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|  NEWS
January 2023
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Hold on to your hats! We're off to a fast start in 2023 here at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. On January 5, we announced the founding of the PRISM center with $50.5 million in funding. PRISM stands for Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory, and this center will find ways to make computing orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. UC San Diego computer science professor Tajana Simunic-Rosing leads this center through a $35 million grant from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) via the JUMP 2.0 program, which brings together SRC, DARPA and industry and academic stakeholders. With her continuing leadership, a group of 10 universities banded together to create the $50.5 million PRISM center.
Tajana's entrepreneurial spirit represents the best of the Jacobs School of Engineering – she achieved a great goal at remarkable speed, building success upon success. By the way, Tajana holds the John J. and Susan M. Fratamico Endowed Chair here at UC San Diego. Creating new endowed chair professorships is critical for our sustained excellence and for our next surge forward. Just look at what Tajana did with her endowed chair.
As I said, 2023 is off to a fast start – and I sincerely hope that we will be making additional great-news announcements at the scale of PRISM as we move through the year.
I believe that speed is fundamental to both the art and science of engineering. Optimizing and innovating in the face of uncertainty is what we do as engineers. My own working style as an engineering dean is to move fast. It's born out of my professional responsibility to empower everyone at the Jacobs School to make the biggest positive impact possible. My job is to help unlock doors, so that our students, staff, faculty and collaborating partners can fully engage and achieve the greatest results possible.
As we look ahead, I'm honored to also reflect back and share some of our 2022 Jacobs School institutional highlights and student highlights. Together, let's make use of engineering and computer science to solve our toughest shared challenges.
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 Leads $50.5M Center for Faster, More Efficient Computing
UC San Diego computer science professor Tajana Simunic-Rosing leads a team that won a $35 million grant from the Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) to make computing orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. Ten universities will band together to create the $50.5 million UC San Diego-led Processing with Intelligent Storage and Memory center. This center will focus on novel memory and storage devices and circuits; next generation architectures; systems and software; and grand challenge applications in drug discovery and data analysis. The grant is part of the JUMP 2.0 program, which brings together SRC, DARPA and industry and academic stakeholders to improve performance, efficiency, and capabilities across electronics systems. UC San Diego faculty are also playing key roles in two additional JUMP 2.0 centers. Read coverage in The San Diego Union Tribune.
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Human Brain Organoids Implanted into Mouse Cortex Respond to Light
A team of engineers and neuroscientists led by UC San Diego electrical engineering professor Duygu Kuzum has demonstrated for the first time that human brain organoids implanted in mice have established functional connectivity to the animals’ cortex and responded to external sensory stimuli. The implanted organoids reacted to visual stimuli in the same way as surrounding tissues, an observation that researchers were able to make in real time over several months thanks to an innovative experimental setup that combines transparent graphene microelectrode arrays and two-photon imaging. Read coverage in Interesting Engineering.
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Three Faculty Join National Academy of Inventors
Three entrepreneurial UC San Diego engineering faculty have been named National Academy of Inventors Fellows, the highest distinction awarded to academic inventors. This year's inductees — Professors Yu-Hwa Lo, Nicole Steinmetz, and Joe Wang — have demonstrated a spirit of innovation in creating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on the quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. UC San Diego is the first, and so far only, UC campus to establish a chapter of the NAI.
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$10M DOE Grant to Scale Up Reuse of Battery Materials
Nanoengineers at UC San Diego are leading a $10 million project to develop and scale technologies that allow valuable materials from spent batteries to be reused. The team is developing a one-ton pilot project that scales up a process invented at UC San Diego to reuse cathode materials from spent electric vehicle batteries. Professor Zheng Chen, part of the UC San Diego Sustainable Power and Energy Center, leads the team of researchers from UC San Diego, Arizona State University, the University of Chicago, General Motors, ExPost Technology, and Argonne National Laboratory. Read coverage in The San Diego Union Tribune.
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New Web Tracking Technique is Bypassing Privacy Protections
To subvert web browser privacy tactics, advertisers have pioneered a new method for tracking users across the Web, known as user ID (or UID) smuggling. No one knew exactly how often this method was used to track people on the Internet, so computer scientists at UC San Diego developed a technique to quantify the frequency of UID smuggling in the wild. Their measurement tool, called CrumbCruncher, keeps track of how many times it has been tracked using UID smuggling. The researchers found that UID smuggling was present in about 8 percent of the navigations that CrumbCruncher made. This paper is from the Computer Science department's Security and Cryptography group, which took home five test-of-time awards in 2022.
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UC San Diego Researchers Earn Air Force Young Investigator Awards
Three researchers at UC San Diego, including nanoengineering Professor Zeinab Jahed and mechanical engineering Professor Lisa Poulikakos, have been selected to receive Young Investigator Research Program awards from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the basic research arm of the Air Force Research Lab. The engineering and chemistry faculty will use the grant funding to study the way neurons in the brain communicate; aid our fundamental understanding of gas and plasma flow to accelerate the development of next-generation power and propulsion systems; and construct gas-responsive polymers for industrial applications.
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Wearable Skin Patch Monitors Hemoglobin in Deep Tissues
A team of nanoengineers at UC San Diego developed a wearable photoacoustic patch that can monitor biomolecules in deep tissues, including hemoglobin. This gives medical professionals unprecedented access to crucial information that could help spot life-threatening conditions such as malignant tumors, organ dysfunction, and cerebral or gut hemorrhages. The flexible wearable patch comfortably attaches to the skin, allowing for noninvasive long-term monitoring. It can perform three-dimensional mapping of hemoglobin with a submillimeter spatial resolution in deep tissues, down to centimeters below the skin. In comparison, other wearable electrochemical devices only sense the biomolecules on the skin surface.
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Teaching Sustainable Practies To All Engineers
A group of 20 students from the Jacobs School of Engineering spent the fall quarter learning how to apply sustainable design practices to any field of engineering. In the inaugural Sustainable Engineering and Design course, students learned about life cycle assessment, the environmental impact of different materials and energy sources, and design practices to improve the sustainable performance of products and processes. The goal is to encourage future engineers to apply sustainable practices to any and all fields of work. “Every engineer should be a sustainability engineer,” said Huihui Qi, a teaching professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering who developed and taught the course.
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Scientists Uncover New Organizing Principles of the Genome
A team of researchers has uncovered the physical principles—a series of forces and hydrodynamic flows—that help ensure the proper functioning of life’s blueprint. Its discovery provides new insights into the genome while potentially offering a new means to spot genomic aberrations linked to developmental disorders and human diseases. The research team includes UC San Diego mechanical engineering professor David Saintillan, physicists at NYU and mathematicians at the Flatiron Institute.
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