Professor Shaochen Chen's nanoengineering lab is developing a platform technology for creating engineered tissues. The goal is to create new solutions for drug development and testing, organ transplants, regenerative medicine and more. His team recently removed significant barriers holding back one of the leading techniques for 3D-printing of these engineered tissues. The technique is called digital light processing (DLP) bioprinting. Removing the barriers allowed the team to print tissues with high cell densities, high cell viability, and finely resolved structures. In a new Science Advances paper, the team describes how they removed the barriers by reducing a problematic light-scattering effect by tenfold through the addition of a contrast agent to the bioink.

The use of oral exams in engineering courses at the Jacobs School increased students’ motivation to learn, particularly in first-generation college students, according to a study of undergraduate students at UC San Diego. The oral exams also improved students' understanding of the content, evidenced by outcomes on subsequent written tests. One next step for this NSF-funded project is finding ways to scale up oral exams in large engineering courses. “Oral exams provide more capacity for students to elaborate their thought process and the problem solving strategy, not just rush right into the problem solving process and outcome,” said Huihui Qi, a teaching professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at UC San Diego and PI on the NSF grant.

UC San Diego computer science professor and cybersecurity expert Stefan Savage has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE). Savage's work examines a wide range of technologies, from cars, to spam emails to cryptocurrencies. Savage is being recognized by the NAE for contributions to the security, privacy and reliability of network systems, transforming approaches to problems in these areas. This recognition is the latest in a long series of accolades for Savage, who has also received a MacArthur “genius” award and the ACM Prize in Computing. He is the Irwin Mark and Joan Klein Jacobs Professor in Information and Computer Science at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. 

Electrical engineers at UC San Diego are creating better battery-free smart tags for things like inventory management. The team has developed a robust, low-cost and scalable way to provide power and enable communications in an RFID-like manner, while using smartphones as the devices that both read and power the signals. The team recently presented the first backscatter integrated circuit that can enable wireless communication and battery-less operation coming from a single mobile device. The custom chip costs a few pennies to manufacture and can be entirely powered by LTE signals. The team, led by electrical engineering professors Patrick Mercier and Dinesh Bharadia, is working together in the Jacobs School's Franklin Antonio Hall. Read more in Interesting Engineering.

At the most recent conference of The National Research Platform (NRP), held on campus, celebrating UC San Diego professor and visionary Larry Smarr was a key part of the program. The NRP facilitates high-speed data access for science and computation, made possible through partnerships connecting more than 50 institutions. At a conference event held in his honor, Smarr said, “As I think about all the wonderful things I’ve heard tonight and look at all of you, all of this is about collaboration. It’s not about me. None of what I have done was done except with collaboration and partnership with some of the most extraordinary people in the world." Smarr has been on the computer science and engineering faculty at the Jacobs School since 2000. While he retired in 2020, he is very much active on campus. 

Jacobs School of Engineering undergraduates are developing a low-cost autonomous underwater vehicle that could soon help UC San Diego ocean researchers monitor glaciers melting in the Arctic. The team, called Yonder Deep, is one of the student organizations working in the Qualcomm Student Space in Franklin Antonio Hall here at the Jacobs School. “The Yonder Deep team is pushing the frontier of low-cost, high-value marine platforms for research in high-risk polar regions. This kind of work is critical to understanding sea level rise and developing systems for monitoring the Greenland ice sheet,” said Grant Deane, a researcher in the Marine Physical Lab at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego who mentors the team.  

Nanoengineering professor Tod Pascal and bioengineering professor Lingyan Shi are among the four UC San Diego professors to be selected as 2023 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellows, a prestigious award for early-career scientists of outstanding promise. Pascal exploits quantum effects at the nanoscale to both create new materials from the atomic level up, and to modify existing materials to give them more desirable properties. Shi is pushing the boundaries of what's possible when it comes to using targeted light to look inside living cells with high resolution both in terms of space and time.

By growing uniform lithium crystals on a surprising surface, UC San Diego engineers have opened a new door to fast-charging lithium-metal batteries. In a Nature Energy paper, the Jacobs School nanoengineers report progress toward lithium-metal batteries that charge fast. To grow the lithium metal crystals, the researchers replaced the ubiquitous copper surfaces on the negative side (the anode) of lithium-metal batteries with a nanocomposite surface made of lithium fluoride (LiF) and iron (Fe). Using this lithiophobic surface for lithium deposition, lithium crystal seeds formed, and from these seeds grew dense lithium layers – even at high charging rates. This work is tied to the Jacobs School's Sustainable Power and Energy Center.

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