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A Quarterly Newsletter for the Friends and Alumni of the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

June 22, 2026

Preparing to give a history talk for ECE’s 60th anniversary celebration in April, I took myself to Geisel Library. While the thrill of encountering, say, a carbon‑copied memo concerning laboratory space allocations in 1973 should not be underestimated, and such documents stand as the cuneiform tablets of our professional ancestry, I confess to having had low expectations for those archive boxes. But I was wrong. Here are a few treasures:

Foreign languages: In 1967, for the MS degree, the foreign language requirement was a reading knowledge of Russian, German, or French. And for the PhD, two languages!

ECE 60 Years!

Prof. Massimo Franceschetti and his Jazz trio provided musical accompaniment for lunch.

Our wonderful ECE staff!

Graduate student posters

The UC San Diego Photonics Society, UCSD's SPIE student chapter, introduced 150 students at Southwestern Middle School to optics through hands-on demonstrations of polarization, diffraction, holography, and laser alignment. Student volunteers adapted the demonstrations for an outdoor setting and helped inspire students to learn more about optics and photonics.

Congratulations to ECE students Spencer Dunn, Ajay Sundaram, and Batoel Euol and the SunBreak team for placing second in the Early Stage track of the 2026 Triton Sustainability Challenge! The team is developing hardware and control software that help farms align energy-intensive operations with solar generation and grid conditions. Learn more

Through ECE 198, UC San Diego students prepared and delivered 32 lessons to more than 200 K–12 students across San Diego this year. The hands-on lessons introduced young learners to core ECE topics including circuits, machine learning, and Arduino programming. 

Prof. Paul Siegel joined ECE in 1995 after a career at IBM Research. He managed the Signal Processing and Coding project at the Almaden Research Center (1984-1993) and was named a Master Inventor. A Fellow of the IEEE, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008 "for the invention and development of advanced coding techniques for digital recording systems."

His primary research interest is the mathematical foundations of signal processing and coding, especially for digital data storage and communications. He recently presented the 2026 Viterbi Lecture at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. His lecture titled “Coding Theory, Memory, and AI: A Harmonious Trio,” explored the evolving relationship among three critical technological pillars: coding theory, computer memory and AI.

The fellowship will support Prof. Yuanyuan Shi's research on development of an AI-driven framework to rapidly model, simulate, and control complex physical systems using limited sensor data, overcoming traditional barriers of slow and costly simulations in multi-process systems. Learn More.

Prof. Patrick Mercier's lab has developed a new chip that uses piezoelectric resonators to more efficiently convert  and manage power in data centers. The prototype achieved 96.2% peak efficiency and delivered four times more output current than earlier piezoelectric-based designs.            Learn more.

Prof. Dinesh Bharadia's lab has developed an open-source “digital twin” of a wireless network: giving graduate students, startups and other innovators a free, easy-to-use way to test new technologies and get fast, realistic feedback. Learn More.

A team led by Prof. Yu-Hwa Lo  has developed fentanyl test strips that are 100 times more sensitive than current commercial versions. They created a new physics-based model that explains, for the first time, how these widely used tests work and how to systematically improve them. Learn More.

What if students could learn Fourier optics not only through equations on a slide, but by watching diffraction patterns emerge in front of them? What if concepts such as aberrations, image resolution, and spatial filtering could be explored by building and modifying a real optical imaging system? These questions motivated a comprehensive redesign of ECE 181, an upper-division ECE course on Optical Imaging and Fourier Optics.

Prof. Saharnaz Baghdadchi redesigned ECE 181 by centering the course around a microscopy platform, transforming the laboratory from a supplemental activity into the connective thread linking lectures, experiments, and course materials across the ten-week quarter. The platform gave students hands-on experience with an evolving optical imaging system, progressing from aberrations and image quality to fluorescence, dark-field, and phase-contrast imaging, spatial filtering, and Fourier optics. This integrated structure allowed students to revisit the same system as new concepts were introduced, reinforcing the connection between mathematical models and physical behavior.

The ECE Alumni Mentorship Program (ECE AMP) had their annual alumni picnic on Saturday May 30th at Doyle Park. Thank you to all the alumni and students who came out to celebrate the program and enjoy our amazing alumni community. We hope to see you at the next one!

Stay tuned for an announcement in the Fall if you're interested in becoming a mentor for ECE AMP!

Electrical and Computer Engineering Summer Research Internship Program (SRIP) 

The SRIP fund pays undergraduate and MS students to do full-time research in a faculty lab over the summer. Each year the department supports about 30-50 students through SRIP, which involves part-time research for academic credit in Spring quarter, followed by full-time paid summer research. Engaging our undergraduates in research is incredibly important for fostering a research interest and enabling students to decide to pursue a PhD.

For more information or to donate to the SRIP fund, please click this link.