"We truly value this initiative for the way it weaves problem solving and science into meaningful, real-world contexts through engaging design challenges,” said Julie Garcia, senior director of Future Ready Learning at San Diego Unified School District, which now offers the problem-solving physics course (described above in the Dean's column) in three high schools. “It’s not just about learning concepts, it’s about giving students the opportunity to think critically, collaborate, and create solutions that matter."

When America invests in research, the results improve lives. A wildfire is stopped before it reaches a neighborhood. A building is safe after an earthquake. Cars are equipped with better cybersecurity. These advances are made possible by federally supported university research — a proven engine for innovation that protects communities, strengthens the economy and improves lives across the nation. Here are some of the UC San Diego innovations, many led by engineers and computer scientists, that are saving lives and helping the United States stay ahead.

A new AI tool developed by electrical and computer engineers at UC San Diego could make it much easier — and cheaper — for doctors and researchers to train medical imaging software, even when only a small number of patient scans are available. The AI tool improves upon a process called medical image segmentation, where every pixel in an image is labeled based on what it represents — cancerous or normal tissue, for example. This process is often performed by a highly trained expert, and deep learning has shown promise in automating this labor-intensive task.

UC San Diego ranked #4 among U.S. public universities in the 2025 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU). The highly regarded annual assessment also places UC San Diego 15th among all U.S. universities and 20th globally. The ranking uses six objective indicators of academic and research performance, including the number of alumni and faculty who have been awarded Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals; papers published in the journals Nature and Science; and per-capita academic performance. 

A team of undergraduate mechanical engineering students at UC San Diego developed a prototype of a fusion target autoloader system. The capstone design project, sponsored by General Atomics, provided the students a chance to apply their engineering education to fusion energy research and development. The project itself is a step toward designing a system to increase the frequency at which small targets full of fusion fuel can be imploded by lasers to generate fusion energy. This work is part of the research, education and industry collaborations efforts of the UC San Diego Fusion Engineering Institute. 

UC San Diego bioengineering professor David Gough devoted nearly half a century to a singular goal: improving the day-to-day experiences and the outlook on life of people with diabetes. Gough developed many of the biomedical engineering foundations that paved the way for implantable sensor technologies that people with diabetes now use daily, and played a key role in shaping bioengineering at UC San Diego into one of the most respected bioengineering programs and departments in the world. He passed away in December at the age of 78.

Visual artists often want to protect their work from non-consensual use by generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. But most visual artists do not have the technical know-how or control over the tools needed to do so, according to a survey of 200 artists by computer scientists at UC San Diego and the University of Chicago. The researchers also reviewed more than 1,100 professional artist websites to see how much control artists had over AI-blocking tools, and evaluated which processes were the most effective at blocking AI crawlers. UC San Diego computer science Ph.D. student Lisa Luo talked about this work with KPBS.

Last summer, a faulty software update from a cybersecurity firm led to the outage of millions of computers running Microsoft Windows hardware. One year later, computer scientists and medical cybersecurity experts from UC San Diego detailed, in a JAMA Network study, effects of the outage on hospitals and on patient care. The researchers found that at least 750 hospitals faced disruptions during the outage, and more than 200 experiened service outages related to patient care. Learn more about this study in coverage in WIRED.

Engineering researchers at UC San Diego have developed a simple yet powerful method to characterize lithium metal battery performance with the help of a widely used imaging tool: scanning electron microscopy. The advance could accelerate the development of safer, longer-lasting and more energy-dense batteries for electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage. This work, published in PNAS, is tied to our Sustainable Power and Energy Center.  

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