Convergence - Issue 12

The Magazine of Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa Barbara

Fisheries Salvation Did Your Vote Count?

Q&A with Kimberly Turner Green Chemistry & CoQ10

TWELVE, FALL 2008

Letter From the Deans

Isaac Asimov recently noted, “The only constant is change, continuing change, inevitable change…”

We have some significant changes to acknowledge with this issue. The pictures above and the signatures below reflect those changes—two of the three of us are new to our positions since the last issue.

With the appointment of Pierre Wiltzius as Dean of the Division of Mathematical, Life, and Physical Sciences in the College of Letters and Science, Steve Gaines is returning to his position as Director of the Marine Science Institute, by way of a one-year sabbatical. Steve served as acting dean of MLPS for 17 months, and was an active participant on our editorial board.

Evelyn Hu, founding scientific director of our California NanoSystems Institute, is departing to accept an endowed chair at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Science. She is being succeeded at CNSI by physicist David Awschalom, a long-time member of CNSI, who is probably best known for his pioneering work in spintronics and quantum computation.

Our editorial content in this issue, as in most, is very broad-ranging—we go from voting machine security to our bicycle-racing new chair of mechanical engineering and her MEMS research, and from fisheries management through green chemistry and nutraceuticals to the world’s largest particle accelerator. That breadth truly reflects the rich intellectual environment we’re privileged to enjoy here at UC Santa Barbara. That rich environment and a strong spirit of collegiality, in turn, provide the bases for the interdisciplinarity that is pervasive in our research.

Matthew Tirrell Dean, College of Engineering

Pierre Wiltzius Dean of Mathematical, Life and Physical Sciences, College of Letters & Science

David Awschalom Scientific Director, California NanoSystems Institute

CONTENTS

TWELVE, fall 2008

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Did Your Vote Count?

If you’re in California, you can thank UC Santa Barbara’s Computer Security Group for helping ensure it did. If you live in another state with electronic voting systems…

6 q &A:

Kimberly Turner

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Cover Story: Fisheries Salvation

I got into engineering totally on a whim. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I didn’t know what to major in for undergrad. My parents said, “Just get an engineering degree then you can major in anything you want.”

The “Race to Fish” has led to decline and collapse of fisheries around the world.

New research shows a way to stem and even reverse that decline.

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Not so fast...

Start-up of the world’s largest particle accelerator hasn’t been exactly smooth...

Just Add Water

Going green gets organic solvents out of organic chemistry.

19 20 21

Very Small Research

What is This?

Shorts... Have you heard?

CONVERGENCE T h e M a g a z i n e o f En g in e e r in g an d th e Sc i en c es at UC S an ta Bar b ar a

DidYourVo

UCSB’s Computer Security Group, headed by Giovanni Vigna, left, and Dick Kemmerer, right.

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oteCount?

Every vote counts… or does it? When a presidential election rolls around, that question suddenly takes center stage. Now, thanks to the Computer Security Group (CSG) in the Computer Science Department at UC Santa Barbara, we know a lot more about the security and vulnerabilities of electronic voting machines, and specifically about how and where those machines could be breached by hackers and the votes erased or results altered.

The Bad News is... ... they found electronic voting systems wide open to abuse and identified numerous opportunities to infiltrate and compromise the voting process.

They exposed vulnerabilities when voting machines are prepped and tested at county offices, while they’re stored unprotected at precincts before elections, and even during the few minutes someone is in the voting booth.

The Good News is...

...at least in California, the state has acted on the group’s findings to safeguard the integrity of the vote by decertifying most of the machines, recertifying some after procedural modification for restricted use, and relying more heavily on traditional paper ballots.

“I think (Secretary of State for California) Debra Bowen has done a good job of securing things here in California,” said Professor Richard Kemmerer, head of the security group.

Ms. Bowen invited the group to Sacramento last year to assess the Sequoia voting machines. At the same time, experts from UC Berkeley and UC Davis were reviewing other leading brands, Diebold (now Premier Election Solutions) and Hart InterCivic.

While California has mothballed or modified many of its suspect machines, some states using similar equipment have taken no action. “Those states are still very vulnerable,” Kemmerer said.

Currently, seven states rely completely on direct touchscreen electronic voting. And according to Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Renton, Wa., about 99 percent of all votes are now cast electronically or electronically scanned.

Convinced that voting machines and optical scanners are equally vulnerable, Harris favors paper ballots and full public scrutiny of the counting process. She further argues that, since many precincts have modest numbers of votes which can be easily counted by hand, it makes little sense to use computers for the process.

Kemmerer has been working in the field of computer security for more than 30 years. When he joined the UCSB faculty in 1979, he estimates there were fewer than 10 universities with computer security groups, and maybe only half those were active.

The reason was simple: for many years, computer security just was not considered an issue. Kemmerer recalls someone he talked to in 1983 asking why he needed a password for his computer, saying there was nothing in there he minded anyone else seeing.

Twenty-five years later, most people use passwords to protect their computers, knowing they contain a labyrinth of financial and personal information that they definitely do not want to share.

Still, says Kemmerer, it took a couple of major global events before everyone woke up to the importance of security and the potential havoc that could be created by people hacking into computer systems.

The first was Y2K. When the global clock ticked over from 1999 to 2000, a lot of people were expecting systems failures triggered by the so-called “millennium bug”, a failure of computers to recognize the year “00” after decades of double-digit numbers.

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“I think the real value of all this was that people began to realize that computers control everything we do,” said Kemmerer, ticking off things like water and power supplies, nuclear reactors and rail networks.

The second event was the terrorist attacks of September 2001 which Kemmerer says raised the specter of assaults on nations through their computer networks; this, in turn, increased the importance of intrusion detection and cyber defense.

“I think the real value of all this was that people began to realize that computers control everything we do,” said Kemmerer, ticking off things like water and power supplies, nuclear reactors and rail networks.

Since 9/11, much more funding has become available for studying computer security, reliability, privacy and intrusion detection. “So, after 30 years, I no longer have to explain why we need to be looking at this,” he said.

According to Kemmerer, technology now exists to stage all manner of malicious attacks, from targeting a pacemaker inside someone’s chest to launching massive “denial of service” attacks that can cripple a corporate giant on the other side of the world.

The Federal government’s focus fell on electronic voting in the wake of the Florida presidential election shambles eight years ago, when the world watched election officials trying to interpret votes by intently studying hanging chads.

After a series of hotly-contested recounts left candidates George Bush and Al Gore only a whisker apart, the electoral bickering was finally silenced by a Supreme Court decision enabling Florida to certify the vote in Bush’s favor.

Since that debacle, companies like Sequoia, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold and Hart have begun offering hardware and software that they claim will accurately and securely record democracy in action.

However, Kemmerer and his team, who also completed a study of the ES&S system for the Ohio Secretary of State, strongly disagree. “These companies all saw a market,” he said.

“In the process they made a lot of assumptions that were never tested—until now.”

Associate professor Giovanni Vigna, coleader of the eight-member testing team, says it’s obvious that systems have been built up piecemeal and lack a clear overall design. “Anyone who has taken two classes of computer science could do better,” he said.

Ironically, the tools to become a cyber thief or online hacker are readily available… online. “You can go online and shop for attack tools to do this,” said assistant professor Christopher Kruegel.

“You barely need any technical knowledge.”

Kruegel, who joined the faculty and the Computer Security Group a year ago, paints a grim picture of the cyber landscape in which the threat from criminals in places like Eastern Europe, Russia and China is becoming more serious but less visible.

Because we hear less these days about “worms” and other highly contagious Internet viruses, Kruegel thinks people have been lulled into a false sense of security. “But it’s not getting better, it’s getting worse,” he says. “It’s just not so obvious.”

For many years, this research unit within UCSB’s Department of Computer Science was known as the Reliable Software Group—it was only about 18 months ago that the name was changed to the Computer Security Group, a more accurate reflection of its core focus.

A decade ago the group was looking at Web browsers and experimenting with its own versions of spyware, the little software package you may unknowingly take home after visiting a site and which then tracks your every cyber move.

In the late ’90s, CSG set up spoof attacks showing it could penetrate online bank accounts, obtain customer names, account and PIN numbers, and even (theoretically) transfer money around. It then told the banks so they could plug the holes.

Vigna, whose areas of research include Web security and intrusion detection, criticized the “abysmal quality” of the software and “elementary mistakes” found in many components of the patchwork systems.

UCSB’s computer security experts uncovered vulnerability and exposure to risk throughout the election process, and documented their findings in two short videos that have so far logged nearly 80,000 viewings on YouTube. The group’s work and their videos have been covered by the New York Times, Forbes, and multiple national technology and political blogs.

Critics have suggested that what CSG was able to achieve with unlimited laboratory access to machines and plenty of time, could not possibly be duplicated in a real election. The team’s video and reports, however, show how quickly they were able to corrupt the memory card and, with it, the voting machine; indeed, they demonstrated a whole series of equally fast attacks and related problems.

Their demonstrations included showing how quickly equipment security seals can be bypassed, even inside the voting booth—a voting machine results cartridge is switched in under 18 seconds, and various other machine components can be accessed by removing a few housing screws.

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Malicious software, capable of deleting votes or switching them between candidates, can be introduced as easily as planting a USB flash drive or by accessing a memory card.

The group also demonstrated a Trojan virus which was programmed to conceal itself by behaving normally when the system was routinely tested, then corrupting results during voting; such a virus can also be programmed to delete itself after the election, leaving no trace it was ever there.

Finally, the group showed that vote-flipping software could be programmed to spread through the system-like a virus, meaning a single criminal intrusion at one machine could eventually infect many others.

The significance of all this is not lost on Vigna, especially after the razor-thin margin in the 2000 presidential race. “We already know which are the critical, swing states,” he says, suggesting the corruption of relatively few precincts could well determine a state or national election outcome.

D

efCon, which takes place over two and a half intense days every August in Las Vegas, is described as the “world Olympics of hacking” by Giovanni Vigna, UCSB associate professor of Computer Science.

“I’m appalled there are still states allowing electronic voting with no paper trail,” says Vigna, an Italian who is astonished that this country lets its precious democracy hang by such a slender thread.

UCSB earned major bragging rights by winning the event in 2005 and finishing second the following year—quite an achievement considering around 300 teams battle through a qualifying round just to grab one of eight spots in the final.

He sees two solutions: One is to create an entirely new system with built-in, ongoing security checks; the other is to implement continuous security evaluations of existing systems, using independent, fulltime, paid monitors.

Vigna believes one way to safeguard the voting process is to fill out paper ballots and count them through optical scanners.

Although these are also vulnerable, he says they are simpler and easier to secure than voting machines.

Vigna, who teaches a class on hacking, said DefCon is a hardcore event attracting challengers from areas like the military and security companies, some of whom won’t even give their names.

“With paper ballots you have a paper trail and can have a recount if necessary. If everything else goes down you can still vote, but if the machines fail you can’t vote.”

The DefCon competition is based on a Capture-the-Flag scenario: each team is given the same computer to defend and to use in attacking their opponents’ systems. Teams score points by hacking into the opponents’ systems, indentifying their weaknesses, attacking those flaws, blocking attacks on their own systems, and repairing damage inflicted on their systems by others’ attacks.

Voters can feel grateful to UCSB’s Computer Security Group for helping protect their franchise. In turn, Secretary of State Bowen earns one vote—of thanks—from Vigna. “She had the guts to take our recommendations to heart and find the least painful way to trade off what we’re using right now with the security issues we raised.”

END

In 2002 Vigna started something similar just for universities. Now billed as the world’s largest universitybased hacking competition, the International Capture the Flag event takes place at UCSB during a single day each December. Last year it drew 36 teams, comprising about 450 students, from universities in the United States, Europe, India, South America, Australia and Russia.

Relevant links: Computer Security Group: cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab Voting Machine Evaluation Project: cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/voting California Secretary of State’s Top-to-Bottom Review: sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vs.htm

Each team in the competition has an Internet server providing virtual services, such as banking, car rental, or retail sales. The web pages have all been seeded with vulnerabilities which the teams have to find and patch on their own servers while trying to compromise others.

The university competition “is simpler and briefer than DefCon,” said Vigna. “It’s also an educational experience.

Help is available to the competing teams, and the students gain knowledge through the competiton.”

Relevant links: DEFCON Hacking Convention and Competiton: defcon.org

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Steve Weixel

6

q uestion and answer

Kimberly Turner

After nine years at UC Santa Barbara, Kimberly Turner has just been appointed Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering—at just 35 years old. She earned her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Michigan Technological University in only three years, graduating in 1994, and received her Ph.D. in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from Cornell University in 1999. She joined the department of Mechanical & Environmental Engineering (since redesignated the Department of Mechanical Engineering) at UCSB in August 1999, where she is continuing her research in the areas of MEMS and nanosystems. Her research group comprises six Ph.D. students, three undergraduate researchers, and a postdoc.

Turner is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award, and her work has been published in Nature, Nanotechnology, JMEMS, and multiple other publications. She is a member of many technical societies including IEEE and ASME, is currently Chair of the ASME MEMS Division, and is General Chair for the 2010 Americas Workshop on Solid-State Sensors & Actuators.

The newly-appointed department chair talked to Convergence about her vision for the department, her research, her experience as a young woman in a male-dominated field, and why she doesn’t fit the “girl engineer” stereotype.

How did you get into engineering?

I got into engineering totally on a whim. I wanted to be a veterinarian, but I didn’t know what to major in for undergrad. My parents said, “Just get an engineering degree then you can major in anything you want,” so I did that and I got my undergrad degree in three years. Then I started looking into grad schools and I realized I was going to have to stay an extra year to do all that biology (for veterinary school). At the same time I had applied for national fellowships and I got a National Science Foundation fellowship for grad school—for engineering.

I did my Ph.D. at Cornell. I got into MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) while I was there and just loved it—although there were moments when I wondered if I’d made the right choice. I used to sneak into the vet school and go to lectures because I was still really interested in that and I’d learned a tremendous amount on my own.

I was really into it but now

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I’m glad I have dogs as a hobby. Engineering suits me because it’s very creative.

What brought you to UCSB? I didn’t think initially that I’d fit into academia. To be brutally honest, I thought I was too diverse. My dad is an academic, and engineering is one of his few interests. I didn’t see myself as that narrow, so I thought I would get a job in the industry and work on research and I’d just do all the things I wanted to do on the side. But my Ph.D. advisor said, “I think you’d be a great academic. You really should give it a shot.” I didn’t want to be a postdoc because I was tired of being a poor grad student and I didn’t think I could do that lifestyle anymore, but he said, “You might not have to.” I applied to Berkeley and UCSB, and I got the job here right away. I didn’t get the Berkeley job; they hired someone much more senior who was already well into his career. I was really impressed when I came here. There were people that I interviewed with that had a big vision. …They really seemed to want to go into new and diverse areas. I thought that that was the kind of place where I’d want to be—someplace where change is happening, a place that’s growing and moving at an exponential rate.

I told myself when I decided to go into academia that I had to do research I would enjoy doing and to make sure I didn’t stress about tenure. I saw too many young academics completely stressed out and just ruining what seemed to be the best years of their lives. I thought, I’m going to do what I want and if they’ve happy with me after five, seven years and I get tenure, that’s great. I didn’t stress and I got tenure after five years. I didn’t know if academia was right for me,

Peter Allen

Kimberly Turner (center) and her research group in the MEMS laboratory.

but now looking back I can’t see myself in any other job. My schedule’s flexible. I work a lot but I work on things I want to work on, I can ride and race my bike and I can show my dogs and I can live in Santa Barbara at the beach. I mean, what’s not to like?

that’s what improves rankings and rankings improve graduate student quality—it’s just a big circle. If the department does well overall we’ll all do better. You can be the smartest person ever, but if you don’t have smart grad students and postdocs you’re dead in the water.

You were just appointed Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Did you have any hesitation about accepting the position?

Our department has hired some amazing people in the recent past, and I am very excited to see it grow and change.

I have great colleagues here who are doing research which, quite literally, will change the world. We need to support the careers of the young faculty, and continue to provide a dynamic environment in which to teach, work, and collaborate!

A lot. You hear people say, “Don’t do it. You really need to just focus on your research.” But I’m not a ‘100 percent focus on anything’ kind of person. I’ve enjoyed the diverse challenges and the responsibilities that I’ve taken I have great colleagues on over the years.

here who are doing research which, quite literally, will change the world.

I love my research program and I like the way my lab functions—it runs like a little machine. I don’t really want to mess that up, but I think with good time management and good support from the rest of the faculty that I can do it. But yes, I was worried. I felt like ideally it would have been good to do this a year or two from now, but I always said I would never do it before I was full professor and before I felt like my research career was firmly established. Those have both happened, so that’s OK.

You involve undergraduates in your research, which is somewhat unusual. Why do you do that?

I like to have undergrads in my lab for a number of reasons.

One is that they aren’t jaded by academia. They have not learned how to be close-minded and so they’re often more creative. They think outside the box because they still don’t know what’s possible. I feel like it’s also beneficial to undergrads to see what research is like and get into real products. It makes learning more active and I think that’s always a good thing. It’s been fun. I’ve worked with about 30 undergrads and I involve them in the whole process. They’re not just lab rats. They publish papers and they present papers at conferences if it’s mostly their work.

I want them to see what’s going on outside my lab and conferences are a great way to get a huge survey of what’s going on in the field and hopefully motivate them to want to go on to grad school.

As chair, what’s your vision for the department?

I always said that if I became department chair I wouldn’t want to just slog through the day to day stuff. I want to take on a mission and do something really good for the department. I want to improve the undergraduate labs. I also want to increase the visibility of the department, because

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You’re only 35. Do you feel like your youth has been a problem professionally?

What do your diverse interests bring to your research and teaching?

Although I have been here for over nine years, people still call me a junior faculty member. Also, I’m often compared to some of my colleagues who have been around for the same time, but people will tell me, “Oh, you’re too young to be department chair.” They won’t make those remarks to someone who is literally at the same career step, maybe five years older than me. It shouldn’t matter how old you are. That does bother me sometimes—to be thought of as too young to do things.

It never really hurt in the long run, but it does bother me.

But I’m not willing to try to look older or more conservative because of that. It doesn’t bug me that much.

I am always thinking about how engineering could make things better. When I ride the bike I’m thinking, We should have a class project on measuring the effect of certain tires versus friction or, Oh, we could put our gyro on the bike or, How could we build a better power meter?

I do bring that into my classes. Right now I’m teaching a design course and it’s really easy to bring things like cycling into a design course. Last year their class project was to build a pedal-powered anything. The team that built theirs made a pedal-powered composter.

How has your experience been as a young woman in engineering?

I’ve always felt like a minority. When I was an undergrad there just weren’t very many women. I’d be in a class of 50 and look around the room and there’d be two of us.

I also felt like a minority in terms of my diverse interests. I’ve always felt like I didn’t really fit the typical academic mold, but it’s worked out fine. There are many ways to manage your career and there’s no one right way. I actually think that being a female made that part easier. Because there weren’t any others to model myself after, I could kind of create my own existence. It would have been great to have women colleagues to talk to and have someone else to go through the process with, but at the same time, if anything, I was able to spread my wings on my own. That’s not to say there weren’t negative things, but I try not to dwell on them.

I also think that I don’t fit the female engineer stereotype— there’s this mistaken idea that if you’re a girl engineer you somehow have masculine interests. People would be horrified if they knew that I like to read fashion magazines and that I like to shop at Nordstrom. I really am kind of a girly girl. I like makeup and shoes and all those things that girls like. One time on a course evaluation I actually got that “Professor Turner is a really good dresser.”

I do try to bring my interests into the design process because then I’m more likely to really want to spend time with the students talking about it.

Is there a message you’d like to send to young people about engineering?

I had a preconceived notion that engineering was this one-dimensional thing. You had to be in this geeky mindset and you really don’t. I guess my advice to young people would be that engineering is really broad and diverse. There are many different paths and there are many different ways to apply engineering to the real world. Engineering impacts everyday life, and I think that people don’t think about that. A lot of young people don’t even know what engineers do, when in fact almost everything you touch has been engineered, so no matter what you’re interested in you can find some way of working on it. I found that out just by trial and error, but I think more people would go into engineering if they realized that it wasn’t just about cars, or it wasn’t just about circuit boards. …There’s the whole world out there.

Relevant links: Turner Research Group: engineering.ucsb.edu/~tmems Of Dogs & Bike Racing: profkimberlyturner.blogspot.com Team Chicken Ranch Blog: onthebteam.blogspot.com

You say you have diverse interests. Tell me more about them.

Cycling and my dogs are my main outside interests. I really like to handle show dogs and train show dogs. And I race my bicycle—I ride for Team Chicken Ranch. I did probably 20 races this year and that takes a lot of travel and training time, although I can involve my students in that too. We’re probably one of the fittest research groups on campus. Sometimes I’ll have weekly research meetings with my students as we climb Old San Marcos. We’re pretty hard-core.

I’m also musical. I play the piano. I’m not very good but I just play for enjoyment. I’m an avid reader of anything. I don’t read engineering books 100 percent of the time either. At night, my way to de-stress is to read something completely different. I love cooking so I read cookbooks, and novels and history.

I just have a lot of interests; I’m not one–dimensional at all. I think it helps me because I’m really content.

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For a look at Kimberly Turner’s research and to see why the “Dude” (above) is involved, please see Very Small Research on page 19.

Fisheries Salvation

“The oceans of the world continue to suffer from the survival of the philosophy of the commons.

Maritime nations still respond automatically to the shibboleth of the ‘freedom of the seas.’ Professing to believe in the ‘inexhaustible resources of the oceans,’ they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.”

– Garrett Hardin, The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) As industrial-scale fishing fleets and processing ships combed the oceans in the 1970s and ‘80s for profitable large fish, such as sailfish, tuna, cod, halibut, and shark, fishery after fishery economically collapsed or became biologically depleted. Atlantic cod off Newfoundland and the Georges Bank stocks of cod and haddock along the United States eastern seaboard plummeted while the west coast saw abalone fisheries collapse from Alaska to southern California. One species, the white abalone, was eventually protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act.

The study—two of the 14 co-authors were researchers at UCSB’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis—and its projections were highly controversial, triggering a debate that echoes today.

However, some scientists took up the challenge to demonstrate that large fisheries could be managed in ways other than the predominant open access (also known as “race to fish”) approach.

This usually takes the form of an industry-wide fish stock quota, leading to the biggest, fastest boats grabbing as much as possible before the quota is reached, ending the season.

In another Science paper last September, resource economist Chris Costello and marine biologist Steve Gaines, both from UC Santa Barbara, and economist John Lynham of the University of Hawaii posed a different strategy they thought might help save ecosystems and fisheries. “In many ways, Worm’s Fishermen pose with their catch of paper motivated ours. He found halibut in Homer, Alaska, in the 1930s. a problem and we wanted to find a solution,” said Costello, the lead author of “Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries That same year, a team of researchers from Canada, Collapse?” the United States, and Sweden analyzed in Science magazine how a 50-year decrease in marine biodiversity Though Worm’s paper reached controversial was profoundly reducing the goods and services— conclusions, observed Gaines, “what was not including food—provided to humans by ocean controversial was the fact that things were getting ecosystems. Led by marine biologist Boris Worms of worse (with commercial fish stocks).” But the director Dalhousie University in Halifax, the study concluded of the Marine Science Institute had no desire to that a “business as usual” approach would cause a global continue delineating problems; evaluating potential collapse of fisheries by 2048 and “sabotage” any natural solutions was his goal. “With our paper, we wanted capacity for recovery. to see if fish stocks improved dramatically when Tom Brandt

By 2006, a quarter of the world’s fish stocks had been overexploited or depleted, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Despite various management strategies in play around the planet, it looked more and more like ecologist and social philosopher Garrett Hardin’s grim predictions for a tragedy in the ocean commons was coming true.

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Abigal Powell

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“When it is no longer a fishing commons, secure ownership changes fishermen’s incentives,” said Gaines, “it focuses them on long-term economic goals. Once you do that, profits are driven by sustainable fish populations.” management systems changed,” Gaines explained. “We found there were some striking positive effects, and that’s the exciting thing.”

When Costello, a Bren School of Environmental Science and Management professor, examined the global harvest database used by Worms and his team, he found it included more than 11,100 fisheries covering all large marine ecosystems. This data showed a clear trend toward wide-scale collapse, which meant the harvest in a given year was less than 10% of the maximum recorded harvest. But it was silent on how the fish stocks were managed. “We put together our own database to match the 1950-2003 catch database, with management information for each of the fisheries,” he recalled. This allowed identification and comparison of 121 fisheries that were managed by catch shares, which was defined as some form of individual transferable quotas, or ITQs, though a cooperative may also hold such quotas.

Based on shared ownership of a fishery’s scientifically determined total catch, the catch share method provides each entity in the fishery a dedicated share of the catch, which can be bought and sold. Fishermen can choose to go out when the weather is good, stay as long as economical, and return without the time pressure driven by an open access system. In this model, as the fishery’s health improves, it becomes more profitable and the shares increase in value. And there are ecological benefits from a growing sense of stewardship.

“When it is no longer a fishing commons, secure ownership changes fishermen’s incentives,” said Gaines, “it focuses them on long-term economic goals. Once you do that, profits are driven by sustainable fish populations.”

led to the conclusion that, in Costello’s words, “the catch share group was dramatically less prone to fishery collapse, and the longer you used a catch share system, the better the results.” In fact, under certain statistical models, the study found that switching a fishery in decline to an ITQ not only stops the spiral into collapse but also could reverse it. This will depend on many factors, including habitat health. Excluded from the study were some traditional forms of local, shared fishing efforts, such as territorial user rights based on geographic boundaries, and community concessions, both of which are found among the Polynesians.

Not a new idea—the oldest catch share system for a large ecosystem in the management database was from 1975 in New Zealand—the ITQ approach has yet to be widely imitated. Despite the economic distress and cultural disruption of a collapse to fishing communities, catch shares only began taking hold in the 1980s. Today, Costello estimated, “somewhere between one and two percent of the global fisheries use catch shares.”

Besides New Zealand, catch shares have been employed in Australia, Iceland, and increasingly Canada and the U.S., particularly Alaska. The red snapper fishery went to catch shares in 2007, and Pacific groundfish fishery managers, who oversee 80 species, are scheduled to decide in November (2008) if they will move to a catch share system.

However, Costello noted, of the “hundreds of fisheries in the U.S., only seven or eight are currently catch shares. They are just not widely adopted yet.”

There are understandable reasons fishermen, who have invested hugely in the race to fish, remain leery of what they

Jeremy Prince

Comparing ITQmanaged fisheries to the other fisheries

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“I believe this is critical to a sustainable fishery,” he added. “The empirical data being collected can provide management and the fishermen with new models, such as a cost share system.”

frequently see as another regulatory change in their usual way of doing business. Even if they are willing, or forced, to try something new, conflicts arise over who gets how big a share of the catch and on what basis. Capping shares to avoid consolidation is another obstacle. More striking has been the resistance of many environmental groups to the catch share system.

Despite the benefits well-designed ITQs can bring to the ocean’s fisheries and fishermen, they are not panaceas for every problem afflicting the seas, warn the study’s authors.

Marine Protected Areas, Marine Reserves, and Territorial User Rights Fisheries as well as the various forms of cost share fisheries can all be appropriately employed to enhance, rather than degrade, human use of the sea.

Rana Banerjee

“Until now, there has been only sparse, anecdotal evidence of the ecological effects,” said Costello. “So the global environmental community, with a few notable exceptions, has been somewhat skeptical.

They’ve described catch shares as ‘privatizing the oceans,’ rather than providing fishermen with incentives for stewardship.” However, the economist does sense them shifting toward catch shares, depending on how the system is defined.

One model of catch shares cannot fit all ecological, economic, and social conditions, the researchers argued in their paper. The point is to establish long-term incentives for fishermen, and there are “hundreds of ways to do that from all over the world,” said Costello.

Customizing a system to fit the needs of ecosystems and fishers makes catch share fisheries “more likely to not only be adopted, but to be successful.”

“What this study shows,” said Gaines, “is that we need a toolbox, a wide variety of different approaches. Part of the mix is having ITQs and MPAs, but another part is fixing the problems that lead to mismanagement of fisheries. The human impacts on the oceans are gigantic,” particularly pollution and the effects of climate change.

“Some of these problems are going to be very hard to fix, others we should fix as soon as we can,” he added. “The last thing you want is to have 15 things simultaneously hitting these ecosystems and their populations.”

Relevant links: Garrett Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons: garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_ the_commons.html

The success of many forms of species management depends on collecting and consistently updating specific ecological information on the fishery and the habitat.

The collaboration of fishermen, who increasingly assert their stake in decisions that affect their livelihoods, can make a difference. At UCSB, a group of researchers has recently joined with local fishermen to create CALobster, a community-based research effort to promote the bestpossible management practices for California spiny lobster while maintaining a working harbor. The collaboration is an outgrowth of the establishment of 13 Marine Reserves in state and federal waters off the Santa Barbara Channel Islands over the past five years, but it could lead to an ITQ.

CALobster: calobster.org Steve Gaines’ Home page: lifesci.ucsb.edu/eemb/ faculty/gaines Christopher Costello’s Home Page: fiesta.bren.ucsb. edu/~costello The Economist: economist.com/ science/displaystory.cfm?story_ id=12253181

Bren researcher Hunter Lenihan co-leads, with Matt Kay, the UCSB part of the endeavor while fisherman Chris Miller has organized the lobstermen. Following creation of the reserves, it was evident that better data was needed to track their impact on local commercial species, such as lobster and rockfish, according to Lenihan. “We wanted to develop spatially specific data for management, and the fishermen have organized themselves into geographically diverse zones (in the Channel),” he said. The date is now being collected with tagged lobsters and fish.

The lobstermen were interested in what benefits, if any, they might see spilling into their fishing zones from the reserves where they could no longer trap the crustaceans.

CALobster gives them access to research results and a voice in designing research objectives. “We wanted to create more of a balance between the old, top-down management and a bottom-up approach,” said Lenihan.

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Not so fast...

Start-up of the world’s largest particle accelerator hasn’t been exactly smooth...

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million-pound, four-story-tall CMS, one of LHC’s two broad-spectrum particle detectors. Incandela is also deputy physics coordinator for the experiment, and is based at CERN’s Geneva headquarters through late 2009.

he Sept. 20 news release from Geneva was terse: An incident the previous day had caused “a large helium leak” into a section of the 17-mile (27 km) circular tunnel under the French-Swiss border that is home of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator—the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. No injuries or “risk to people” occurred, reported the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), but apparently a connection between two important magnets had melted during a gradual increase of the electrical current.

This malfunction happened 10 days after the successful first test run of the LHC, in which separate beams of protons— positively charged particles from, in this case, hydrogen atoms—had circulated in first one direction and then the opposite direction through the tunnel. The beams’ paths traversed the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, a major piece of equipment to which UC Santa Barbara scientists and engineers made key contributions.

Other principals from the campus’s high-energy physics group who are involved with the collider experiments include scientists Claudio Campagnari, Jeffrey Richman, David Stuart, and Michael Witherell (who is also UCSB’s Vice Chancellor for Research). They and the more than 30 other UCSB engineers, post-doctoral researchers, graduate and undergraduate students, and technicians working on the CMS experiment have mixed feelings about the delay.

Stuart, who has focused on cosmic ray particle tracking data, admits to being “disappointed by the delay” after the effort invested in preparing the CMS for its role in searching for the forces and fundamental building blocks of the early universe.

UCSB’s Joseph Incandela in the LHC collision hall, with the Compact Muon Solendoid undergoing final assembly in the background.

Richman pointed out that while “the magnet accident was really unfortunate, bringing a new accelerator into operation typically takes a year or more.”

Super-cooled, superconducting electromagnets are fundamental to the efficient and effective functioning of the collider. During the planned experiments, which will seek to prove the existence of subatomic particles new to science, the magnets guide the paths of tiny bunches of protons as they race through special beam tubes at speeds approaching that of light. Two high-energy beams will be forced to collide at specific experiment sites, propelling particles through layers of detectors.

Campagnari, who co-leads one of the physics analysis groups, said his group is using the “extra time to refine some of the data analysis techniques” they plan to use.

Though “it’s not the end of the world,” he said, he and others noted that a six-month delay could cause major problems for grad students and postdocs.

Incandela was also philosophical about the delay: “We will keep working at a pretty intense level to further our understanding of the detector and its smooth operation.

We were all a bit down when the problem with the machine was announced, but we have too much to do to spend much time dwelling on it.”

Circulating liquid helium keeps the magnets at a temperature colder than outer space. This eliminates electrical resistance, but cooling the magnets down to, or warming them up from, that temperature takes weeks.

CERN has announced that the accelerator’s affected sectors must be warmed again so that the magnets in question can be retrieved and examined. Faced with a two-month delay for warming and re-cooling cycles, and an “obligatory winter maintenance period,” the restart of the LHC must wait until “early spring 2009,” the agency said.

Relevant links: The Large Hadron Collider: public.web.cern.ch/ public/en/LHC/LHC-en.html Compact Muon Solenoid: public.web.cern.ch/ public/en/LHC/CMS-en.html

UCSB particle physicist Joe Incandela says the delay could be longer than six months if repairs or upgrades, beyond replacing the immediate failed magnets, are necessary. He is part of the UCSB team that helped construct the primary tracking device for the 27½-

UCSB LHC/CMS Group: hep.ucsb.edu/cms BBC Guide to the Large Hadron Collider (Too long to key in… go to bbc.co.uk and search for LHC)

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Sheraz Sadiq, KQED Quest

The CMS’s role is to search for the forces and fundamental building blocks of the early universe.

15

Going green gets organic solvents out of organic chemistry

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Peter Allen

Organic solvents are usually toxic, are created from the world’s petroleum reserves, and ultimately make up more than 70% of all chemical waste generated. Bruce Lipshutz, a chemistry professor at UC Santa Barbara, wants to get rid of them by replacing them with water‌ even seawater.

Never heard of CoQ10?

“Why not use the same technology, the same ‘trick’, we use to dissolve CoQ 10 and many other nutraceuticals and pharmaceuticals in water?” asked Lipshutz. He theorized that if those bioactive compounds can be solubilized in water, then we should be able to do the same with organic reactants and their associated catalysts. That would then lead to the desired reaction products—in essence, organic chemistry in water.

UC Santa Barbara chemist Bruce Lipshutz says you’re not alone if you haven’t. “If you don’t know anything about it,” Lipshutz said during a recent interview, “that’s not surprising—much of the public hasn’t heard of it.” He’s on a mission to correct what he views as a major oversight in human wellness, especially among baby-boomers: “Society needs not only to know about CoQ 10, we need to think about it as a daily vitamin, and to take it .”

Lipshutz has a strong history with CoQ 10 in his lab.

Initially, he retooled the chemistry to produce the supplement using synthesis rather than fermentation, the method that Japanese industry uses and which led to their world leadership position in CoQ 10 production.

China’s recent entry into the CoQ 10 market, however, dramatically impacted pricing and availability of CoQ 10.

Like vitamin C, coenzyme Q 10, also known as ubiquinone, is a compound that’s vital to our survival. It’s a coenzyme that our cells synthesize, albeit in 21 steps, and it’s in every one of our cells. This contrasts with a vitamin, such as vitamin C, which is not made by the body. Both CoQ 10 and vitamin C are “compounds of evolution,” Lipshutz said. “Everybody accepts the importance of vitamin C. The reason the public doesn’t yet appreciate CoQ 10 is that it’s had no celebrity champion—no Linus Pauling.” (Pauling, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, was also a strong advocate for greater consumption of vitamin C.)

When the supply of CoQ 10 grew faster than demand, Lipshutz went back into the lab to study what else could be done with this life-sustaining compound. CoQ 10 is readily available at Costco or drug stores, where you can buy it formulated into softgels that deliver the nutrient in various strengths. It’s marketed as helping to provide a boost in energy as well as a healthy heart. Lipshutz noted, however, that our bodies absorb only10-15 percent of the CoQ 10 in the softgel form. How, he asked, could this become more available and bioefficient?

While the body produces its own CoQ 10, that production decreases with age. “Nature gave us, through 2.5 billion years of evolution, a number of fundamental anti-aging, free-radical scavengers that helped us to survive, on average, to about 40 years of age, until modern medicine came along,” Lipshutz said. “Our ability to synthesize CoQ 10 diminishes with aging beyond our prime, which is around 20.”

“The future isn’t about access to CoQ 10,” he said. “It’s about getting it into water, so that we can deliver more of it and get more of it into the mitochondria of our cells.”

With CoQ 10’s water insolubility, that was a significant challenge. Lipshutz found the answer in nanotechnology, which eventually became the tie-in to green chemistry.

If one doesn’t get vitamin C, the consequences can be significant and ultimately hazardous to your health. “It’s essential for several cellular processes. For example, everyone knows about scurvy,” Lipshutz said. “You can last 30 days, maybe 60 days, without vitamin C as your cells deteriorate.”

“We do it with nano-micelle-forming technology,” Lipshutz said. He starts by putting a known, inexpensive molecule called PTS into water, in which it spontaneously forms nanoparticles averaging 25 nanometers (one nanometer is equal to one billionth of a meter) in diameter. These “designer” surfactants have a lipophilic portion tied to a hydrophilic portion through a linker.

The lipophilic inner portion, which is actually vitamin E, self-associates because it doesn’t have any solubility (any energy-lowering interactions) with the surrounding water,” Lipshutz said. “But the external, or hydrophilic PEG portion, interacts well with water.”

On the other hand, CoQ 10 – much of which is in the mitochondria of our cells – is essential for cellular respiration and for production of ATP (adenosine triphosphate), which facilitates energy generation within cells. “You couldn’t last 30 minutes without CoQ 10,” he said. “Evolution teaches us that CoQ 10 is as important as vitamin C. But who’s teaching this to our aging population? Nobody.”

Lipshutz went on to note, “While modern medicine has extended our longevity, some very common drugs can further reduce our naturally declining levels of CoQ 10—for statin-based cholesterol-inhibiting drugs such as Lipitor and Zocor—also inhibit the body’s synthesis of CoQ 10, by as much as 40-50%. This isn’t a side effect of statins, but a direct, inherent function of these drugs, since both cholesterol and CoQ 10 are synthesized from the same precursors. That makes CoQ 10 supplementation even more important for those taking statins; it’s the secret to getting rid of exercise intolerance and the muscle pain they can cause.”

The result is that when you add CoQ 10, it says, ‘Where would I rather be?’ Since “like dissolves like,” the CoQ 10 goes inside the micelles. Since they are only nanometers in diameter, the water in which CoQ 10 is solubilized stays crystal clear. These solutions are also stable at room temperature.

“We can also take pharmaceuticals, like Taxol, an antitumor agent, and put them into just water or saline using this PTS,” he said. “The potential for broadening the range of drug delivery modalities for both existing and new drugs is tremendous.”

Relevant links: A good CoQ 10 Overview: tishcon.com/coenzymeq10.html

By taking advantage of this micellar technology, synthetic chemistry can also be done inside the micelles, where they function as nanoreactors. That translates into doing chemistry in pure water, and given the innate high

17

concentrations of substrates within these micelles, reactions take place without additional input of energy (i.e., no heating needed). “That’s truly green chemistry,” Lipshutz said. Moreover, the PTS that enables this green chemistry is “benign by design”—it is made from ingredients that are all

to water, that would save 32,000 metric tons (32 million kilos) of organic solvents… and the potential, obviously, is far beyond one percent.”

impact. (GRAS is an acronym for Generally Recognized As Safe, an FDA designation.) In fact, Lipshutz says, it’s a provitamin; an ester of vitamin E. “You could drink it.”

Relevant links:

The savings in heat needed in many reactions and the waste created by organic solvents could be dramatically reduced using this nanotechnology-based approach. Lipshutz sees this as among his most significant contributions in an already illustrious career as an organic chemist. “If we were to shift just one percent of solvent-based industrial processes

Green Chemistry (EPA): epa.gov/gcc/pubs/about_gc

Peter Allen

“We are getting organic solvents out of organic reactions,” he said, “and we’re already looking into next-generation possibilities.

All of this green chemistry has “We aim to get organic solvents out of organic reactions,” come out of developing a way he said. “And we’re already looking into next-generation to put CoQ 10 and other dietary possibilities. All of our green chemistry has come out of being supplements into water.” able to put CoQ10 and other dietary supplements into water.”

“It’s an opportunity to affect every person on the planet,” he says proudly. safe and/or GRAS-affirmed, and thus of no environmental Lipshutz Research Group: www.chem.ucsb. edu/~lipshutzgroup 12 Principles of Green Chemistry: epa.gov/gcc/pubs/ principles

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Kimberly Turner’s VERY SMALL RESEARCH

K

imberly Turner’s primary research focus is very small—literally. Her lab works on tiny devices, called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). They can function as filters, sensors, and switches, and have myriad applications in everything from car airbags through videogame controllers to inkjet printers.

Jeff Clarke

Turner is developing exquisitely sensitive devices that can detect minute changes in mass—changes that can indicate the presence of a single molecule of a material. This new generation of sensors could have a broad range of applications, including food safety monitoring and detecting trace amounts of chemical warfare agents, long before they can be picked up by current systems.

Michael nirthern

MEMS devices can also be designed to sense movement. A MEMS gyroscope built by a former student has attracted a lot of attention, Turner says, because it is far more robust than alternative MEMS designs. She sees applications for such a MEMS gyroscope in guiding satellites and even missiles: “anything that requires precise tracking.”

The technology could also be used in place of the Global Positioning System (GPS), which fails if the signal from a satellite-based transponder to a GPS receiver is blocked.

After studying the intricate system of nanoscale hairs on a gecko’s feet, Turner’s team has developed synthetic adhesives that mimic the functionality of the gecko’s feet. The adhesives are reversible, so they can be stuck and unstuck, just like the feet of a gecko on the move. In one application, diminutive robots could be outfitted with sticky feet to allow them to climb over rough, rocky terrain and up and down walls. The US Army is interested in their potential use in war zones, where hand-sized, sticky-footed “microrobots” equipped with sensors could be surreptitiously sent into buildings to scout for dangers before soldiers enter.

“What they’d like them to be able to do is reconnoiter environments that aren’t confirmed as being safe,” Turner says. “This would be just as valuable in disaster site evaluation and search-andrescue as in a combat environment.”

19

Peter Allen

Turner’s other main research focus—”a project that’s really skyrocketed”—is developing adhesives inspired by the marvelously sticky feet of geckos, which enable the animals to wander across ceilings and grip glass.

From top: Research team member “Dude” curls his toes to release his foot from a sheet of glass; a MEMS device designed to mimic the contact surface of Dude’s toes; Kimberly Turner and fit research group members Ph.D. student Mark Zielke and undergraduate Matthew Wingert in her lab.

What is this?

Find the answer on the inside back cover.

20

SHORTS...

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News and Events from Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa Barbara

New Nanoscale Process Will Help Computers Run Faster, More Efficiently Smaller... Faster...

More efficient...

These are the qualities that industry needs in electronic devices in order to speed up computers and reduce their energy consumption. Materials engineers at UC Santa Barbara have made a major contribution to this field by creating a new nanotechnology that was described recently in the prestigious journal Science. For the first time, the UCSB engineers have created a way to make square, nanoscale, chemical patterns for use in the manufacture of integrated circuit chips. The method is called block co-polymer (BCP) lithography, and may be used in commercial production as soon as two years from now.

to continue to develop, we need more powerful microprocessors that use less energy. “If you can shrink all these things down,” he said “you get both more computing power and higher energy efficiency, in a smaller package.” “ BCP lithography,” said Hawker, “essentially relies on a natural selfassembly process. Just like proteins in the body, these molecules come together and self assemble into a pattern. We use that pattern as our lithographic tool, to make patterns on the silicon wafer.”

When this technique has been tried before, the molecules spontaneously self-assembled into hexagonal arrays, which look like bee hives. Since industry uses parallel lines on a square or rectangular grid, however, the hexagonal arrays have only limited application.

“Our research has actually shown that by changing the structure of the molecules, and using two selfassembling procedures at the same time, we’re actually able to get square arrays for the first time,” said Hawker.

“Now you can start to marry the old technology with the new technology for the fabrication of microprocessors.”

Five leading manufacturers, including Intel and IBM, helped fund the research at UCSB, along with the National Science Foundation and other funders. The university has already applied for patents on the new BCP lithography methods, and it will retain ownership.

Relevant Links: Hawker Research Group: www.mrl.ucsb.edu/hawker

A multidisciplinary team led by Craig Hawker, materials professor and director of the Materials Research Laboratory at UCSB, with professors Glenn Fredrickson and Edward J. Kramer, developed the process, which can create features between five and 20 nanometers wide on silicon wafers.

(A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or roughly one-thousandth of the thickness of a human hair.)

Hawker explained that for computers

Hawker on YouTube: youtube.com/ watch?v=yAdjwF8b1f4 Collision of Galaxy Clusters Yields Insights on Dark Matter Two UC Santa Barbara astronomers are part of a team that has made a stunning discovery using the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. The discovery was announced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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The capture of a collision of galaxy clusters was made by a team led

by Marusa Bradac, a postdoctoral researcher and Hubble fellow in UCSB’s Department of Physics.

The international team also included Tommaso Treu, assistant professor of physics at UCSB.

“It is in our view an important step forward to understanding the properties of the mysterious dark matter,” Bradac said. “Dark matter makes up five times more matter in the universe than ordinary matter. This study confirms that we are dealing with a very different kind of matter, unlike anything that we are made of. And were able to study it in a very powerful collision of two clusters of galaxies.”

As the two clusters that formed MACSJ0025 (each almost a whopping million billion times the mass of the Sun) merged at speeds of millions of miles per hour, the hot gas in each cluster collided and slowed down, but the dark matter did not. The separation between the material shown in pink and blue therefore provides direct evidence for dark matter and supports the view that dark matter particles interact with each other only very weakly or not at all, apart from the pull of gravity.

Relevant Links: NASA Press Release in full: nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/ news/08-111.html Marusa Bradac Home Page: physics.ucsb.edu/ marusa/ ~ About_Me

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News and Events from Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa Barbara

Wiltzius named Dean of Science Pierre Wiltzius has been appointed dean of the Division of Mathematical, Life, and Physical Sciences at UC Santa Barbara.

Most recently director of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Wiltzius began his new assignment on October 1.

Prior to joining Beckman Institute, where he held faculty appointments in Materials Science and Engineering and in Physics, Wiltzius served as director of semiconductor physics research at Bell Laboratories. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, andspent two years, beginning in 1982, at UCSB as a postdoctoral research fellow in physics.

In 1987, he was the Robert Mehrabian Distinguished Lecturer here.

“UC Santa Barbara has become known around the world for our preeminence in the mathematical, life, and physical sciences,” said Chancellor Henry Yang in announcing the appointment. “We look forward to the inspiration and leadership that Dr. Wiltzius will bring to our MLPS division. We are delighted that he will be joining the faculty in our Department of Physics as well.”

As dean, Wiltzius will hold the Susan and Bruce Worster Chair for the Dean of Science.

Relevant Links: MLPS Website: science.ucsb.edu

“It is a tremendous honor to have been selected as the next dean of mathematical, life, and physical sciences,” Wiltzius said. “I am looking forward to working with Chancellor Yang, the senior leadership team, and the faculty, students, and alumni of the campus. I will build on the outstanding scholarly achievements and the exemplary strengths in interdisciplinary research across campus.”

In addition to receiving widespread praise for his leadership of the Beckman Institute, Wiltzius is a highly regarded researcher and pioneer in the areas of soft-condensed matter, colloidal self-assembly, photonic crystals, and microphotonics. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). In 2001, he received an R&D100 Innovation Award from R&D Magazine for printed plastic display circuits.

Banerjee receives 2008 IBM Faculty Award Professor Kaustav Banerjee of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering has been recognized with an IBM Faculty Fellow Award for his outstanding achievements in research.

The award comes with research funding to continue collaboration on coupled electromagnetic and thermal effects in interconnections for nano-scale integrated circuits. The IBM faculty awards are highly competitive and are accorded to a selected group of academics around the world annually.

The awards are designed to foster collaboration between researchers at leading universities worldwide and those in IBM research.

Relevant Links: Banerjee home page: ece.ucsb.edu/Faculty/Banerjee IBM Faculty Awards: www-304.ibm. com/jct09002c/university/scholars/ facultyawards Bowers Awarded HP Innovation

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Research Grant John Bowers, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the UC Santa Barbara Institute for Energy Efficiency, has been named a recipient of a 2008 HP Labs Innovation Research Program grant. Bowers will collaborate with HP Labs, HP’s central research arm, on a research initiative focused on developing a CMOS compatible, hybrid silicon ring resonator laser that is compact, low threshold, and high speed, and that can be used in 10 Gbit/s interconnects on silicon substrates. Semiconductor ring resonator lasers are simple but very powerful components, which can be readily integrated with other optoelectronic devices and have large free spectral range (high Q). Ring lasers made on silicon are the ideal solution for a high speed low cost CMOS compatible optical engine.

HP reviewed more than 450 proposals from 200 universities in 28 countries. Bowers’ selection made UC Santa Barbara one of only 34 universities in the world to receive a 2008 Innovation Research grant.

The HP Labs Innovation Research Program is designed to encourage open collaboration with HP Labs resulting in mutually beneficial, high-impact research. This year’s proposals were solicited on a range of topics within the five principal research themes at HP Labs—intelligent infrastructure, sustainability, information explosion, dynamic cloud services and content transformation.

“HP Labs’ selection of Bowers and UC Santa Barbara for a 2008 Innovation Award demonstrates outstanding achievement,” said Prith Banerjee, senior vice president of research at HP and director of HP Labs. “This will help accelerate HP Labs’ global research agenda in pursuit of scientific breakthroughs.”

Relevant Links: Bowers Research Group: ece.ucsb.edu/uoeg HP Press Release (with links): hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/ press/2008/080814xa Packard Fellowship Awarded to

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News and Events from Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa Barbara

Song-I Han Song-I Han, assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded a prestigious Packard Foundation Fellowship for Science and Engineering for the year 2008.

Han is one of 20 Fellows that were

selected this year from 99 nominations by 50 invited universities. The $875,000 Fellowship will be paid over five years, beginning in November 2008.

The funding will support Professor Han’s research in developing new magnetic resonance methods with enhanced sensitivity and imaging capability, leading to the development of state-of-the-art biophysical instrumentation, and in addressing questions such as what drives Alzheimer’s-related proteins to aggregate as brain deposits, and how proteins fuel marine bacteria using sunlight.

“Song-I Han winning the Packard Award is one of the most thoroughly appropriate and predictable events I have witnessed in our department in the last five years,” said Alec Wodtke, chair of UCSB’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “Her success at UCSB is a testimony to her creativity and potential, which are both enormous. She likewise demonstrates how successful young professors can be in establishing flourishing lives at UCSB.” Relevant Link: Song-I Han Home Page: www.chem. ucsb.edu/people/faculty/han

Stucky Receives Top Military Award for Life-Saving Gauze UC Santa Barbara Professor of Chemistry Galen Stucky has been honored by the Department of Defense for his role in the development of a blood-clotting gauze that is helping save soldiers who suffer severe, lifethreatening injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan. The DoD’s Advanced Technology Applications for Combat Casualty Care (ATACCC) Award was presented to Stucky in August during opening ceremonies of the group’s annual meeting in Florida. The ATACCC convention is the premier scientific meeting on the battlefield medical needs of the nation’s soldiers and on recent advances in trauma surgery and medicine.

Severe battlefield injuries present unique problems in stemming blood loss, which is the primary cause of combat deaths. Medics may have less than two minutes to stop blood loss before death is imminent. In 2004,

Stucky and his colleagues were asked by the Office of Naval Research to work with Connecticut-based Z-Medica to improve its zeolite-based substance, QuikClot® hemostatic agent, which promotes instant clotting and sealing of the wound until the injured can reach medical facilities. Adding to the task, the Navy wanted a solution within six months.

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As a result of Stucky’s research, the latest generation of the product, QuikClot Combat Gauze™, is now a medical gauze infused with nanoparticles of kaolin clay. It has been found to be 100 percent effective in testing performed at the Naval Medical Research Center. A civilian version is becoming standard equipment with emergency responders nationwide, and over-the-counter sports-branded versions are becoming popular with outdoor adventurers.

“Here’s a very, very simple, costeffective solution that works. I feel strongly about the impact it will and can have for the military and for civilians of every age,” Stucky said.

“It’s a wonderful example of how the university can effectively and directly contribute to solving real-life problems in meaningful ways. This project has meant more to me than any other that I’ve worked on for the past 40 years.”

Relevant Link: Stucky Home Page: www.chem.ucsb.edu/people/ faculty/stucky Wudls Endow Interdisciplinary Chair in Materials UC Santa Barbara organic chemist Fred Wudl and his wife, Linda, have endowed a professorship in materials science in the College of Engineering with a $1 million gift to UCSB. “We established the chair to maintain and foster excellence at UC Santa Barbara,” said Fred Wudl, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry who also serves as co-director of the campus’s Center for Polymers and Organic Solids.

The Fred and Linda R. Wudl Chair will support the teaching and research of an outstanding materials scholar with interdisciplinary research interests that would merit a joint appointment in the life or physical sciences.

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Linda Wudl, also a UCLA graduate, holds advanced degrees from Harvard University and SUNY Buffalo. She has a Ph.D. in genetics and served as vice president of quality at Amgen until her retirement several years ago.

Relevant Link: Fred Wudl Home Page: www.chem.ucsb.edu/people/ faculty/wudl

Wudl, a creator of new organic materials, has made pioneering contributions to the field of chemistry for more than 30 years. He has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Chemists in the World by the Institute for Scientific Information and has received numerous awards and honors, including the American Chemical Society Award for Chemistry of Materials. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the advancement of Science. Wudl earned both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from UCLA.

UCSB Alumnus Supports Graduate Students UC Santa Barbara has received a $500,000 gift from alumnus M. Ross Johnson and his wife, Charlotte, to establish an endowed fellowship fund to recruit and support outstanding graduate students in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Johnson, who earned a doctorate in organic chemistry from UCSB, is an internationally recognized medicinal chemist and pharmaceutical and biotechnology entrepreneur. He is co-founder and president of Parion Services, a pharmaceutical company in North Carolina.

The Johnsons established the graduate fellowship to honor his doctoral advisor, UCSB Professor Emeritus Bruce Rickborn. “Professor Rickborn played a great role in my success and the success of many other UCSB students as well,” said Ross Johnson. “We could think of no better way to honor him than to establish a fellowship in his name that would attract future generations of top students to UCSB. It is our way of giving back to the community and honoring a truly deserving mentor.”

Alec Wodtke, chair of UCSB’s Chemistry and Biochemistry Department, said: “Ross Johnson has shown both wisdom and generosity in providing a permanent fund to support the development of young people’s careers in science. This is a wonderful tribute to his scientific mentor Bruce Rickborn. It is a double dose of heartwarming goodness!”

Written and reported by staff writers and editors from the Office of Public Affairs.

Wall street may be risky... ... but UC Santa Barbara still offers a rewarding return on your investment.

That’s quite a claim in these unpredictable economic times—but when you recognize the dividends we offer, it makes sense.

When you support students through programs, scholarships, and fellowships you’re investing in brilliant young minds who will be tomorrow’s leaders and make a lasting impact on society.

Your support of our faculty and their research creates new knowledge, with applications in health, energy, computing, communications, the environment and much more.

Make an investment that will last beyond this tax season. Please go online, print, fill out and mail the donation form at:

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CONVERGENCE The Magazine of Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa Barbara

Answer from page 23

TWELVE, FALL 2008 Editor: Tony Rairden Creative Director: Peter Allen Writers: Anna Davison

Frank Nelson

Vic Cox

George Foulsham

Gail Gallessich Copy Editor: Marie Howell

Professor Patrick Daugherty and his collegues at CytomX Therapeutics (an early stage, privately-funded biotechnology company developing proteolytically-activated biotherapeutics based on UCSB research) have crafted a molecule that is activated by protease at cancer tissue binding sites. After clipping the mask molecule on the antibody, binding occurs on the target molecule.

This specificity enables direct delivery of therapeutic agents to the desired site.

Note from the editor Our deans, inside the front cover, refer to the great breadth of content in this issue. The breadth you see here is only the tip of the iceberg—and that can make the editor’s job a tough one. We have so many interesting stories about outstanding people and research in Engineering and the Sciences here at UCSB that we never have the problem of not having enough material for an issue.

The problem is, instead, choosing what to cover from the wealth of possibilities. In a printed publication of specific frequency, space is finite. That means we have to leave many worthwhile stories out of the magazine. The websites of this magazine (convergence. ucsb.edu), the College of Engineering (engineering.ucsb.edu), and the Division of Mathematical, Life, and Physical Sciences (www.science.ucsb.edu) give us quite a bit more flexibility, and the ability to be considerably more current, than our “hard copy” print medium, and I encourage you to visit them often between issues of Convergence. The high production values of our magazine make it a tactile and visual feast, but the websites can keep you up to date in a way that no hard copy medium can.

TR

Editorial Board: Matthew Tirrell, Dean, College of Engineering Pierre Wiltzius, Dean of Mathematical, Life and Physical Sciences, College of Letters and Science Bruce Luyendyk, Associate Dean of Mathematical, Life & Physical Sciences, College of Letters and Science David Awschalom, Scientific Director, California NanoSystems Institute Kevin Almeroth, Associate Dean for Advancement, College of Engineering Frank Doyle, Associate Dean for Research, College of Engineering Kristi Newton, Assistant Dean for Development, Engineering and the Sciences Tony Rairden, Communications Manager, College of Engineering Peter Allen, Marketing Director, College of Engineering Joy Williams, Assistant Dean for Budget and Administration, College of Engineering Andrea Huebner, Publications Director, UCSB Alumni Association Michelle Keuper, Executive Assistant to the Dean, College of Letters and Science Convergence is a publication of Engineering and the Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5130.

If you have comments or questions about this publication, contact please Tony Rairden at trairden@ engineering.ucsb.edu.

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The University of California, in accordance with applicable federal and state law and University policy, does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, pregnancy (including childbirth and medical conditions related to pregnancy or childbirth), disability, age, medical condition (cancerrelated), ancestry, marital status, citizenship, sexual orientation, or status as a Vietnam-era veteran or special disabled veteran. The University also prohibits sexual harassment. This nondiscrimination policy covers admission, access and treatment in University programs and activities. Inquiries regarding the University’s student-related non-discrimination policies may be directed to: Office of the Affirmative Action Coordinator, University of California, Santa Barbara, 805.893.3105.

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