2025 Jacobs School Highlights

As we dive into a new quarter and a new year, we're taking a moment to reflect on some of our 2025 highlights for the Jacobs School of Engineering. From ranking Top 10 yet again, to launching an AI undergraduate major, doubling our bioengineering instructional lab capacity, and strengthening efforts to make fusion a practical reality, this video provides a small taste of what we are accomplishing together. We are already building on this momentum in 2026 in order to advance engineering and computer science to improve lives, strengthen the economy, and drive national security and global competitiveness.

A research project of up to $25.8 million at UC San Diego, funded by ARPA-H, aims to tackle the critical shortage of donor organs by developing fully functional, patient-specific livers using 3D bioprinting. Led by Shaochen Chen, professor in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering, the multidisciplinary team is building on more than two decades of innovation in rapid, high-resolution 3D bioprinting and stem cell science. Researchers will work on scaling the technology from millimeter-scale tissue models to life-sized, transplantable organs made from a patient’s own cells. Read coverage in the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Bioengineers at the UC San Diego Future Biomanufacturing Center, in partnership with CFD Research Corporation, have launched a $4.1 million DARPA-funded project to build comprehensive whole cell models of E. coli cells that capture all cellular processes and predict how individual cells behave under different conditions. These “digital twins” of bacterial cells will be used to better understand how to engineer microbes that can sustainably produce valuable chemicals from renewable resources. The models will also provide insights into bacterial responses to antibiotics, which could enable researchers to combat drug-resistant infections. 

UC San Diego is playing a major role in U.S. efforts to rebuild the country's semiconductor manufacturing strengths and maintain strengths in microelectronics design. Much of this is led by Andrew B. Kahng, distinguished professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering and of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Kahng has served as principal investigator of OpenROAD, a nationwide project led by UC San Diego that is making chip design more accessible through free, open-source tools. He is also co-principal investigator of the NSF Chip Design Hub, and heads another major research effort through DARPA’s Next-Generation Microelectronics Manufacturing program.    

A spray-on polymer coating developed by chemical and nano engineers could protect crops from bacterial infections and drought. Importantly, spraying just part of a leaf results in immunity to bacterial infections and improved drought tolerance for the entire plant. Creating the spray coating — and making it plant-friendly — was made possible by modifying a common polymer synthesis method to work in gentle, water-based conditions. Using this modified method, the researchers produced a polymer material that is permeable to gases, so it allows plant leaves to continue breathing and growing normally.

Abdoulaye Ndao, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS), one of the highest honors for scientists working to advance research and innovation in Africa. He is the first AAS Fellow in UC San Diego’s history. The fellowship recognizes his long-standing efforts to promote scientific excellence and leverage research to support Africa’s development. At the Jacobs School, Ndao leads a research group that develops next-generation optics technologies.

A new data structure and compression technique developed by engineers at UC San Diego enables the field of pangenomics to handle unprecedented scales of genetic information. Pangenomics, a subset of bioinformatics, is the study of many different genomes from one specific species. This can provide a more holistic picture of the natural variation and mutations that occur within a species than using one singular reference genome. The new method, detailed in Nature Genetics, provides unmatched compression for pangenomes while also significantly advancing their representative power by encoding additional biologically relevant information, including phylogenies, mutations, and whole-genome alignments.

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