Newly graduated PhD student Lillian Hughes creates 2D ensembles of spin qubits in diamond.| RSS
Daniel Oropeza receives the Young Investigator Award from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.| RSS
Christopher Andrew Hariman and Anika Mahajan Jena, who are both entering their senior year in The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, have been named Tau Beta Pi Scholars, joining just 254 students nationwide selected by the world’s largest engineering honor society. Candidates are chosen based on academic excellence, leadership, service, and the promise of future contributions to the profession.| engineering.ucsb.edu
When the lunar lander Vikram touched down near the south pole of the Moon on August 23, 2023, it was a momentous day for the Indian Space Research Organization (IRSO). Not only was India now one of the few nations with a successful lunar mission — and the first to land a spacecraft in the challenging terrain surrounding the Moon’s south pole — but the mission also represented a daring comeback after a software glitch resulted in a crash landing during the country’s previous lunar miss...| engineering.ucsb.edu
In 2020, right when Jane Baude was starting her PhD research, she learned that a critical component of her experiment — the gel needed to grow and test mammary epithelial cells — wouldn’t be available for nearly a year because of pandemic-related production issues. So, she and her adviser, UCSB professor Ryan Stowers, decided to pivot. Instead, Baude would engineer her own gel to study cells.| engineering.ucsb.edu
The summer 2024 issue of the magazine Convergence, produced in The Robert Mehrabian College of Engineering at UC Santa Barbara, included an article about Cadense, a company developed by Tyler Susko, associate teaching professor, undergraduate vice chair, and capstone instructor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at UCSB. He had spent nearly a decade working — eventually with UCSB mechanical engineering associate professor Elliott Hawkes — to develop an adaptive shoe and build a star...| engineering.ucsb.edu
On September 17, researchers from UC Santa Barbara, UC Riverside, and Cal Poly Pomona gathered with donors, industry members, and students to celebrate the launch of the BioFoundry for Extreme and Exceptional Fungi, Archaea and Bacteria (ExFAB). With the support of a six-year, $22 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the new facility will allow researchers to make novel discoveries using previously unstudied microbes that could generate advances in biotechnology an...| engineering.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara computer science professor and vice chair of the Department of Computer Science Daniel Lokshtanov has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support collaborative work to develop a structural theory for quasi-polynomial time algorithms. The $800,000 award, given to Lokshtanov and his colleague Maria Chudnovsky at Princeton University through the NSF’s Algorithmic Foundations program, “supports potentially transformative projects in the theory of al...| engineering.ucsb.edu
Charlotte Rodriguez spent her summer at UC Santa Barbara investigating nitinol — a nickel-titanium alloy widely used in biomedical devices, such as self-expanding heart stents. Guided by Samantha Daly, a mechanical engineering professor, and mentored by PhD candidate Andrew Christison from the Daly group, Rodriguez worked to address one of the material’s most pressing challenges — its fatigue life, which relates to the number of cycles of stress it can withstand before failure.| engineering.ucsb.edu
Tiny grains of silt, clay, and other materials might be small in size, but when they stick together, they can create enormous impacts, including landslides and coastal erosion. UCSB distinguished professor Eckart Meiburg has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) award to study these processes in collaboration with former UCSB mechanical engineering associate professor Alban Sauret, who is now at the University of Maryland. According to NSF, the three-year, $330,000 award will encourag...| engineering.ucsb.edu
Maintaining an open airway is a critical priority in emergency medicine. Without the flow of oxygen, other emergency interventions can become ineffective at saving the patient’s life. Creating this airway through endotracheal intubation, however, is a difficult task even for highly trained individuals working under the best of circumstances. In the field and in the ER, where seconds matter, emergency medical personnel face many unknowns and wildly challenging condition, which, together, lo...| engineering.ucsb.edu