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|  NEWS
September 2022
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I know a life-changing opportunity when I see one
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I am honored to share the news that UC San Diego is leading a new $5M NSF effort to support low-income transfer students to earn a bachelor’s degree in engineering and computer science. The program is designed to eliminate opportunity gaps. How? Through significant scholarships and paid summer research opportunities. Crucially, this support is combined with comprehensive cohort-based, success-promoting programming for students who are brimming with academic ability, talent and potential. The program is called EMPOWER, and it is led by Bill Lin, electrical and computer engineering professor and department chair here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
I know life-changing educational opportunities when I see them. As a kid from a family of Italian construction workers in New York, I was the first in my family to go to college. Yes, I worked extremely hard as a student; yes, I stayed focused; and yes, I found joy in learning. But I also caught many lucky breaks as a student, in the form of scholarships, fellowships and engineering-related student jobs. I am certain that without these opportunities as a student, I would not be a first-generation college grad with a PhD in mechanical engineering and a job as dean at a top-10 engineering school. Perhaps that's why I'm so excited to talk about the EMPOWER program, which serves transfer students studying engineering and computer science at UC San Diego, as well as engineering students at two nearby community colleges: Southwestern College and Imperial Valley College.
A big piece of engineering and computer science education is the mindset and skill set that you leave with. This requires practice, and time to practice. I'm thrilled that EMPOWER will give transfer students financial breathing room along with the tools and opportunities to build the social, academic, and practical foundations for successful careers in engineering and computer science.
This new program adds to an ever growing constellation of efforts to provide all our students at the Jacobs School with the resources they need to thrive. EMPOWER also engages people all across UC San Diego in an organized fashion to ensure that our collective impact is as great as possible.
With more than 9,500 students a year enrolled at the Jacobs School, we are moving the needle when it comes to educating the innovative, diverse technological workforce our society needs. But there is more work to do to ensure every student reaches their full potential. I won't let up until every single student at the Jacobs School has all the opportunities they need.
As always, I can be reached at DeanPisano@eng.ucsd.edu.
Sincerely,
Al
Albert ("Al") P. Pisano, Dean
UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
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$5M from NSF to empower transfer students to earn engineering degrees
UC San Diego is leading a new NSF-funded effort to support low-income transfer students pursuing a bachelor’s degree in engineering. The five-year, $5 million program, called EMPOWER, will support engineering students at UC San Diego and two nearby community colleges — Southwestern College and Imperial Valley College — working to eliminate opportunity gaps through comprehensive cohort-based programming and significant scholarships. The program is designed to identify and document the most effective combinations of strategies for increasing the rate at which students who start at community colleges around the nation ultimately earn bachelor's degrees in engineering.
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Franklin Antonio Hall set to open
After years of planning, construction, and collaboration, our new Franklin Antonio Hall is opening this month! The building’s collaborative lab spaces will expand our ability to leverage engineering and computer science for the public good. We are grateful to everyone who has helped bring this project to fruition, from faculty and staff, to students, philanthropists, industry and community partners. Learn more about the impactful research that will happen in Franklin Antonio Hall from this San Diego Union-Tribune feature.
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Small, low-energy chip enables AI on the edge
A new chip brings AI a step closer to running on a broad range of edge devices, disconnected from the cloud, where they can perform sophisticated cognitive tasks anywhere and anytime without relying on a network connection to a centralized server. The work is co-led by bioengineers at UC San Diego and appears in the journal Nature. The chip runs computations directly in memory and can run a wide variety of AI applications — while being twice as efficient as existing systems. Applications for the neuromorphic chip range from smart watches, to VR headsets, smart earbuds, next-gen sensors in factories, and rovers for space exploration. Read more in IEEE Spectrum. Read coverage in IEEE Spectrum.
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The physics of walking is simpler than we thought
What do robots walking and ants walking have in common? Quite a bit it turns out — enough to show that the math behind the physics of walking is not as complicated as scientists thought. The research team had previously studied ant walking and wanted to see how their findings could be applied to robots. In the process, they discovered a new mathematical relationship between walking, skipping, slithering and swimming in viscous fluids for multi-legged animals and bots. “This is important because it will allow roboticists to build much simpler models to describe the way robots walk and move through the world,” said PNAS paper coauthor Nick Gravish, a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the Jacobs School.
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Students enjoy binational summer of research and friendship
Nearly 200 high school and college students from the US and Mexico spent the summer at UC San Diego, conducting research projects ranging from bioprinting for in vitro blood brain barriers, to the acoustic tracking of humpback whales. It's part of the ENLACE binational summer research program, founded in 2013 and run by Olivia Graeve, mechanical engineering professor and director of the UC San Diego graduate program in materials science. ENLACE uses STEM to build cross-border friendships, while encouraging participants to consider college or graduate school options.
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Math-computer science student named to hacking Top 50 list
UC San Diego math-computer science student Faris Ashai was recently featured in 2022’s Major League Hacking (MLH) Top 50, a list recognizing the top new computer scientists and hackers. MLH compiles this list each year, highlighting the hackathon community’s most inspiring members and recognizing their contributions to the tech ecosystem and STEM education. Ashai was recognized for creating new opportunities to help make the hackathon community more inclusive and accessible.
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