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/

"Microrockets Take Off In Acid" / Joseph Wang research in Chemical & Engineering News

NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and colleagues have published work on microrockets that run on acid. Chemical & Engineering News created a great video (embedded below) and wrote a story on the research: "Microrockets Take Off In Acid". This research was published (J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja210874s).



The first sentence of Lauren Wolf's story in Chemical & Engineering News:

Microrockets—those tiny, self-propelled, tubular engines being developed to pick up and carry cellular and molecular cargo—can now operate in some natural environments.

New Building: Structural & Materials Engineering Building / Panel Discussion Nov 8

Nov 08, 2011 7pm - 8:50pm - Special Event: SME Building Panel Discussion

Speaker: SME Building Panel 
Location: Center Hall, Room 101

Come learn about the future home for the Department of Structural Engineering, Department of Nanoengineering, Department of Visual Arts and Medical Devices Group. The Structural and Materials Engineering Building (SME) is nearing completion and many parties have been involved in the design-build process from start to finish. Hear about the the dynamic interaction of the various team members (designers, architects, owners, construction managers, and inspectors) required to successfully complete the project. The event will begin with presentations from Safdie Rabines (Architect's point of view), Englekirk Structural Engineering (Design Engineer's point of view), UCSD Facilities Design & Construction (Owner's and Inspector's points of view), and Mortenson Construction (Project Manager's point of view). A question and answer period will follow the presentations.

Don't miss out on this exciting opportunity to learn about your future home!

Contact for Event

Lindsay Walton
Phone: 858-822-3273
Email: lwalton@ucsd.ed

Microrockets Take Off / NanoEngineering Research from UC San Diego

The paper on nanomotors that selectively pick up cancer cells is highlight this week in C&EN (Chemical & Engineering News).

Nanoengineers Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang of the University of California, San Diego, and coworkers show that tube-shaped microrockets functionalized with antibodies can cruise through human blood serum.

Video Caption (see below): In the first section of the video,  you can see the microrocket (black) selectively collect a pancreatic cancer cell. (The cell has a specific outside surface marker that the microrocket attaches to.) In the following three sections of the video, the microrocket is unable to collect the cancer cell, either because the rocket has not been modified, or because the cells do not express the right outside surface marker. 




Video Caption (see below): In this 8-second video, a microrocket transports a pancreatic cancer cell in buffer solution and in human serum.

"Micro-Rockets" Aim at Cancer Diagnostics / Video

In a new study in the journal Angewandte Chemie, NanoEngineers from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering describe an immuno-micromachine-based approach for in vitro isolation of cancer cells that holds promise for direct circulating tumor cell (CTC) detection without sample preprocessing.

The work was led by two NanoEngineering professors: Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang.

Read the news story in Chemistry World by Kate McAlpine.

Related videos are here.

Professor Liangfang Zhang is one of the faculty speakers tomorrow at Research Expo here at the Jacobs School of Engineering.

Video Caption (see below): In the first section of the video,  you can see the microrocket (black) selectively collect a pancreatic cancer cell. (The cell has a specific outside surface marker that the microrocket attaches to.) In the following three sections of the video, the microrocket is unable to collect the cancer cell, either because the rocket has not been modified, or because the cells do not express the right outside surface marker. 




Video Caption (see below): In this 8-second video, a microrocket transports a pancreatic cancer cell in buffer solution and in human serum.



Update #1: New caption for the first video.
Update #2: Dan Kagan says this paper is going on the cover of an upcoming print issue.

Jan Talbot / 2010 Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award

NanoEngineering, Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Professor Jan Talbot earned a 2010 Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award. Congrats!

This award recognizes a career of excellence in teaching both undergraduates and graduate students, mentoring graduate students, and contributing the development of educational curricula in her field.



According to Prof Talbot's Web page, her research interests include:

• Electrodeposition
  
• Electrophoretic deposition
  
• Information display screening technology
  
• Chemical mechanical polishing
• Solid state lighting materials
  
• Electrochemical transport phenomena
  
• Corrosion
  
• Materials science

Nanoengineers from UC San Diego Win the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Academic R&D award

Left: NanoEngienering PhD student Joshua Windmiller

From the NanoEngineering website:

Congratulations to Joshua Windmiller and NanoEngineering Professor Joseph Wang's Nanobioelectronic Sensor team on winning the IDTechEx Printed Electronics Academic R&D award at the 2010 Printed Electronics USA conference and tradeshow for their work on textile-based printed bioelectronic sensors.

From Printed Electronics World:

The University of California, San Diego won this award for its work on textile based printed bioelectric sensors. The University fabricated thick-film (screen-printed) amperometric sensors that were printed directly onto the elastic waist of undergarments for physiological monitoring. Additionally, they demonstrated the highly sensitive detection of trace concentrations of explosive agents using screen-printed sensors on GORE-TEX®fabrics. The University reports, "Our research has demonstrated the feasibility of employing screen-printed biosensors for a number of utilitarian applications leading to the realization of a new class of wearable biosensors that enables a "wear and forget" paradigm."

This is tied into the "smart underwear" project that made headlines around the world earlier this year:





This prestigious, world-renowned award is given to an academic research organization that has made a significant contribution over the past 24 months to the understanding of the principles and accrued knowledge behind printed electronics or photovoltaics.

Another photo of Josh below:

UCSD@50 Special Section in the San Diego Union Tribune

On Sunday Nov 14, the Union Tribune ran a special section outlining some of the history and highlights of UC San Diego's first 50 years.

Check out the coverage online: http://www.signonsandiego.com/ucsd-50/

Below is a screen shot of one of the pages. It includes future looking quotes from UC San Diego Bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs and NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang.

The special section includes information on how structural engineers from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering played an important role in retrofitting bridges to prepare them for earthquakes.

(That same page also has a great image of Jacobs School undergrads floating in near-zero gravity in order to made better space toilets.)

Scenes from a NanoEngineering Lab: (Part 3)

Here is the third post on chemical engineering major Maria Zimmerman, who is an undergraduate student researcher in a nanomachine-focused lab run by NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang.

In a previous post, Maria said that she got her foot in the Wang lab door through a fellowship, and stayed because she loved it. It was a fellowship for the UC San Diego California Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) in Science, Engineering and Mathematics program.

In the first post and second post, Maria in photographed in the lab and gives a bit of advice to undergrads thinking about trying their (gloved) hands at research:

Maria said: "Ask for responsibility. The work only gets interesting if they trust you want to do it. You are just wasting your time if you go in to clean pipette tips."

But what does Maria actually do in the lab?

"I work in the nanomotors section of Dr Wang's research lab. My recent work has been on nanomotor controlled in vitro drug delivery. We are able to manually control the nanomotors ability to pick up, transport, and drop off cancer drug carrying microparticles. We are striving towards a realistic model for in vivo applications," said Maria Zimmerman. 

Undergraduate Snapshot from a NanoEngineering Lab (Part 2)

Maria Zimmerman is a senior at UC San Diego majoring in chemical engineering. Below are a few of her unfiltered thoughts about working in professor Joseph Wang's NanoEngineering lab, and about doing student research as an undergraduate. (I'm hoping Maria will also fill us in on what kind of research she is working on. Stay tuned. And be sure to check out her other lab shots here.)

"I started my research during the summer of 2009. I was supposed to leave at the end of the summer due to my fellowship, but I kept extending a few months at a time until now, a year and half later.

"At first I just wanted to publish a paper and work with the renowned Dr Wang just because it’s ambitious, and because I knew I needed to take advantage of this opportunity because it’s one of the most prestigious career training opportunities UC San Diego has to offer. Now I stay because it brought me closer to UC San Diego than anything else I've done in my four years here.

"The grad students and postdocs I answer to have become my friends as well as my professional mentors. Having this lab to drop by everyday makes this huge campus feel more personal. And of course, working so close to Dr. Wang really helps me understand what thinking and commitment it takes to be successful. I don't want to pursue a career chemical engineering because it’s ambitious anymore, but because I really can see myself doing it."

Maria Zimmerman's advice to other students:

1. Go for the gold! The labs that are the hardest to get in will be the most worth it. Those are the labs that will invest the most money in you.

2. Ask for responsibility. The work only gets interesting if they trust you want to do it. You are just wasting your time if you go in to clean pipette tips.

3. Get to know your mentor. They are filled to the brim with advice. They were undergraduates once too, and they usually have some pretty strong opinions about it.

Snapshots from a NanoEngineering Lab at UC San Diego Part 1

Last week when I was helping out with a photo shoot in one of the NanoEngineeringhttp://nanoengineering.ucsd.edu/ labs run by professor Joseph Wang, I ran into chemical engineering major Maria Zimmerman who is one of the undergraduate researchers in Joseph Wang's labs. I'm going to ask Maria for a few thoughts on her experiences as an undergraduate researcher, and post the responses here. If you have any questions for Maria, leave a comment or send me an email at: dbkane AT ucsd DOT edu.

UC San Diego and NanoEngineering Featured in 7/39 TV News Story

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/station/as-seen-on/Recession_Report__UCSD_San_Diego-105928283.html

Check out the NanoEngineering Department in action in this short news story that ran last week on Ch 7/39.

http://www.nbcsandiego.com/station/as-seen-on/Recession_Report__UCSD_San_Diego-105928283.html

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.

Glove Box in a NanoEngineering Lab

There is a glove box in Shirley Meng's NanoEngineering Lab at UC San Diego, but it's not the kind of glove box that stores gloves. Instead, you have stick your hands and arms through enormous black gloves in order to touch anything that is in the box. And once your black-gloved hands are in the box, you have to put on ANOTHER pair of gloves before you can do any work. Below are a couple of photos of students from the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion. More photos on Flikr, at the Shirley Meng set...photos that accompany the story about the new NASA contract to Meng and NEI Corp.

NanoEngineering Department is a World Leader

The Department of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego is highlighted in two info-grahics that accompany the cover story of the July 19 issue Chemical & Engineering News "Filling Nanotech Jobs." UC San Diego is highlighted the undergraduate, M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in nanoengineering offered by the Department of NanoEngineering.

The C&EN trend article, by Ann M. Thayer, provides some background on where nanotechnology in the United States has been, and where it is going.

The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering established the Department of NanoEngineering in 2007. Read the inagural NanoEngineering at UC San Diego story here.

Take a spin through some of the exiting NanoEngineering research happening here at UC San Diggo: peruse the first edition (in PDF form) of the Department of NanoEngineering newsletter.

NanoEngineering professors from the Jacobs School have been in the news recently. NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang made headlines around the world for one piece of his lab's smart sensor research.

NanoEngineering professor Shirley Meng is the UC San Diego lead on a new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The grant went to General Atomics and UC San Diego's Meng is leading a subcontract. Onell Soto from the San Diego Union Tribune covered the story.

According to Soto:

General Atomics will get nearly $2 million to work with the University of California San Diego to develop a battery big enough to store power for utilities, in which chemicals would flow through cells as power is needed.

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.

Photos and Video: NanoEngineers Print and Test Chemical Sensors on Elastic Waistbands of Underwear

Here are three photos tied to the story "NanoEngineers Print and Test Chemical Sensors on Elastic Waistbands of Underwear".

There is a YouTube video of one a UC San Diego chemcial engineering undergraduate who worked on printing the electrodes onto underwear waistbands.

Joseph Wang Textile-Based Sensors in the News

"Textile-based sensors" or "smart underpants"? Both....and two different ways to think about the same research project led by NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. Reuters recently filed a story taking the smart underpants angle...which is true...but there is more. The story was triggered by a peer-reviewed paper in the British journal, Analyst. Also, here is the Reuters story with a funnier headline.

The paper investigates the viability biological sensors printed on the inside of the elastic waistband of underwear, where there is constant close contact with skin and sweat. These sensors could eventually be used as early warning sensors on the battlefiled, telling doctors that something is going wrong with someone out in the field, based on biomarkers recorded in the sweat. The U.S. Office of Naval Research is funding this research. It's part of the "field hospital on a chip" grant that I wrote about in 2008.

I'm working on a story with more details of the new paper. Thick-film textile-based amperometric sensors and biosensors. Stay tuned.

Update: Yahoo!News also picked up the Reuters story.

Four Jacobs School Professors Among The 2010 Hellman Faculty Fellows

Congratulations to the four young professors from the Jacobs School who are among the 30 UC San Diego faculty members awarded a 2010-2011 Hellman Faculty Fellowship at the University of California, San Diego. The funds awarded will support young faculty members in their scholarly work as they strive for tenure with the university.

The Jacobs School of Engineering recipients are:

Jurijs Bazilevs: Structural Engineering
Zhaowei Liu: Electrical and Computer Engineering
Donald James Sirbuly: NanoEngineering
Andrea Rae Tao: NanoEngineering

Read the full story on the UC San Diego news site.

Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Research Scholars

The list of Calit2 UCSD Undergraduate Summer Research Scholars is out, and many of the students are Jacobs School of Engineering undergraduates.

Avinash Ananthakrishnan, Junior, Computer Engineering (minor: Cognitive Science)
advisor: Zhongren (Arnold) Cao, Calit2
Scalable and Energy Efficient Embedded Digital Signal Processing Implementation for High Order MIMO-OFDM Systems

Thomas Chew, Freshman, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Shu Chien, Bioengineering
Effects of Shear Stress and Chemical Environment on Stem Cell Differentiation

Ronnie Fang, Junior, Chemical Physics / Engineering Physics (minor: Biology)
advisor: Liangfang Zhang, NanoEngineering
Scaling Up of Lipid-Polymer Hybrid NanoParticles for Drug Delivery

Roger Huang, Junior, Aerospace Engineering
advisor: Jan Kleissl, Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering
Application of Total Sky Imagery to control energy storage on the UCSD campus

Suraj Kedarisetty, Junior, Bioengineering (minor: Chemistry)
advisor: Nathan Delson, Mechanical/Aerospace Engineering
Improve Patient Safety through the Development of Intelligent Medical Simulators

Daniel Lew, Junior, Bioengineering: Premed
advisor: Martin Haas, Cancer Center and Biology
BMI-1 Promotes Cellular Invasion and Drug Resistance in Head and Neck Cancer Stem Cells

Nicole Lim, Freshman, Bioengineering: Biotechnology (minor: Law & Society)
advisor: Joseph Wang, NanoEngineering
Smart NanoScale Devices

Kristian Madsen, Junior, Electrical Engineering
advisor: Deli Wang, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Vertical Nanowires and Heterostructures for Photoelectrochemical Water Splitting

Emi Nakayama, Junior, Chemical Engineering
advisor: Jennifer Cha, NanoEngineering
A Mechanism Control the Size of Microbubbles for Ultrasound Imaging and Drug Delivery

Perry Naughton, Sophomore, Electrical Engineering
advisor: Deli Wang, Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE)
Low Cost Solar Cells using Simple and Inexpensive Spray Pyrolysis Technique (SPT)

Bryan Ransil, Freshman, Computer Science
advisor: Falko Kuester, Structural Engineering
Human-Data Interaction

Arvind Satyanarayan, Junior, Computer Science
advisor: Jim Hollan, Cognitive Science
Interaction Techniques for Large Wall Displays

Emily Schoenhoff, Sophomore, Bioengineering
advisor: Robert Sah, Bioengineering
Cartilage Degradation in Aging Humans - Collagen Network

Justin Tse, Junior, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Adam Engler, Bioengineering
Directing Mesenchymal Stem Cell Migration with Matrix Elasticity

Alan Turchik, Junior, Mechanical Engineering
advisor: Tom Levy, Anthropology, Calit2
Camera Stablization for Aerial Photogrammetric Systems

Grant Van Horn, Sophomore, Computer Science
advisor: Serge Belongie, Computer Science and Engineering (CSE)
GroZi and Visipedia

Christopher Wei, Sophomore, Bioengineering: Biotechnology
advisor: Kun Zhang, Bioengineering
De Novo Assembly of the Microbial Genome

David Yi, Junior, double major: Bioengineering: Premed and Biochemistry/Cell Biology
advisor: Weg Mendoza Ongkeko, Surgery
Identification of a Distinct Subpopulation of Cancer Stem Cells Critical for Metastasis and Tumor Growth in Human Anaplastic Thyroid Cancer