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|  NEWS
May 2022
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In memoriam: Franklin Antonio
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I'm extremely sad to share that our alumnus, friend, and collaborator, Franklin Antonio, recently passed away. Franklin Antonio – a co-founder of Qualcomm – was a staunch advocate for our students and a generous supporter of our educational mission. He donated $30 million to UC San Diego in 2017. In honor of his support for the programmatic expansion of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, we named our new building in his honor: Franklin Antonio Hall.
I have never been more determined to make good on our commitments. I have never been more determined to ensure that Franklin Antonio Hall truly serves our students through a design that ensures the circulation of people and ideas. That was the vision that Franklin and I co-created during our walks on the building site, and that is the vision that we will deliver.
We just completed the construction of Franklin Antonio Hall this spring, and research teams are preparing to move into the 13 collaborative research laboratories right now. We are also finalizing our teaching, learning, entrepreneurship, executive outreach, and socializing spaces. We will officially celebrate the building opening in September with a campus-wide event.
Franklin will be dearly missed. At this moment, it's hard to imagine the September celebration without Franklin. We will honor Franklin's engineering legacy at Qualcomm, we will thank him for his advocacy for our students, we will never forget his support of the larger mission of the Jacobs School.
More than 40 donors joined Franklin Antonio in support of this machine for innovation. Recently, many of our Franklin Antonio Hall donors came together for the first time in the new building. A dynamic community has self-assembled around the shared vision behind the project, and I look forward to working with this wonderful, ever growing, group of people and companies to deliver on all the positive outcomes that we planned for when we designed this machine for innovation.
Franklin, we will make you proud.
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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UC San Diego to host workshop to diversify engineering faculty
The Jacobs School of Engineering is proud to host the 2022 NextProf Pathfinder workshop this Oct. 2 - 4, in partnership with the University of Michigan. Applications are now open for the workshop, which is designed for 1st and 2nd year Ph.D. students, and master’s students intending to apply to a Ph.D. program. NextProf Pathfinder prepares participants for a successful career in academia, and encourages those in groups underrepresented in the engineering and computer science faculty to pursue careers in academia. Please share this opportunity with your networks and any eligible students.
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Multi-tasking wearable continuously monitors glucose, alcohol and lactate
Engineers at UC San Diego developed a wearable device that can serve as a continuous glucose monitor, Breathalyzer, and fitness monitor all in one. Their prototype is about the size of a stack of six quarters. It can continuously monitor several health stats—glucose, alcohol, and lactate levels—simultaneously in real-time. It is applied to the skin through a Velcro-like patch of microscopic needles that are each about one-fifth the width of a human hair. The device can be worn on the upper arm and sends data wirelessly to a custom smartphone app. The research was led by engineers in our Center for Wearable Sensors. Read coverage in KPBS.
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Mapping lung development after birth into late childhood
How do the lungs develop after their first breaths outside the womb? What cellular changes early in life give rise to lung malfunction and disease? Researchers from UC San Diego and UNC Chapel Hill created the first single-cell-resolution map of postnatal lung development to help answer these questions. The research could help provide a more detailed understanding of which genetic and epigenetic factors affect lung health across the human lifespan, starting from birth.
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Cleaning up online bots' speech
Computer scientists at UC San Diego have developed algorithms to rid speech generated by online bots of offensive language, on social media and elsewhere. To do so, they first fed toxic prompts to a pre-trained language model to get it to generate toxic content. Researchers then trained the model to predict the likelihood that content would be toxic. They call this their “evil model.” They then trained a “good model,” which was taught to avoid all the content highly ranked by the “evil model.”
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Nano-tools to diagnose and treat traumatic brain injury
Each year, between 2 million and 3 million Americans suffer from traumatic brain injuries (TBI). There are currently no treatments to stop the long-term effects of TBI, and accurate diagnosis requires a visit to a medical center for a CT scan or MRI. UC San Diego bioengineering Professor Ester Kwon aims to change that. Kwon’s team is developing nanomaterials that could be used to diagnose traumatic brain injury on the spot, be it a sports field, the scene of a car accident, or a clinical setting. They’re also engineering nanoparticles that could target the portion of the patient’s brain that was injured, delivering specific therapeutics to treat the injury and improve the patient’s long-term quality of life.
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Smartphone app for at-home screening of Alzheimer's, ADHD
Electrical engineers at UC San Diego have developed a smartphone app that could allow people to screen for Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD and other neurological diseases and disorders—by recording closeups of their eye. The app uses a near-infrared camera, which is built into newer smartphones for facial recognition, along with a regular selfie camera, to track how a person’s pupil changes in size. These pupil measurements could be used to assess a person’s cognitive condition. Read coverage in the New York Post.
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Study of Alzheimer's marker in blood prompts warning about brain-boosting supplements
Elevated levels of an enzyme called PHGDH in the blood of older adults could be an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease, and a study led by bioengineers and neuroscientists at UC San Diego provides new evidence to support this claim. The findings also prompt caution against the use of dietary supplements that contain the amino acid serine as a remedy for Alzheimer’s disease. In analyzing brain tissue, researchers observed a trend consistent with their previous findings in blood samples: expression levels of the gene coding for PHGDH were consistently higher in adults with different stages of Alzheimer’s disease, even the early stages before cognitive symptoms manifested. Read coverage in KPBS.
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Heart arrhythmia mapping, no catheter required
Bioengineers and cardiologists from UC San Diego invented a technology that can accurately and noninvasively map atrial and ventricular heart arrhythmias in a matter of minutes. The technology, developed by Vektor Medical Inc., a company co-founded by UC San Diego faculty, demonstrated 97.3 percent accuracy in a clinical validation study, and recently received FDA clearance.
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Why are certain plant viruses powerful cancer fighters?
A plant virus that infects legumes, called cowpea mosaic virus, has a special power: when injected into a tumor, it triggers the immune system to treat the cancer—even metastatic cancer—and prevents it from recurring. For the past seven years, nanoengineers at UC San Diego and Dartmouth College have been studying and testing cowpea mosaic virus—in the form of nanoparticles—as a cancer immunotherapy and have reported promising results in lab mice and companion dog patients. Its performance has been unmatched by other cancer-fighting strategies the team has tested. But the exact reasons for its success have remained a mystery, until now. The UC San Diego team is from the Center for Nano Immuno-Engineering.
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