UCLA’s MSOL Program Ranked #1 by U.S. News & World Report In U.S. News’ 2023 list of best online master’s in engineering programs, UCLA moved up from the No. 2 spot last year, regaining the top position it held in 2020 and for three years in a row from 2015 to 2017.
Q&A with UCLA Civil Engineer Jonathan Stewart on Earthquake in Turkey Civil and environmental engineering professor Jonathan Stewart, who is part of a U.S. response team, addressed questions from reporters around the world, as devastation in Turkey from the Feb. 6 event has raised questions on earthquake readiness and structural resilience.
UCLA Samueli Faculty Join New Effort in Next-Generation Electronic Technologies Five faculty members are part of the JUMP 2.0 microelectronics research program — Jason Cong and Yizhou Sun of computer science, Subramanian Iyer and Puneet Gupta of electrical and computer engineering, as well as Ximin He of materials science and engineering.
Watch: Dennis Hong Rolls Out his Robot Posse Dennis Hong, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, unveiled his team’s latest creations at a TedX talk. The humanoid robots, whose designs have evolved over the years, are capable of a variety of tasks.
Greening Up the Production of Ammonia — the Key Ingredient for Fertilizer A multi-institutional study published in Nature Energy and co-authored by Yuzhang Li, an assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering, detailed a new sustainable technique to reduce the carbon footprint of the key fertilizer ingredient.
Ion-Specific Membrane Holds Potential to Improve Energy Storage and Water Filtration David Jassby, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, demonstrated an innovative membrane that can be fine-tuned to allow only a single type of ion to pass through it, paving the way for advances in energy storage and water filtration.
Meet the Program Director of ARPA-E: Laurent Pilon The Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy program shared an interview with new director Laurent Pilon — a UCLA professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering — on his research in solar, thermal and electrical energy storage, as well as his vision for the program.
Bruin Racing Formula SAE Kicks Off NASCAR Season at the Coliseum In a time-trial competition against its crosstown rival USC, the UCLA Formula SAE team tested its student-built car on the temporary, quarter-mile race track built for the NASCAR Cup Series at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
UCLA Idea Hacks 2023 An annual hardware-focused hackathon on the West Coast, IDEA Hacks is hosted by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ UCLA chapter and provides hundreds of students with the opportunity to develop their own projects.
UCLA Engineer Receives 2023 SPIE Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Optics Professor Aydogan Ozcan of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department received the award from the international society for optics and photonics for his use of computational optics in the development of next-generation imaging tools.
UCLA Data Mining Scholar Wei Wang Elected IEEE Fellow Computer science professor Wei Wang has been selected as a fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for her contributions to data mining. She also leads a team of researchers developing a pandemic early warning system.
UCLA Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Awarded Okawa Foundation Grant Assistant professor Yuan Tian, who is also affiliated with the Institute for Technology, Law and Policy — a joint institute of UCLA Samueli and the school of law — received the award for her research on developing security, privacy and safety measures for human-AI interactions.
UCLA Engineering Professor Receives Mark Foundation for Cancer Research Award Aaron Meyer, an assistant professor of bioengineering, received a 2023 Emerging Leader Award from the Mark Foundation for Cancer Research for his research on ways to track and reactivate antibody-mediated immune response in the body.
Bioengineer Mireille Kamariza Featured as One of 11 Up-and-Coming Researchers Mireille Kamariza, an assistant professor of bioengineering, has been named one of the up-and-coming researchers by Nature Medicine for leveraging tools to develop affordable and deployable diagnostic tech that could help combat infectious diseases.
STEAM - Meet Rajit Gadh Rajit Gadh, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, outlined his research in this interview on engineering power solutions and renewable energy storage to improve sustainability.
Los Angeles Fire Department Trains in Urban Search and Rescue In the wake of the 7.8 earthquake in Turkey, Ertugrul Taciroglu — a professor of civil and environmental engineering — warned that there are buildings in Los Angeles that are still not earthquake-safe, and stressed the importance of addressing the problem.
The Twitch Seinfeld Show Proves AI Shouldn’t Write Comedy Nanyun “Violet” Peng, an assistant professor of computer science, described her research on AI creativity and shared the technology’s process in identifying and generating humor.
Race to Zero: California's Bumpy Road to Electrify Cars and Trucks Rajit Gadh, director of UCLA’s Smart Grid Energy Research Center and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, described the challenges associated with vehicle-to-grid integration, where the stored energy in electrical vehicles can be utilized by the grid during peak hours.
How Seawater Might Soak Up More Carbon Civil and environmental engineering professor Gaurav Sant and his team were featured in this piece for leveraging the oceans to fight climate change by giving “the ocean a giant dose of antacid to boost its capacity to suck up carbon dioxide.”
How ChatGPT Can Improve Education, Not Threaten it John Villasenor, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and law, wrote an op-ed on the emerging AI text-generating technology, ChatGPT, and explained why he is allowing his students to use the tech to assist their writing.
STUDENTS
UCLA Engineering Doctoral Student Aims to Bring Accessible Speech Technology to All Alexander Johnson, a fifth-year electrical and computer engineering Ph.D. student is working on improving artificial intelligence-based speech technology for children, particularly speakers of dialects underrepresented in STEM fields, such as African American English.
ALUMNI
It Takes a Village: Bruin Engineer Shares Hopeful Vision for Diversity in STEM Krystal Cunningham Ph.D.’19 melded the arts and sciences through an examination of ancient materials for potential modern applications in nano-materials during her time at UCLA. Today, Cunningham is a senior engineer at Raytheon where she works on space and airborne systems.
