How Two UCLA Engineering Students Built a Self-Playing Piano That Can Do the Impossible Karina Bender, who just received her second master’s in mechanical engineering, and George Grigoryan, who graduated with a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering, designed and built the project at the Engineering Makerspace under the supervision of its faculty director and bioengineering professor Jacob Schmidt.
Bruin Supermileage Vehicle Brings Its First Hydrogen Car to Shell Eco-marathon It was the first time in recent years the Bruin Racing team fielded a finished car at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and passed two of the 12 technical inspections needed to qualify for a run at the Shell Eco-marathon. Despite not completing all inspections, the team now has a promising blueprint for next year.
At LABEST 2026, UCLA Points the Way to Scientific Innovation for the Future UCLA’s Technology Development Group hosted a summit May 18–21 on bioscience and medical technology, featuring panels and presentations from campus researchers including UCLA Samueli faculty in bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering.
U.S. Lead In Science Is Shrinking Fast As China, India And Even Iran Catch Up Amir Faghri, a distinguished adjunct professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, proposes ways to strengthen U.S. scientific leadership by increasing federal support for research, protecting American universities and investing in STEM education.
AI & Tech Brief: The Quantum Race Prineha Narang, a professor of physical sciences and electrical and computer engineering, shares insights on the future of quantum computing technology and the policies that will shape its direction.
S&P 500 Closes Higher as Chips Stage a Comeback Electrical engineering doctoral student Jui-Han Liu is featured in a photo accompanying the story, holding a semiconductor wafer in the CHIPS Lab during the launch of the Semiconductor Hub at UCLA Samueli. Liu is also featured in coverage by AOL and Yahoo Finance.
Can Solar Sails Really Send Humans Out Into Interstellar Space? Artur Davoyan, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, discusses the feasibility of solar sail technology for deep space missions, as well as his lab’s related research developing heat-tolerant, lightweight materials that can withstand extreme temperatures.
Autonomous AI Screening Flags Unreliable Lyme Test Results, Boosting Sensitivity to 95.7% Aydogan Ozcan, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and bioengineering, comments on his research addressing errors in Lyme disease diagnostics, which involves a framework that identifies and excludes unreliable neural network predictions in computational point-of-care diagnostic platforms.
