Congrats Hellman Faculty Fellows

Congratulations to the three Jacobs School of Engineering faculty who have been named Hellman Faculty Fellows for 2012-2013.

• Kamalika Chaudhuri, computer science and engineering
• Juan C. Del Alamo, mechanical and aerospace engineering
• Jie Xiang, electrical and computer engineering

Read more about the Hellman Faculty Fellows here. 

Shu Chien Honored by Columbia University

Bioengineering professor Shu Chien is being honored by Columbia University with an honorary Doctor of Science.

Columbia University will confer the honorary degree at commencement exercises on Wednesday, May 16. Chien is University Professor of bioengineering and medicine at UC San Diego and Director of the UC San Diego Institute of Engineering in Medicine.

From the Columbia University press release:

Shu Chien, Doctor of Science: As a doctor, researcher and professor, Chien has made seminal contributions to fields of biology, medicine and engineering. His primary areas of research are cardiovascular physiology, molecular and cellular bioengineering, and stem cell regulation. He is the author of more than 500 peer-reviewed scientific articles and editor of 11 books. He has been a leader of numerous professional societies and the recipient of countless awards, including the National Medal of Science, which he received from President Obama in 2011.

Learn more about Chien's research in this Jacobs School of Engineering story celebrating his National Medal of Science.

In San Diego on April 13? Shu Chien is giving the Richard Skalak Memorial Lecture today, April 13 from 4-6 p.m. at the Calit2 Atkinson Hall. Register here

TDLC Renewal Grant / NSF $18M

How do humans learn, and how is the element of time critical for learning? The Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC), headquartered at UC San Diego in the Institute for Neural Computation, is helping to answer that question, thanks in part to an $18 million renewal grant from the National Science Foundation.

Founded in 2006 with support from the NSF, TDLC is led by Gary Cottrell, professor of computer science and engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. The interdisciplinary team of scientists and educators includes over 40 principal investigators at 17 partner research institutions, including UC Berkeley, Rutgers University at Newark, and Vanderbilt University, in three countries, and in several local San Diego schools.

Read the full story: http://www.jacobsschool.ucsd.edu/news/news_releases/release.sfe?id=1132

Past TDLC stories: TEMPORAL DYNAMICS OF LEARNING CENTER LOOKS TO THE FUTURE

CROSS-FERTILIZATION OF IDEAS AT SAN DIEGO-BASED LEARNING CENTER

NSF AWARDS $12 MILLION TO UC SAN DIEGO SCIENCE OF LEARNING CENTER FOR THREE MORE YEARS OF INNOVATION

Science of Learning Center Comes to UC San Diego 

Images from National Medal of Science event / Shu Chien

Screen shots from the live web video feed of the National Medal of Science ceremony at the White House today are on the Jacobs School of Engineering Flickr stream. Congratulations to UC San Diego bioengineering professor Shu Chien. Check out the screen shots on the Jacobs School flickr feed. Read the story on the Jacobs School news site.

Gert Lanckriet Electrical Engineering Prof Named to TR35 List

Electrical engineering professor Gert Lanckriet was named to Technology Review TR35 list. The Jacobs School story is coming, but here is the link to the Gert Lanckriet Technology Review story.

Below is a video that describes some of Lanckriet's work. 

Bioengineer Kun Zhang Wins Stem Cell Grant to Study Stem Cell Mutations

Bioengineering professor Kun Zhang took home one of the 8 CIMR grants that went to UC San Diego today. (Read the original press release by Debra Kain.)

The summary of Zhang's newly funded project:

Kun Zhang, assistant professor, Department of Bioengineering, Jacobs School of Engineering and the UCSD Institute for Genomic Medicine, was awarded $1,382,140 to study mutations associated with stem cell reprogramming and differentiation. By understanding the functional consequences of mutations that can arise during the course of reprogramming a patient’s own stem cells into pluripotent stem cells, the researchers hope to clear one of the biggest hurdles in the field of hIPS cells – the risk of cancer.  The scientists will comprehensively identify genetic changes in protein coding sequences, or exomes, through large-scale DNA sequencing, with the goal of better understanding of how such mutations occur and propagate. Read about Zhang's recent Nature paper on stem cell mutations.

Learn about Zhang's recent Nature paper.

Media coverage from the Zhang Nature paper:
Nature News & Views
MIT Technology Review
San Diego Union Tribune
Los Angeles Times
NPR Science Friday

Bernhard Palsson Elected to American Academy of Microbiology

UC San Diego bioengineering professor Bernhard Palsson has been elected to fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology. Palsson, along with 77 other new fellows, was elected in recognition of his scientific achievement and original contributions to the advancement of microbiology. (See the full list of Fellows here.)

Palsson’s current research at UC San Diego focuses on the reconstruction of genome-scale biochemical reaction networks; the development of mathematical analysis procedures for genome-scale models; and the experimental verification of genome-scale models with current emphasis on cellular metabolism and transcriptional regulation in E. coli and Yeast. You can read more about Palsson and his team on the Systems Biology Reseach Group site. 

Read a recent press release on research coming out of the Palsson lab: “Metabolism Models may Explain Why Alzheimer's Disease Kills Some Neuron Types First”.

There are more than 2,000 fellows representing all subspecialties of microbiology, including basic and applied research, teaching, public health, industry, and government service. For more information on the American Academy of Microbiology click here.  

Palsson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

The Department of Bioengineering at UC San Diego is consistently ranked in the top 2 or 3 bioengineering departments in the nation. 

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

The Future of Music Search and Discovery

Electrical engineering professor Gert Lanckriet recently won an NSF CAREER grant for work on developing automated ways to search, annotate and generally make sense of the ever-growing sea of digital music. More info on the funded project is below. Also, check out some cool related stories (and video!) from Lanckriet and his collaborators:

Electrical Engineers Go Head to Head with Genius on Music Playlists

Facebook Games for a Better Music Search Engine

From a Queen Song to a Better Music Search Engine 

CAREER: An Integrated Framework for Multimodal Music Search and Discovery.

A revolution in music production and distribution has made millions of songs instantly available to virtually anyone, on the Internet. However, a listener looking for "dark electronica with cello" or "music like U2's", without knowing a relevant artist or song name, or a musicologist wanting to search through large amounts of unknown ethnic music, would face serious challenges. Novel music search and discovery technologies are required to help users find the desired content.

The non-text-based, multimodal character of Internet-wide information about music (audio clips, lyrics, web documents, images, band networks, etc.) poses a new and difficult challenge to existing database technology that depends on unimodal, text-based data-structures. This project addresses two fundamental research questions at the core of addressing this challenge: (1) The automated annotation of (non-text-based) audio content with descriptive keywords; and (2) the automated integration of the heterogeneous content of multimodal databases, to improve music search and discovery on the Internet or in a personal database. The resulting architecture leverages the automation and scalability of machine learning with the effectiveness of human computation, engaging music professionals or enthusiasts around the world.

The research addresses questions at the core of multimedia information retrieval in general, enabling the design of a new generation of expressive and flexible retrieval systems for multimodal databases, with applications to music discovery, video retrieval, indexing multimedia content on the home PC, etc.

Bioengineering Professor Bernhard Palsson Named AAAS Fellow

Jacobs School bioengineering professor Bernhard Palsson is one seven new AAAS Fellows from UC San Diego. Read the AAAS release here.

Bernhard Palsson, PhD, professor of bioengineering and adjunct professor of medicine, was cited for distinguished contributions in the area of systems biology, specifically in genetic circuits and genome-scale models of complex cellular processes.

Palsson runs the Systems Biology Research Group in the Department of Bioengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.


Palsson is the senior author on a recent Nature Biotechnology paper looking at why Alzheimer's Disease kills some neuron types first.

Stefan Savage and Pavel Pevzner named 2010 ACM Fellows

Congrats to Stefan Savage and Pavel Pevzner, both named 2010 ACM Fellows.

Pavel Pevzner

Stefan Savage

Stefan Savage is being recognized by the ACM “for contributions to large scale systems and network security.”

Pavel Pevzner is being recognized by the ACM “for contributions to algorithms for genome rearrangements, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.”

Both are professors in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego.

UC San Diego computer science professor Stefan Savage’s work has focused on the security threats enabled by broad Internet connectivity; including worms, viruses, denial-of-service, botnets and spam. He is known for advancing a quantitative approach towards computer security, including the development of empirical techniques to measure and analyze global-scale attacks and efforts to identify the economics driving modern attackers.

Savage is part of the Systems & Networking and Security research groups in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UC San Diego. Savage is also the Acting Director of the UC San Diego Center for Networked Systems. His interests range from the economics of e-crime, to characterizing availability, to automotive systems to routing protocols and data center virtualization.

UC San Diego computer science professor Pavel Pevzner’s work has focused broadly on algorithmic aspects of bioinformatics. Bioinformatics has become a part of modern biology and often dictates new fashions, enables new approaches, and drives further biological developments. Pevzner’s work focuses of DNA sequencing, proteomics, and genome rearrangements, the key areas of algorithmic biology. He authored influential graduate and undegraduate textbooks on bioinformatics algorithms and is now interested in new approaches to interdisciplinary computer science education and introducing computer science to education of biologists. 

Pavel Pevzner is the Ronald R. Taylor Professor of Computer Science at UC San Diego; Director of the NIH Center for Computational Mass Spectrometry; and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Professor.

San Diego Union Tribune is Live Tweeting Interview W/ UCSD Chancellor Fox Regarding Her National Medal of Science

http://twitter.com/#!/LilyShumLeung

New Blog in Town / Science Quest from SD Union Tribune

Gary Robbins is the new science/technology journalist at the San Diego Union Tribune, and he has started a new science blog called "Science Quest". Check it out here.

One of last week's Science Quest blog posts covers electrical engineering (ECE) professor Jack Wolf's induction into the National Academy of Sciences.

Cryptographer/ Computer Scientist Honored

Congrats to computer science professor Mihir Bellare. He and Phillip Rogaway won the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award , for their development of practice-oriented provable security. Their contribution resulted in high quality, cost-effective cryptography, a key component for Internet security in an era of explosive growth in online transactions. (Who doesn't shop online!?)

Check out the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award Web page here. BTW, ACM stands for Association for Computing Machinery.

I interviewed Bellare in 2007 regarding a TR35 award that one of his students, Tadayoshi (Yoshi) Kohno, won.

2010 Distinguished Educator Award of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society

Congratulations to electrical and computer engineering (ECE) professor Gabriel Rebeiz. He received recipient of the 2010 Distinguished Educator Award of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (MTT-S).

This award is given to a distinguished educator in the field of microwave engineering and science who exemplifies the special human qualities of the late Fred J. Rosenbaum who considered teaching a high calling and demonstrated his dedication to the MTT-S through tireless service.

Prof. Rebeiz has been cited for his "Outstanding Achievements as an Educator, Mentor And Role Model of Microwave Engineers and Engineering Students".

The award will be conferred at the annual Society Awards Banquet to be held during the International Microwave Symposium the week of May 23 to 28, 2010 in Anaheim, California.

Read more about professor Rebeiz's work in press releases linked below:

Toward Cheaper Imaging Systems for Identifying Concealed Weapons on the Human Body

Two-Antenna Quad-Beam 11-15 GHz Phased Array RFIC Targeted at Satellite Systems and Advanced Radars

Most Complex Silicon Phased Array Chip in the World Developed at UC San Diego

Materials Science Professor Wins International Award

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) professor Marc A. Meyers won the 2009 Rinehart Award, given at the 9th Congress of the DYMAT Association on the Dynamic Mechanical and Physical Behavior of Materials Subjected to Dynamic Loading, held in Brussels, Belgium, from September 7 to 11.

The 2009 award was given to professor Meyers (UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering Materials Science and Engineering) and to Prof. Field (U. Cambridge, UK). Meyers is affiliated with UC San Diego's Materials Science and Engineering program, which is concerned with the structure, properties and applications of materials. This university-wide program aims to provide fundamental knowledge for understanding of materials with the objective of predicting, modifying, and tailoring the properties of materials to yield enhanced material performance.

Meyers was one of the Jacobs School professors recently profiled in an NSF video. Watch the video here. Read the transcript and learn more here.

Three hundred researchers from 29 countries attended the DYMAT congress, which was held at the Royal Military Academy. DYMAT is a European based global association coordinating activities in the domain of dynamic behavior of materials.

The citation in the plaque received by Prof. Meyers reads: For outstanding achievements to the understanding and modeling of the structure/ property and damage behavior of materials subjected to high-strain-rate and shock-wave loading. The award was given at the inaugural session of the meeting, after keynote lectures by Profs. Field and Meyers , by General Major Harry Vindervogel, commander of the Royal Military Academy, and by Dr. Richard Dormeval (CEA-France), president of DYMAT. The DYMAT award, established in 1990, is a global recognition, and past recipients are from the USA (4), Russia (1), Japan (1), Germany (1), and China (1).