.vonliebig.ucsd.edu/

Nanotrees harvest the sun’s energy to turn water into hydrogen fuel

University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, also offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale.

The trees’ vertical structure and branches are keys to capturing the maximum amount of solar energy, according to Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. In images of Earth from space, light reflects off of flat surfaces such as the ocean or deserts, while forests appear darker. That’s because the vertical structure of trees grabs and adsorbs light while flat surfaces simply reflect it, Wang said, adding that it is also similar to retinal photoreceptor cells in the human eye.

Wang’s team has mimicked this structure in their “3D branched nanowire array” which uses a process called photoelectrochemical water-splitting to produce hydrogen gas. Water splitting refers to the process of separating water into oxygen and hydrogen in order to extract hydrogen gas to be used as fuel. This process uses clean energy with no green-house gas by-product. By comparison, the current conventional way of producing hydrogen relies on electricity from fossil fuels

“Hydrogen is considered to be clean fuel compared to fossil fuel because there is no carbon emission, but the hydrogen currently used is not generated cleanly,” said Ke Sun, the first author of the article and graduate student in the Wang group who led the project.

Stay tuned, we'll have more about this exciting project next week.

Research Expo Poster Titles are Online

230 cutting-edge Research Expo poster titles are online. Check them out and see the future of engineering. Find out where many different engineering fields are moving. Get the inside scoop.

Research Expo / Learn about Research Advances First

The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering invites you to campus for Research Expo 2012. See engineering advances before they are widely disseminated. Meet 230+ talented graduate students at the poster session.  Learn at the faculty talks and network at the reception.

Research Expo is Thursday, April 12 from 1:30-6:00 p.m. http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/

Research Expo at a Glance
* 230+ graduate student posters highlight engineering research
* Ten-minute faculty talks from all six engineering departments
* Meet faculty, students and technologists at the networking reception

Stay all afternoon or just a few hours in your area of interest. Recruit students, learn about the latest research breakthroughs, spark a collaboration.

Research Expo is a unique opportunity for industry engineers, scientists, investors and recruiters to access talent and advanced research across all six departments of the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Attend Research Expo. Your brain will thank you! http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/re/

Advice for DECaF

People hire people, not resumes. Talk to everyone and make sure you mention offers you've received from other companies. Always end on a positive note and smile.
These were some of the pieces of advice that members of Women in Computing and tutors in the CSE department at the Jacobs School of Engineering gave to a standing-room only crowd last week in preparation for DECaF, the job fair that concludes Engineering Week here on campus.
The presenters knew what they were talking about. They had landed jobs at Yahoo!, Google, Facebook and Apple, among other companies. They had decided to put on the presentation to make sure more students land jobs with these companies.
As a CS student, it's important to study for interviews, explained Brina Lee, a first-year graduate student who has worked at Yahoo! Studying in groups is the best way to go. Picking a language that you already know well and sticking with it is the best approach. Recruiters are looking for good problem-solving skills rather than knowledge of a particular language. Students also should be comfortable writing code on a white board, without the help of a compiler. They should also be familiar with running time and data structures.
"Introduce yourself with confidence and stick your foot in the door," Lee said.
Below is a slideshow with the presentation she and fellow WIC members gave:








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