Jacobs School of Engineering research features prominently in UC San Diego’s new campaign that communicates the impact of the campus’ research. The effort includes powerful videos highlighting our work toward faster, more affordable cancer detection powered by AI; sensors that help doctors detect health issues earlier; translating performance science into new ways to help all of us move better and live healthier; and real-time wildfire intelligence that helps protect communities. Learn more about how UC San Diego’s research impacts your life and see our faculty in action in these new videos.

“We tend to think of a heart attack as a plumbing problem that starts and ends in the heart. What this study shows is that the heart immediately engages the brain and immune system, and that conversation can actually make the injury worse,” said Kevin King, M.D. Ph.D. King is a lead author on this groundbreaking paper published in Cell. He is a UC San Diego bioengineering professor and a cardiologist with a faculty appointment in medicine at UC San Diego. See media coverage in NPR and Smithsonian Magazine.

Thanks to Univeristy of California research backed by federal funding, scientists across UC are developing new treatments that don’t just prevent heart damage from getting worse, but — for the first time in medical history — actually help the heart heal. For example, UC San Diego bioengineering professor Karen Christman has done groundbreaking work treating injured hearts with extracellular matrix, or ECM, a substance our bodies produce to give our tissues shape and form. She’s developed a gel made of ECM that can be administered in the aftermath of a heart attack that reduces scarring and preserves living muscle.

In the Los Angeles Times, Jacobs School fusion researchers explain why the United States needs a stronger national fusion strategy before our global lead in this area slips away. In an opinion piece authored by UC San Diego faculty members Farhat Beg and Mike Campbell, and MIFTI Fusion’s Mihir Worah, the researchers argue that isolated breakthroughs won't win the global fusion energy race. Strategy will. Read about what a more robust national strategy for fusion energy could look like in the LA Times. 

A facility for building electronic devices that can be implanted in the human body, especially for brain, eye and spinal applications, has opened at the Jacobs School. This is the first Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) facility at a university dedicated to producing implantable medical devices for brain surgery. This will allow researchers to move innovations into the prototyping and manufacturing stages — in a single facility — and build devices ready for FDA approval.

Electrical engineers at the Jacobs School developed a new way to train AI systems to solve complex problems more reliably, particularly problems that require interpreting both text and images. This work could give rise to more capable AI tutors that walk students through solutions step by step while checking their logic along the way. It could also provide more reliable automated analysis of business reports, complex charts or scientific papers — and do so with reduced risk of fabricated information or incorrect interpretations.

Jacobs School computer scientists found that customers are 32% more likely to buy a product after reading a review summary generated by a chatbot than reading the original review written by a human. Why? LLM-generated summaries often contain sentiments that are more positive than the human reviews they summarize. This is the first study to show evidence that cognitive biases introduced by LLMs have consequences on users’ decision making, and the first study to measure that impact.

Jacobs School mechanical engineers took a major step toward designing better turbines for burning hydrogen fuel. Thanks to an NSF-funded collaboration with the San Diego Supercomputer Center at UC San Diego, the researchers simulated hydrogen combustion in high-pressure conditions to better understand how to increase safety when hydrogen is burned in industrial settings. This is a critical challenge because while hydrogen burns without generating carbon emissions, the speed and intensity of hydrogen combustion are significantly different from the speed and intensity of natural gas combustion.  

Join us for the Jacobs School of Engineering's 44th annual Research Expo symposium on Wednesday, April 15. Research Expo is an opportunity to learn about the latest technologies in development, meet the engineering and computer science graduate students and faculty bringing them to fruition, and recruit top tech talent from a Top 10 engineering school. More than 150 graduate students from all six Jacobs School departments will showcase their research and workforce-ready engineering and computer science skills to industry judges and guests from all across our region. Register to join us for a day of networking and discovery. 

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