Mark Galvan (center) stands with Congresswoman Susan Davis (CA-53) and the Capitol’s chief administrative officer, Dan Beard
Jacobs School undergraduate Mark Galvan builds concrete canoes, instals solar panels, ensures LEED certification for UCSD campus buildings...and now he is the first "green intern" at the United States Capitol in Washington D.C.
UC San Diego senior Mark Galvan recently began working three days a week in the Office of the Architect of the Capitol and “Green the Capitol” offices, and two days a week in the office of Congresswoman Susan Davis (CA-53).
Structural engineering researchers expect severe damage to a retaining wall they will shake on October 2 at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
Media interested in attending the shake test (10 a.m.-2 p.m.) or obtaining footage from the shake test should contact Andrea Siedsma at asiedsma@soe.ucsd.edu or 858-822-0899
WHERE: UCSD Englekirk Structural Engineering Center at Camp Elliot
WHAT: Witness a series of dramatic simulated earthquakes that will shake a retaining wall at the UC San Diego Englekirk Structural Engineering Center, which has the largest outdoor shake table in the United States. Hundreds of miles of retaining wall systems exist in the western United States. Their routine design for static applications has been practiced by many public and private sectors. However, the seismic design of these retaining walls has not been extensively developed and there are no accurate and reliable guidelines in the existing design codes and specifications.
This will be a second in a series of simulated shake tests on retaining wall systems by researchers at the Englekirk Center. During the first set of tests, performed in early September, researchers investigated the seismic response of a semi-gravity reinforced concrete cantilever wall. Researchers will now test the seismic response of a semi-gravity reinforced concrete cantilever wall with a sound barrier. The walls will be backfilled with typical Caltrans soil and supported on flexible foundation in a soil box. The outcome of this research, funded by Caltrans, will ensure that future retaining wall systems are designed to a higher performance standard and existing systems are upgraded and retrofit to offer satisfactory performance to provide a safe and mobile transportation system in California.
*During the tests, researchers will simulate ground motions based on the 1994 Northridge earthquake (6.7 magnitude); 1999 Kocaeli, Turkey quake (7.4 magnitude); and the 1995 Takatori, Japan quake (6.9 magnitude). Engineers will increase the ground motions for each test until the wall suffers major damage.
Sara Richardson won first place in the life and physical sciences category, an award which comes with a $1000 cash award.
Richardson received first prize for her work on “Simulation of EVA Suite Effects During Lunar and Martian Analog Exercise.” Richardson’s research explored the effects of lower body negative pressure versus lower body positive pressure as a way to simulate human exercise on the moon. She was nominated by her faculty advisor Alan Hargens, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the UCSD School of Medicine. She completed her research at the Clinical Orthopedic Lab at the UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest.
"The research resources available from the UC San Diego Libraries have been extremely valuable in my project," said Richardson. “I have made extensive use of the UCSD Library resources listed in Sage and the E-journal subscriptions, which were necessary to view the results of my searches on PubMed and have been essential to my ability to access relevant papers. The research strategies I have picked up in this project have carried over into other aspects of my academic life—both for class and research."
Richardson is extremely involved at UC San Diego outside the library as well. She is the past president of the Jacobs School of Engineering's Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC).
Watch Richardson on YouTube (below) giving a tour of E-Games 2008.
Long considered a top cyber-security expert, Savage leads a team at the Collaborative Center for Internet Epidemiology and Defenses that last year infiltrated the infamous Storm botnet, which victimized millions of people through internet spam scams. And last month the center, which is a joint UCSD and UC-Berkeley effort, was awarded a five-year, $7 million grant from the U.S. Navy's research arm to study botnets and the threats they pose to national security.
Herd It, the music discovery Facebook game created by Jacobs School engineers just moved from alpha to full production mode. Herd It was created by the same group of researchers who are developing a new kind of music search engine that is capable of actually listening to songs and returning songs that contain the musical characteristics that person is looking for--based on their text-based search strings--moved from alpha to offical release mode today.
Stiff gels are important for coaxing adult stem cells to differentiate into muscle cells. Making muscle cells from adult stem cells in the lab would provide important new sources of high quality cells for a wide range of cell-based regenerative therapies to treat a diverse set of muscle diseases, from muscular dystrophy to heart attacks.
Adam Engler, a bioengineering professor at UC San Diego, is using stiff gels as part of his work to create more realistic stem cell niches that will provide the right cues (in both time and space) for adult stem cells to turn to muscle cells.
The images above highlight the progressEngler has already made. Both images above are adult mesenchymal stem cells (or MSCs). The adult stem cells on the left were grown on gels with stiffness of 1kPa (i.e. soft). The same type of stem cells (right) were grown on intermediately stiff gels (11kPa). The 11kPa gel recapitulates muscle stiffness, hence the adult mesenchymal stem cells on the right expressed MyoD, the protein labeled in the green color. MyoD plays a key role in regulating muscle differentiation. The 1kPa gel (left) is too soft, so those cells do not make the MyoD protein and most but not all lack green staining. The new project, funded by Adam Engler’s five-year $1.5 million NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, will integrate the cue of matrix stiffness with matrix topography and growth factors in a time and spatially-dependent way in order to make a more complete stem cell niche.
Mark Galvan (center) stands with Congresswoman Susan Davis
