UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering blog

By Kritin Karkare

More than 400 students attended TESC's Engineers on the Green.
Photos by David Baillot.

On a cloudy afternoon on the first Monday of Fall Quarter 2018, members from all of the engineering student organizations filled Warren Mall with their project demos, sign-in sheets and informational posters waiting to recruit incoming and returning students at this year’s Engineers on the Green. The annual event is organized by the Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC), which hosts Engineers on the Green to help engineering organizations get greater visibility and recruit interested students for their club activities. The event drew upwards of 400 students and continues to grow each year.

The event played host to about 50 different engineering clubs from a wide breadth of disciplines.

Are you interested in pitching your engineering project ideas and getting funding for them? Divergent Engineering has helped projects like a stair climbing robot get sponsored by Qualcomm.

Triton Racing, Tritons for Unmanned Aerial Systems (TUAS), and Design/Build/Fly (DBF) have exciting opportunities to expand mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science skills, with members working on race cars, autonomous drones and RC planes, respectively, that compete in annual competitions.

If you want to apply your engineering skills to communities outside of campus, learn more about Engineers Without Borders (EWB): some of the projects EWB works on include a water filtration system in communities in Kenya and in Tijuana.

And those are just a few of the project-based groups. Many of the engineering organizations also focus on professional development, outreach, and event planning meant to promote interest in engineering. For engineers that want to get help in soft-skill building and industry relations, they can join the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineers (ISPE) for their leadership rotation program and their industry mentorship program.

Want to bring STEM education to young students? Look no further than Tritons for Sally Ride Science. They host workshops for kids like “Science of Harry Potter Magic” and Ignite Talks to inspire even undergraduates to look for new opportunities in their fields.

Lastly, the Nanoengineering and Technology Society (NETS) works on events like the Nano Day Conference to develop interest in nanoengineering and hosts projects for skill development.

The wide range of opportunities is staggering, whether it be in project-based work or professional development. For more engineering organizations not highlighted, take a look at TESC’s list of organizations here.

By Kritin Karkare

Hackathon participants hard at work on their project. Photo courtesy of SD Hacks.

Rain and lightning didn’t stop nearly 800 students passionate about coding from participating in the fourth annual SD Hacks hackathon, held at UC San Diego and hosted by the Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC). The 36-hour event, which ran from October 12 to 14, is an intercollegiate hackathon where students from across the country come together to create innovative solutions to challenges or projects of their choice in a mere 36 hours. Sleep not included.

Albert P. Pisano, Dean of the Jacobs School of Enginering,
welcomes students to UC San Diego at the SD Hacks
opening ceremonies. Photo courtesy of SD Hacks.

TESC organized the event, which was sponsored by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific) and featured collaborations with student clubs like the Computer Science and Engineering Society (CSES) and other partnerships with companies and organizations like the Power of Neurogaming Center in the UC San Diego School of Medicine and Northrop Grumman Corporation.

This year, a total of 109 teams submitted projects to SD Hacks, ranging from a dog meme classifier to a search and rescue robot that could help emergency crews in dangerous situations. As with previous years, hackers could also participate in challenges set by SD Hacks partners, where projects can take advantage of APIs offered to win specific prizes. For example, DocuSign challenged students to create a project that made the best use of their e-signature API, with the winner taking home $2,000 and an interview for a job or internship. Other services available included Google Cloud Platform and Domain.com.

3, 2, 1... HACK! Photo courtesy of SD Hacks.

David Ding, a third year electrical engineering student at UC San Diego and director of SD Hacks, said that the hackathon took more than six months to plan. The most difficult part? Getting all the sponsors; their last one was confirmed in early October. His favorite part though, was the opening ceremonies because he got to see everything come together. To him, that was extremely gratifying. With the help of 135 dedicated student volunteers under his leadership, SD Hacks ran smoothly.

Of course, coding 36 hours straight will do a number on the mind. Thankfully, UC San Diego is home to a beach just 15 minutes away, where students can go to relax if they need a break.

Participants from other colleges liked that about UC San Diego. Kishan Sarvaiya and Kizar Cassiere from Long Beach State University both said that compared to other schools that they have gone to for hackathons, UC San Diego offered better things to do in terms of experience.

After a long 36 hours, and almost two hours of judging, one group came out on top as the Grand Prize, Best Overall Hack winner for SD Hacks 2018: Polyglot. Polyglot’s team consisted of members Naba Rizvi, Yizhen Shi, Carla Marzari, and Jacob Perkins, all from the University of Toledo in Ohio. They developed a way for non-English speaking youth to learn how to code in their native language, since most programming languages use tags and keywords in English. Polyglot helps them both learn the English words, as well as learn how to code.

To learn more and try out Polyglot, check out their DevPost here: PolyGlot

To check out the wide scope of project submissions, click on the link to the SD Hacks DevPost.

There are many ways in which our genomes vary from one another, leading to differences in various traits or disease susceptibilities. Most researchers who want to uncover these differences focus on simple “spelling” mistakes in our DNA.

“Yet there are complex, repetitive parts of our genome that are also known to cause diseases, such as Huntington’s disease, and these parts of the genome are not analyzed in most large medical genetics studies,” said Melissa Gymrek, PhD, assistant professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine and Jacobs School of Engineering.

So Gymrek and her team built a reference database that allows researchers to estimate a person’s genome at these repetitive regions, even when they are not directly measured.

“This resource will enable analyzing the effects of repeat variation for the first time across hundreds of thousands of individuals on thousands of traits without the need to collect any additional data,” Gymrek said.

Read more about this new resource and its applications in Nature Communications, October 23:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-06694-0

A reference haplotype panel for genome-wide imputation of short tandem repeats.

Jervaughn Hunter. Photo by David Baillot

From Port Gibson, Mississippi to the bioengineering lab of Karen Christman at UC San Diego, Jervaughn Hunter said growing up he had no clue he’d one day be in graduate school. Now that he is, he makes it a priority to share the knowledge he’s gained along the way with other young students.

“I’ll do anything to pay it forward, because I didn’t know I’d ever be in grad school,” said Hunter. “I didn’t think it was going to happen.”

Not only did it happen, but it also happened at one of the top bioengineering doctoral programs in the nation, and with Hunter as a Sloan Scholar, no less. Sloan Scholars receive a four-year fellowship worth $40,000, meant to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists of outstanding promise.

Hunter graduated from the University of Alabama, Birmingham (UAB) with a degree in biomedical engineering, and spent the following year as a post-baccalaureate researcher at UAB working on the use of stem cells to regenerate affected areas of the heart after a heart attack.

He plans to continue to focus on the heart during his time as a Ph.D. researcher, but instead of stem cells, will apply a therapy from Christman’s lab—an injectable hydrogel designed to repair damaged cardiac tissue after a heart attack.

Hunter said the collaborative and welcoming nature of Christman’s lab drew him to UC San Diego and the Jacobs School of Engineering, as did her entrepreneurial spirit. Christman co-founded Ventrix Inc., a San Diego-based startup that uses the hydrogels developed in her lab to repair heart tissue and increase cardiac muscle.

“I want to work on the translational side of medicine, because basic science is fun, but I want to have a treatment out there that I helped make and can see it be used to treat people,” Hunter said. “That was another thing that drew me to Dr. Christman’s lab was the company she started with her material. I want to be able to see treatments we make actually be able to help people.”

Hunter doesn’t leave “helping people” to treatments he develops in lab alone. In the few weeks that he’s been on campus, he’s already gotten involved with the Bioengineering Graduate Society; volunteered to serve as the graduate student liaison for the UC San Diego chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers; and plans to get involved with TRIO Student Support Services as a mentor—Hunter consistently served as a TRIO mentor throughout his undergraduate career, taking upwards of 20 students under his wing overall.

Ultimately, Hunter plans to share his experience at UC San Diego with youth and young adults in his hometown in an effort to bring awareness to opportunities available through higher education. He wants to help Port Gibson achieve sustainable economic, social, and political growth through youth mentorship, wellness initiatives, and educational access. By paying it forward, he hopes to inspire future generations to learn how to work within the system to find the resources they need to achieve their dreams.

Adrian Salguero. Photo by David Baillot.

Adrian Salguero felt behind the curve when he started his computer science and engineering undergraduate degree at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was relatively new to the subject while some of his classmates had been programming for years.

But he stuck with it, and now he is earning his PhD in computer science and engineering at UC San Diego, one of the top ranked computer science programs in the country, as a Sloan Scholar. Sloan Scholars receive a four-year fellowship worth $40,000, meant to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists of outstanding promise.

“I enjoyed writing code, even though at first I felt like I was really behind when I saw my peers, who had been coding for much longer than I had,” Salguero said. “But at the same time it was fun learning all this new material and learning how to code, so I decided to learn not only from my teachers but also from my peers who were more experienced than me.”

His focus within computer science is bioinformatics— using large amounts of data to better understand how different organisms are structured and function with the ultimate goal of better understanding human health. Bioinformatics is also a key component of genomics and cancer research.

“When I heard about the field of bioinformatics two years ago, and how you can be a computer scientist and work on cancer genomics and health and help in that cancer research setting, that resonated a lot with me,” Salguero said. “Cancer research in general is a very important cause, and I didn’t know a computer scientist could be in that field. I feel this is a field that I’m very proud to say I’m contributing to.”

One project he’s working on now is using mass spectrometry data— which measures ions to identify the molecules within a certain mixture or material—from 51 different species of bacteria. He’ll use this data to create a spectral library for each species that will be analyzed to see what proteins, if any, exist in each species. This information will help researchers better understand what functions these proteins serve.

Salguero grew up in South Gate, a city within Los Angeles County. While earning his bachelor’s degree in computer science at UC Santa Cruz, he participated in the Treehouse Cancer Initiative, which is where he first discovered the role that computer science plays in healthcare and cancer research.

He also mentored other students through the Academic Excellence (ACE) program at UC Santa Cruz. As a first generation college student, he knew how valuable mentors can be.

“I joined ACE as a student so I had these mentors and then decided to become a mentor myself,” he said. “Me being first generation, having that support network I feel was very valuable in not only keeping me on track and motivating me, but also showing me that there are a lot of students who are in a similar situation.”

Salguero is brand new to campus, but plans to find similar mentorship opportunities while he works towards his PhD.

He doesn’t have too much free time now, but when he does, chances are high that you can find him watching a movie—Star Wars is one of his favorites—or going for a jog on the beach. May the force be with you, Adrian.

Han-Joo Lee, a graduate student in Professor Kenneth Loh's ARMOR Lab, is working on a new way to make soft robots move. The method he's developing uses ultrasonic atomization — similar to how humidifiers work— to get soft, biomimetic tissues to expand and move. The research was published in Soft Materials and Structures on January 19.

Lee's talk about this research at Lab Expo 2019's Graduate Showcase won 2nd place from the judges panel, and third place in the popular vote.

Eddie Tapia is a UC San Diego mathematics- computer science alumnus currently working on dual master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering and technology ventures at Carnegie Mellon University. When he was president of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) at UC San Diego, he created the Graduate Road Map (GRM) event to increase the number of underrepresented students applying to graduate school. Here’s why:

“I grew up in a low-income household, so my goal for the longest time was to go work after my bachelor’s degree so I could help provide for my family. As a result, grad school was not in my plans throughout most of my undergraduate career. Yet, through the help of some amazing friends, staff members, and faculty, I learned about the benefits of obtaining an advanced degree and they provided me with the insight I needed to craft a strong application.

However, not everyone is lucky enough to have the help I had and I noticed that many students, especially underrepresented minorities, were not applying to graduate school because they had a lot of misconceptions about the whole process. I was bothered by this realization so I began to think of ways where I could give students the opportunity to connect with faculty, current graduate students, and university representatives to demystify the graduate school application process. I created GRM to increase the number of underrepresented students applying to graduate school and support students who might otherwise not apply to graduate school.”

This year, SHPE will host GRM on February 9. If you’re not sure if graduate school is a good fit for you, or don’t really know what the application process is like, come learn from the experiences of current graduate students and professors. Thanks to SHPE, the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Women Engineers at UC San Diego for organizing this event. Details here: https://sites.google.com/ucsd.edu/graduate-road-map-2019/home

When he was in high school and building robots, Marquez Balingit couldn't help but wonder: How do these parts work and how do circuits communicate with each other?

He realized is questions could be answered in one word: nanoengineering. So when it came time to pick a college major, that's what he chose. He wanted to understand what things at the nanoscale or submicron level look like.

Now an undergraduate the Jacobs School, Balingit tackles this question at the Nano3 lab. In the future, Balingit sees himself creating a nonprofit company specializing in a form of energy conversion, battery or generator that is efficient in every aspect: cost, power conversion and practicality. He hopes that it can be free and practical for developing countries, giving them more autonomy so that they can power themselves.

Balingit says he is inspired by the works of Nikola Tesla. From his perspective, Tesla's main desire was to create free energy by harnessing and manipulating existing energy on earth and within the air so that everyone can access it.

Balingit teaches users unfamiliar with the scanning electron microscope, or SEM, how to use it independently. Unlike regular optical microscopes, SEM does not use photons. Instead, it uses electrons, which allows the device to capture smaller features at the 1 micron scale, approximately ⅕ the size of a human red blood cell.

"I like the idea of being the bridge of information by gathering some knowledge, filtering out the details and explaining it to someone clearly," Balingit said. "I learn how to use high tech equipment and understand the standard operating procedures to be able to articulate that to other people so that they can use it on their own."

Outside of training users, Balingit also works on service measurements of sample materials, in order to to figure out the features that users want. He says he feels challenged to get a clear, high resolution images and excited to see something he's never seen before.

"Sometimes things I see in textbooks, I end up actually imaging which is pretty amazing because I never thought I'd be able to. In my textbooks, a lot of things are in the 10 microns and 5 microns and I wondered how they even get these images. Now, years later, I'm getting images that are roughly similar to that," Balingit said.

The Nano3 lab is also looking to increase outreach with the SEM by remotely connecting with high schools and community colleges to show them the SEM's full capabilities of the and what it can provide from an educational standpoint. Balingit feels like this will help bridge the gap between college and high school curricula in nanotechnology by bringing this information to them. By magnifying everyday objects like pennies and ballpoint pens, Balingit also hopes that using SEM will inspire young students to pursue an education/career in a STEM field.

Rebecca Kandell is a bioengineering graduate student and Sloan Scholar.
Photos by David Baillot/ UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Rebecca Kandell knew she wanted to work in a STEM field from a young age. Her mom was a first-generation college student and electrical engineer, and her dad studied mechanical engineering, so engineering had always appealed to her. But she also was interested in biology and had dreams of becoming a medical physician in her youth. It wasn’t until applying for college that she realized she could meld the two into one field: bioengineering.

“I grew up in a family of engineering and science,” Kandell said. “I knew I wanted to get into a technical field. When I attended a high school outreach event and learned about biomedical engineering, I thought that was a great way to combine engineering and biology.”

Kandell, who grew up in Ridgecrest, California, is now pursuing a Ph.D. in bioengineering at UC San Diego as a Sloan Scholar. Sloan Scholars receive a four-year fellowship worth $40,000 to stimulate fundamental research by early career scientists of outstanding promise.

She’s working in the lab of Ester Kwon, a professor of bioengineering at UC San Diego, designing nanoparticles with an emphasis on treating traumatic brain injury (TBI). Her research focuses on brain and nanoparticle therapy, working to develop tiny sub-cellular particles that could be used to more effectively transport drugs to the brain and help treat TBI and other neurodegenerative diseases. The carried drugs can help with treating complications that come with TBI such as brain swelling and cell death.

Kandell earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering at California Polytechnic State University and conducted research while working towards her degrees. There, she used bioimaging and cell culture to investigate natural therapies to prevent the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation (UV) on skin cells.

While at Cal Poly, Kandell also held several officer positions with the Society of Women Engineers (SWE). As president of SWE, one of the largest clubs on campus, she spearheaded multiple large-scale outreach events attended by thousands of K-12 students, and visited local schools to teach engineering principles to underrepresented minority students. With her outreach and volunteering, Kandell hopes to inspire students to study engineering in college and reach their full potential. She has continued to volunteer in San Diego by mentoring students in the Jacobs Undergraduate Mentorship Program (JUMP).

“I value mentoring students, both through scientific research and outreach programs like JUMP,” she said. “Mentorship provides a support system among students so that knowledge and positive experiences can be shared. I am committed to encouraging others to achieve their educational goals.”
Kandell is considering her research career goals, but said there are two components she knows her future endeavors will involve: research and mentorship.

“I am incredibly grateful to the Sloan foundation for their generous award which will allow me to conduct research and also give back to the community.”

Jackie Villalobos, a fourth year electrical engineering student at UC San Diego, has some advice for future engineering students: get involved on campus! She learned this the hard way.

“My first year, I wasn’t involved in anything at all,” she said. “I came in and thought I’m just going to get on top of studying and get used to school. That was the worst decision I could have made and I really regret it.”

It’s hard to image that, since Villalobos is now the president of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) at UC San Diego, helped found the Anita Borg Leadership and Engagement (ABLE) outreach program, is a student worker organizing educational camps at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, and is an undergraduate researcher in Professor Tara Javidi’s lab.

“I met so many new friends through SWE and I felt so much more supported than when I was alone trying to figure out college by myself,” Villalobos said. “You just have to take that first step. If you’re just going to class and going home, there’s not much growth that will happen because you’re not getting out of your comfort zone.”

Villalobos grew up in Chula Vista, twenty miles south of UC San Diego. Her mother and father—who is also an electrical engineer-- immigrated to the United States from Mexico for her father’s job before she was born. The engineering mentality that she saw in her father convinced her that this was a field she was interested in.

“What appealed to me about engineering is if something would break around the house, or the garage stopped working, he would never call anyone to come fix it-- he’d be the one to fix it, and he’d ask if I wanted to help. That’s what got me into engineering, was seeing how applicable it was to everything. That if anything broke, he’d say ‘Oh I can fix it.’ I really liked that mindset and that’s what appealed to me with engineering.”

Her decision to choose electrical engineering for her major wasn’t so decisive. That’s why she enjoys devoting time to outreach efforts that help high school students learn more about what specific majors entail.

“I ended up really liking electrical engineering, but going in I know I didn’t know what I was getting into. That’s why now through SWE, outreach is my favorite part of what we do because we’re able to talk to high school girls about what we do in our majors, what goes on in our classes, and they can explore different majors.”

In addition to her role with SWE, Villalobos is an undergraduate researcher in Javidi’s electrical engineering lab, working on path optimization for drones. The goal is to be able to give a drone a starting point and end point, and have it figure out the most optimized travel path. Their current application is for farmers who use drones to check on their livestock and crops—instead of the drone finding the target object and then landing, the team is working to be able to dispatch the drone, have it check on the object of interest, and then return to its home destination, all on its own.

In addition to finding a group or community to get involved with, Villalobos has one other piece of advice for current and future engineering students: find time for yourself.

“That’s something I always try to work on, because you have a lot of things in your day but there’s also a time where you need to breathe and relax and take a step back,” she said. “Take a moment. I would say for me at least it was about not going for everything all at once and piling a bunch of stuff on. Little by little you take steps, but you just have to make that first one.”

By Kritin Karkare

Undergraduate student Lucas Patel presents his
research. Photos courtesy of Lab Expo.

The UC San Diego Biomedical Engineering Society hosted its seventh annual Lab Expo in January, drawing upwards of 800 attendees and featuring research from more than 60 labs from a variety of disciplines across campus, including anthropology, electrical and computer engineering, bioengineering and more.

Lab Expo chairs and bioengineering students Daibo Zhang and Jessica Ma spent eight months planning the all-day student-run research symposium meant to develop scientific literacy, promote interdisciplinary collaboration and encourage scientific advocacy.

Keynote speaker Grant Sanderson.

Keynote speaker Grant Sanderson, a math educational Youtuber with 1.6 million subscribers, drew a large crowd while talking about his approach to communicating math more clearly. Sanderson, better known by his Youtube channel’s name, 3Blue1Brown, developed his own mathematics visualization programming library to help viewers get a more intuitive grasp on abstract math concepts like neural networks and the Fourier Transform. He thinks that his visualization-first approach has merit.

“By focusing on clarity of communication, it makes you think more clearly about what it is you’re doing,” Sanderson said. “Whatever piece it might be, if you think about how you present this to an audience, it will shape your own understanding of the context, rather than letting communication be an afterthought.”

A research poster presentation and the keynote speech were just the tip of the iceberg. What better way to practice communicating science than to have graduate students pitch their research in only five minutes?

The second annual Lab Expo Graduate Showdown (LEGS) featured seven students from different departments including cognitive science and mechanical and aerospace engineering, competing to best condense and communicate their research projects.

Lab Expo chairs and bioengineering students
Jessica Ma and Daibo Zhang.

Only one could come out on top: judges picked Andrew Shibata, a first year cognitive science graduate student, as the winner. Based on his experiences listening to the myriad accents and voices in California, Shibata’s research aims to develop a database of voices characterizing the San Diego region, and study how people’s voices change the longer they live in San Diego.

Next up, the Biomedical Engineering Society is hosting their annual Translational Medicine Day on March 6. This event aims to bring together the research and healthcare communities-- including students, faculty and industry-- to bridge the gap between bench and bedside. More information can be found here: https://bmes.ucsd.edu/events/translationalmedicine.html

By Xochitl Rojas-Rocha

Students swing into gear an hour into the hackathon.
Photos by Xochitl Rojas-Rocha

On Saturday, April 6^th, young coders from universities across southern California gathered for the third annual HackXX, a 24-hour, women-centric hackathon at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego. HackXX has doubled in size each year since its inaugural event in 2017. This year, more than 200 students bundled themselves into the university’s Price Center, clustered around their laptops, and got to work.

Striving for Change

Jiazhen Rong, a fourth-year bioengineering and biotechnology student, said that while no one ever actively discouraged her from pursuing computer science, the way the field was portrayed left her with the impression that coding was “for boys.” That lack of representation took its toll, at least for a while; Rong didn’t explore programming until her junior year in college.

At HackXX, she has sensed none of that former pressure. “I really feel like this event values women,” she said. She and her two teammates, Haihao Sun and Sid Limaye, created an application that allows the user to combine an original photo file with a famous art piece for a fun, new image. Their idea, they said, was to build on what Snapchat achieves with simple filters.

Rong’s teammates, Sun and Limaye, were two of many young men who participated in the hackathon. The event is open to students of all gender identities, backgrounds and disciplines. Attendees traveled from multiple universities throughout California, some with project ideas and teams, some without. The only requirement was that they treat their fellow coders with respect.

“The goal of TESC is to empower engineering students to grow and succeed throughout their college lives and careers. We constantly seek new opportunities and ways to achieve that goal, and celebrating womxn in STEM at HackXX fits perfectly with our mission,” said Colin Feeney, president of UC San Diego’s Triton Engineering Student Council (TESC). TESC hosted the 2019 HackXX.

C: \>code -- The History and Future of Women in STEM

Students present their project, "Safehouse," to the judges.

After what was literally a sleepless night for some, the hackers had their projects judged according to general performance and presentation. In first place were computer science freshmen Yana Pyryalina (UC San Diego) and Sara Kazemi (CSU Monterey Bay), with a project called “The Callout.” The two coders designed a virtual reality simulation to train and prepare women to respond to misogynistic microaggressions in the work place. In one simulation, a male supervisor encouraged the viewer to “wear [her] hair down” and “wear something tight” for an upcoming meeting with potential investors. The simulation then offered the viewer a series of responses, all focused on drawing the supervisor’s attention to how his comments made his employee feel.

In second place, a team of coders created a role-playing game called “Maze Rescue.” With cute, Undertale-esque graphics, the game challenges the player to save their friend, a female researcher who has been kidnapped, along with her work, by a mad scientist. The player must solve a maze filled with trivia questions on notable women in STEM to save their friend.

The third place winner was “Safehouse,” an application that sends out a call for assistance when a woman feels like she’s in an unsafe situation. The application is volunteer-based, with the team sending out requests for people to sign their homes or apartments up as “safehouses” where a woman can take shelter until help arrives. The team was inspired by UC San Diego’s safety escort system, which calls a Community Service Officer (CSO) to a student’s location from sunset to 4:00 a.m. daily if they feel unsafe.

HackXX sponsor Northrop Grumman challenged students to find a
way to program a small robot car and successfully remove a hair tie
from its stand without knocking the stand over, and transport
it through a maze.

While not every team placed, others did reach the final round of judging or took home awards from HackXX sponsors such as Northrop Grumman and iTradeNetwork. One such team won “Best Women in Hack” for devising an application that helps pregnant women identify foods that they can eat, and assists them in planning meals in advance. Another finalist team created a virtual reality simulation of a women’s history museum. By using the virtual reality headset to interact with different exhibits, a visitor can travel to the moon to learn about Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, or transport to the cockpit of aviator Amelia Earhart to listen to a recording describing her life and achievements.

For HackXX co-directors Alice Lee, a fourth-year cognitive science student, and Bilguun Bulgan, a graduating computer science student, that moment was more than half a year in the making.

“It’s been really rewarding to see everything come to life, and to see how involved all of our team members are,” said Lee. Some students, she said, see hackathons as just a way to connect with corporations and find a job. With HackXX, it’s different. “Everyone on this team actually cares about what HackXX stands for, and I thought that was really cool.”

Congratulations to UC San Diego computer science PhD student Tiancheng (Kevin) Sun, who has been awarded a 2019 Google PhD Fellowship.

Sun’s research interests include computer graphics and computational photography. He is advised by UC San Diego computerscience professor Ravi Ramamoorthi, who directs the UC San Diego Center for Visual Computing.

In 2017, Sun was named winner in the undergraduate category of the ACM Student Research Competition at the 44th SIGGRAPH Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. He also won first place in the undergraduate category of the 2018 ACM Student Research Competition.

Statement from Google: Google is pleased to announce the recipients of the Google PhD Fellowships for 2019. These awards have been presented to exemplary PhD students in computer science and related disciplines. We have given these students unique fellowships to acknowledge their contributions to their areas of specialty and provide funding for their education and research. We look forward to working closely with them as they continue to become leaders in their respective fields.

At UC San Diego, Sun is the recipient of a Jacobs Fellowship, a prestigious fellowship for incoming Ph.D. students to the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

University of California San Diego nanoengineering professor Ying Shirley Meng is among the Finalists of the 2019 Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists. She is one of 31 of the nation’s rising stars in science who will compete for three Blavatnik National Laureate Awards in the categories of Chemistry, Physical Sciences & Engineering, and Life Sciences. Each of the three 2019 National Laureates will win $250,000—the world’s largest unrestricted prize for early-career scientists.

Ying Shirley Meng

Ying Shirley Meng

Shirley Meng, a materials scientist and engineering professor at UC San Diego, utilizes her pioneering research in creating novel techniques to measure, control and optimize energy storage materials from the atomic scale to the system level. Dr. Meng’s work manipulating the functional interfaces in energy storage devices has led to higher energy, more powerful, safer and longer life batteries. Her work aims to provide solutions to humankind’s grand challenge for abundant, clean and sustainable energy.

Meng is faculty director of the UC San Diego Sustainable Power and Energy Center. She directs the Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion in the Department of NanoEngineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Read the full press release from The Blavatnik Family Foundation and the New York Academy of Sciences.

Now in its 13th year, the Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists recognize the past accomplishments and the future promise of the most-talented faculty-rank scientists and engineers aged 42 years and younger at America’s top academic and research institutions. This year, the Blavatnik National Awards received an unprecedented 343 nominations from 169 academic and research centers across 44 states – a record in all three categories. The three 2019 National Laureates, chosen from the 31 Finalists, will be announced June 26.

Read the full story here.

Jose Manuel Rodriguez knew he wanted to be an engineer since he was a young boy. He grew up helping his dad fix things around the house, and enjoyed the sense of accomplishment that came with restoring function to cars, doors, sinks etc.

“I always kind of treated school as a game,” Rodriguez said. “I was always trying to get the high scores. I didn’t like seeing anything other than an A. I liked the feeling of doing well in classes. That’s what kind of motivated me.”

A first generation college student, Rodriguez was so motivated to go to and succeed in college that he skipped his senior prom to attend the IDEA Center’s Breakfast with the Dean and learn what the Jacobs School had to offer.

“I said, ‘You know, I’d rather decide about my future than have this one night of fun. I’ll see my friends, they’ll be there. So I went to Breakfast with the Dean and Triton Day rather than go to my high school prom.”

That decision paid off. Rodriguez decided to attend UC San Diego, and is graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering, having worked on jet engines and even helped restore motion to a young boy’s arms.

Rodriguez, who grew up in Fontana, was also a Chancellor’s Scholar. The scholarship funds he was awarded through that program helped relieve a lot of stress about paying for college, and allowed him to get involved in things like the Rocket Propulsion Lab, where he worked to design a biofuel jet engine.

Rodriguez said his senior design project was one of his most memorable projects and learning experiences. He and a team of three other engineering students designed a motorized brace in 10 weeks that would allow a five-year-old who has a rare virus to move his arms for the first time in three years.

“It really didn’t hit me until we were talking to the prosthetist who said ‘You’re making a really big impact in this child’s life,” Rodriguez said. “I feel like it’s really interesting the way engineering is basically the medium between science and society. You’re that medium, trying to make science practical in a way that impacts real life.

As an IDEA Scholar, Rodriguez participated in the Summer Engineering Institute—at that time a five day college preparatory program that has since been extended to a month-- which he said not only helped prepare him for classes, but helped him form a supportive community of friends on campus.

“The IDEA Scholars program really helped me because there were people that come from my background. You relate to them more. And they understand what you’re going though and you understand what they’re going through and the type of struggles they’re having as well. It helps having people to turn to who are like me.”

Rodriguez advises prospective students to not be afraid of asking questions or asking for help.

“One of the troubles I had was asking for help my first year. I’ve always been a person who went through everything alone, never had help from anybody. But then my first year I kind of struggled a bit with classes—not too much but to the point that I was frustrated that everything wasn’t clicking right away. I’d spend time trying to figure things out by myself, and as soon as I made that leap of asking questions to a TA or something-- because that was totally foreign to me, asking questions—that made such a difference. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and be curious about things. Put yourself out there.”

For mechanical engineering student Cindy Ayala, the IDEA Center and IDEA Scholars program knew what she needed before even she did.

“Through the Summer Engineering Institute, they gave us resources before we knew we needed them,” Ayala said. “In the same way, they gave us mentors before we knew what questions to ask. But then when the questions started to come up, we knew where to go and what resources to look for.”

For Ayala, those questions centered around graduate school.

“I was leaning towards going into industry when I first got here and didn’t think I’d be applying to graduate programs my freshman year, but as I got further along I realized how cool it is to be able to do research at a university,” Ayala said.

She’s starting a joint PhD program in bioengineering through UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco this fall.

To be fair, Ayala did get to do some pretty cool research. She worked in Professor Joanna McKittrick’s lab her freshman year, and then conducted research for Professor Juan Carlos Lasheras, studying how cells migrate in 3D spaces. For her senior design project, Ayala and her teammates developed an automated blood smear system in collaboration with the UC San Diego Medical School, to make it easier to analyze patients’ blood samples.

Her advice to students?

“There are so many resources available through the IDEA center,” Ayala said. “There’s always scholarship opportunities, events and such a large network of mentorship. It’s this very large network of people there to help you.”

IDEA Scholar Jasmine Chiang wasn’t sold on electrical engineering when she first learned about the field—it seemed like a lot of chips. But when she found out that electrical engineering underpins how all forms of electronic communication happen, she was hooked.

“All wireless information being sent, all of that needs to be done through signal image processing, and that’s my specialization now,” Chiang said. “It’s such an important part of our lives, to be able to have signals processed efficiently so we can actually send them in wireless communications.. I want to ensure that the technology for people to communicate around the world and even to outer space continues to be revolutionized.”

After graduation, Chiang will return to UC San Diego in the fall to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering with a focus on signal image processing to make that happen.

“When I first learned about signal image processing I was thinking about its use in music—a lot of it requires filtering and understanding of signal processing,” Chiang said. “So I was honestly hoping I could pursue that. But I recognize now that I’m taking all these classes and meeting all these people and realizing there’s so much more I can do. I’m hoping a masters will help me narrow it down and focus in on what I want to be pursuing as a specific job.”

In addition to being an IDEA Scholar, Chiang was involved in the IDEA Center’s JUMP mentor program and was a peer facilitator at the Summer Engineering Institute for two summers, after experiencing how beneficial the program was.

“I knew when I did my summer program, back when it was Summer PrEP, that I really wanted to be a leader for future classes to inspire them to stay in engineering.”

She also studied abroad at King’s College i London, and was vice president external of the ECE Undergraduate Student Council and was on the ECE Day committee board in joint with the other ECE student organizations.

Juan Maldonado has had his eyes set on the stars since he was a young boy. Any time in the library was spent in the scifi section.

“That’s where my mind was-- the future,” Maldonado said. “I liked learning about these new technologies coming out, especially rockets. I was really interested in rockets.”

After watching SpaceX launches, and particularly the landing of the Falcon 9, Maldonado decided he wanted to work on rockets. As an aerospace engineer, he had a chance to do that through the Rocket Propulsion Lab and Triton Rocket Club. As an undergraduate, he also conducted research in Professor Nicholas Boechler’s lab.

After graduating from UC San Diego with a degree in aerospace engineering, Maldonado is pursuing a PhD in Aeronatics and Astronautics at Purdue University, while also preparing to apply to be an astronaut.

“I’ll be learning another language—probably Russian—and learning how to fly planes and things like that,” Maldonado said. “That’s something I’ve been interested in since I’ve been a little kid, was applying to be an astronaut.”

Maldonado’s decision to study at UC San Diego was largely influenced by the IDEA Engineering Center. Their overnight program “was awesome,” and the summer engineering program was really helpful, too.

“One of the big things for IDEA that I really appreciate was just getting to know other people and developing friendships with people in my major that I see all the time,” he said. “I still have those friends now which has been super awesome.”

The summer program in particular was so beneficial that he served as a peer facilitator for classes behind him.

His advice to students is to give research a try if you have the opportunity. You never know where it might take you.

“Before I did research I was pretty set on going into industry,” Maldonado said. “Whenever someone brought up grad school I was like ‘Oh nah, I don’t want to do more school,’ because I didn’t know what research was like. But once I did it I fell in love with it-- having to come up with creative solutions, the whole process of doing research. That’s what convinced me to go to grad school-- I didn’t know I wanted to do that until doing research just last summer.

For people out there who don’t know or who might be in the same boat as me and think they don’t want to, if they have the opportunity I’d really recommend they do research because they might be like me and really end up liking it a lot.”

IDEA Scholar Melissa Perez decided to pursue engineering on a bit of a whim.

“I always liked math, but I didn’t really know much about engineering to be honest—there wasn’t much exposure to it at my high school.”

Four years and a degree in mechanical engineering later, Perez said she made the right choice, and is excited to start a career at Collins Aerospace this summer, where she previously interned through the Jacobs School’s Team Internship Program.

Perez said the IDEA Scholars program provided her with access to valuable technical workshops and mentors, but most importantly, connected her to a community of people that pushed and supported each other throughout their undergraduate careers.

“IDEA Scholars helped because coming in I already had friends that I met through the summer program,” she said. “And I think the people I met in IDEA Scholars had similar backgrounds to me, we kind of had similar experiences. We were all in it together.”

Those similar experiences, for Perez, included starting at ground zero with engineering.

“In high school, other people had robotics clubs and classes, and my high school didn’t have any of that—I was coming in here with no knowledge. It was kind of scary, but it has to fall back on you—pushing yourself to learn these things and not being scared of saying ‘I don’t know how to do this, but let me try and learn.’”

Perez got her footing, and wound up serving as a peer facilitator for the IDEA Center’s education learning communities. She planned weekly lesson reviews for calculus, and provided students with homework and test preparation support.

She also joined Eta Kappa Nu (HKN), the electrical engineering honor society, even as a mechanical engineering.

“I really liked it because I got to meet a lot more people from different fields. My engineering friends I had before were mainly from mechanical engineering classes, but now I have a lot of electrical and computer engineering friends, too.”

Her advice to future students: get involved!

“I was kind of overwhelmed in the beginning from classes, but looking back I should have joined groups earlier. Getting involved in clubs helps you meet new people and broaden your horizon.”

Ricardo Rueda was really good at math and physics growing up, but had always thought about becoming a doctor one day. After learning about the intersection of engineering and medicine in high school, he was hooked on bioengineering.

“I started learning about the intersection between engineering and medicine-- it seemed so scifi to me, the things that were going on. It was amazing and I wanted to be part of that,” Rueda said.

A first generation college student from a border town on the Rio Grande in Texas, Rueda was accepted into UC San Diego’s bioengineering department—the 2^nd best in the country—and set off down a path that would include research in two professors’ labs, launching a company that provides in-home health monitoring through AI, and a plan to work in the biosensor industry after graduation.

He credits the first step of that process to being an IDEA Scholar.

“IDEA honestly kick started my whole research experience,” he said. “I knew I wanted to do research, and they helped me kick start that passion through the JUMP mentorship program. My mentor had an opening in the bioengineering lab she worked in, so that’s where I started off my research.”

After a year and a half of working in Professor Robert Sah’s Cartilige Tissue Engineering Lab, Rueda’s interests moved more towards bioelectronics. When an opening in Professor Joseph Wang’s Nanobioelectronics lab came up, he jumped at the chance.

Rueda worked on sensing glucose through sweat, and helped develop a microneedle system to deliver targeted drugs for cancer therapy. He plans to work in industry on similar types of bioelectronics systems after graduation.

In addition to the IDEA Center’s mentorship program, Rueda worked as a peer educator for IDEA’s Education Learning Communities, leading weekly review sessions for physics courses, and said IDEA’s summer program was hugely beneficial, as well.

“It kick starts you with a group of people that are in the same vibe. They all have a passion to excel and having this group of people to grind through difficult engineering courses makes a huge difference. It’s helped me build a great network and incredible friendships.”

Rueda’s advice for students is to embrace asking for help.

“Don’t be afraid to reach out to people and ask questions,” he said. ”There are many positions to fill and opportunities to take advantage of on this campus. Sometimes half of the effort is just reaching out to the right person and even if you don’t get to that person on your first try, there will always be someone more than willing to direct you to the right place, especially at IDEA.”

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