IN SEPTEMBER I celebrated the first anniversary of my tenure as dean. The milestone was marked by tremendous excitement about the college’s future and deep appreciation for the many wonderful colleagues, alumni and friends who have coached and guided me. We are fortunate to have an amazing community of Aggie Engineers. And the community is growing.
In this issue, you will meet six new faculty members bringing innovative teaching approaches and unique research expertise to UC Davis. They are joining the likes of Professor Laura Marcu, Associate Professor Katerina Ziotopoulou, Associate Professor Zubair Shafiq and others featured in this issue—all of whom demonstrate a deep commitment to our students, society and the planet. Engineering for the greater good is part of our ethos and the core value of our Next Level strategic vision for research, education and community.
I am excited about the coming months. We will recruit 10 more new faculty members. We will renew the Dean’s Distinguished Speaker Series with two outstanding visitors: Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, and Kim Budil, M.S. ’88, Ph.D. ’94 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
We will open our new Diane Bryant Engineering Student Design Center. Renovations will begin at the Coffee Center. On a personal note, I am thrilled to have returned to the classroom for the first time in five years. I am teaching a first-year seminar entitled “(Almost) Every Breath You Take” and have enjoyed interacting more frequently with our wonderful students.
As you will read, we have much to celebrate and even more to look forward to. Follow us on social media, attend our events, and stay connected as we take the College of Engineering to the next level.
Go Ags! Richard L. Corsi Dean, UC Davis College of Engineering
Engineering Progress is published twice a year by the UC Davis College of Engineering.
Richard L. Corsi
Dean, College of Engineering
Roland Faller
Executive Associate Dean, Facilities and Capital Planning and Graduate Studies
Elissa Roeser
Executive Assistant Dean, Administration and Finance
Jeannie Darby
Associate Dean, Academic Personnel and Planning
Ralph Aldredge
Associate Dean, Undergraduate Studies
Raissa M. D’Souza
Associate Dean, Research
Leigh Ann Hartman
Assistant Dean, Development and External Relations
Steve Pigg
Executive Director, Information Technology
Molly Bechtel
Interim Director, Communications and Culture
Sanjeevi Sivasankar
Faculty Assistant to the Dean for Diversity and Inclusion
AND BRAIN MONITORING on a national scale using light-based, artificial intelligence-informed technologies is now part of UC Davis thanks to the efforts of an interdisciplinary team led by Laura Marcu, professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Marcu and team recently secured a $6.3 million P41 grant from NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering to create the National Center for Interventional Biophotonic Technologies (NCIBT). The NCIBT will advance two optical imaging technologies developed at UC Davisʼ College of Engineering — interventional fluorescence lifetime imaging, or iFLIM, and interferometric diffuse optical spectroscopy, or iDOS.
IFLIM, developed by Marcu’s lab, uses light measurements through a hand-held, penlike diagnostic probe in an open or endoscopic procedure to determine the tissues’ molecular constituents. This information helps determine the prevalence of healthy versus altered tissue.
IDOS, developed by Biomedical Engineering Adjunct Professor Vivek Srinivasan, uses similar, light-based optical imaging that is able to penetrate the scalp and skull to determine brain blood flow.
Both imaging technologies are noninvasive and measure
fluctuations in light emanating from tissues — meaning how light is diffused or absorbed or emitted by the tissue or cells.
These technologies will be combined with an AI-deep learning platform to provide real-time guidance for decision-making during medical and surgical procedures. The center will support research and development, clinical application, and training and education of the new technologies and promote their adoption to improve the quality of interventional health care.
“We are developing a new technological paradigm for surgical and interventional medical decision-making,” said Marcu, who is founding director of the new center.
The goal is to provide clinicians with imaging information, data analysis, easily interpretable image presentations and decision-making support in real time during an operation or patient monitoring. This information will then help guide the clinician toward choices that will improve patient outcomes. Clinical applications of this technology include identification of tissue types during open or intravascular surgery and the measurement of brain blood flow in the intensive care unit or clinic.
“Decision-making about how extensive surgery must be to completely remove tumors relies heavily on the surgeon’s experience, and sometimes requires repetitive and time-consuming lab analysis of tissue around the cancer to make sure all the tumor is gone,” said David
Lubarsky, CEO of UC Davis Health and a fellow of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. “This new national center will build on strengths unique to UC Davis’ School of Medicine and College of Engineering, developing new optical tools to help surgeons everywhere more often provide complete cures for their patients.”
The grant will also support the establishment of a physical center at UC Davis’ Aggie Square. This will include state-ofthe-art laboratories, teaching space, learning centers and the organizational headquarters of the center’s training and education programs. Less than two months after receiving the grant, the center has already hosted its inaugural symposium where attendees discussed innovations in light-based, AI technologies for surgical procedures.
“Advancing human health is one of our four major priorities for impactful research at the College of Engineering and the NCIBT could not be more aligned with this intention,” said Richard Corsi, dean of the College of Engineering. “NCIBT will do this work at the interface of engineering and medicine, and it is expected to have an international footprint and impact. Our college is proud to be associated with this new center and is committed to supporting its success.”
In being selected for this grant, UC Davis joins an elite cohort of two dozen institutions in the country with a P41 center. According to NIBIB, the UC Davis P41 center has the potential to rapidly advance optical imaging technologies that use AI-informed instruments. Such technologies could have a significant impact on the management of common afflictions, including cancer, stroke, heart disease, trauma, infection and degenerative diseases. In selecting UC Davis for the grant, NIBIB also noted UC Davis’ opportunity to both collaborate on a wide range of research projects at this new national center and eventually translate its discoveries into clinical applications.
“It is rewarding to see technologies developed in engineering labs go from bench to patient and, eventually through this center, from patient to population,” Marcu said, “and how engineering principles can provide pathways to create technologies and tools that can impact public health by improving patient outcomes.”
Davis College of
Assistant
Ahn develops new techniques for molecular dynamics computer simulations to study proteins, biomolecules and biophysical phenomena for drug discovery and creating new materials for human health. She received her B.S. degrees in biochemistry and mathematics and her M.S. degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania and her doctorate in chemistry at Stanford University. She worked as a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego before joining UC Davis.
By Noah Pflueger-PetersBadrya aims to make aircraft more efficient and sustainable through aerodynamics. She uses a combination of fundamental and applied research to study flow control, unsteady aerodynamics, gust interactions for conventional and unconventional next-generation aircraft. She received her B.S. in aerospace engineering at Technion – Israel and her M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park. She worked as a junior research group leader and lecturer at the Technical University of Braunschweig before joining UC Davis.
Harvey works at the intersection of biology and engineering to study and model how birds control their flight to inspire the next generation of maneuverable and adaptable uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs). She received her B.Eng. in mechanical engineering from McGill University, her M.S. in zoology at the University of British Columbia and her Ph.D. in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan.
Jeong works at the interface of bio-integrated electronics and medical applications to develop wireless stretchable electronics such as e-tattoos for personalized healthcare monitoring. These devices are at the forefront of the next-generation wearables for humanmachine interface, telemedicine, mobile health and digital medicine. He received his Ph.D. at the University of Texas – Austin and worked as a postdoctoral scholar at Northwestern University before joining UC Davis.
Assistant Professor of Teaching, Biomedical Engineering
Wang is interested in integrating problem-based learning with core biomedical engineering principals and improving students’ engagement in bioinstrumentation courses. He received a B.S. in electrical and electronics engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and a B.S. in biomedical engineering and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering and scientific computing at the University of Michigan. He started his career at Washington State University, where he won the 2022 Reid Miller Excellence in Teaching Award, before joining UC Davis.
Watkins focuses on making public transportation infrastructure more efficient, sustainable and healthy. She uses real-time transit information and traveler information to better understand and improve how people use systems ranging from regional trains and buses to bicycle paths and sidewalks. Watkins received her B.S. at the Georgia Institute of Technology and her M.S. at the University of Connecticut and spent ten years in industry as a transportation consultant before receiving her Ph.D. at the University of Washington. She was a faculty member at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 11 years before joining UC Davis.
By Noah Pflueger-Peters
OVER THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, UC DAVIS STUDENTS WILL BE DESIGNING THE CAR OF THE FUTURE as part of the EcoCAR Electric Vehicle (EV) Challenge. The competition challenges students to convert a Cadillac LYRIQ EV into an autonomous, next-generation battery-electric vehicle with vehicle-toeverything connectivity so it can interact with devices and the environment.
Students will gain teamwork, leadership and hands-on automotive engineering experience with a full-scale vehicle that can help them launch their careers. In the process, they will solve technical challenges in mechanical and electrical engineering, computer science, systems architecture and computer vision and sensing. They will also participate in outreach and consider how their designs and EV technology might benefit historically underserved communities.
“The College of Engineering continues to be a leader in responding to challenges that impact society, and by participating in the EcoCAR EV Challenge, our future leaders will work to build innovative solutions to our world’s energy and mobility needs,” said Dean Richard L. Corsi.
EcoCAR is the latest series in the Department of Energy (DOE) and Argonne National Laboratory’s Advanced Vehicle Technology Competition (AVTC), which began in 1988. UC Davis is among 15 universities selected to participate, its first AVTC competition since 2008. The team has an initial $1.2 million combined investment from the DOE, MathWorks and General Motors— who will donate a LYRIQ to each team—as well as the UC Davis Office of Research, Graduate Studies and the Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the Institute of Transportation Studies (ITS) and the mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) and computer science (CS) departments.
The student-run team will be advised by MAE Professor Mike Hill, CS Associate Professor of Teaching Chris Nitta and ITS Plug-in Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center Program Manager Dahlia Garas, and other faculty mentors plan to join the project as it gets underway.
EcoCAR is ramping up this fall in preparation for the re-opening of the college’s Diane Bryant Engineering Student Design Center (ESDC) after a two-year expansion and renovation. The two are set to grow together and benefit all the projects that call the ESDC home.
As an AVTC program alumnus, Nitta remembers many teammates working on multiple design teams simultaneously, often transferring equipment, techniques and knowledge across projects. The program also brought special equipment to campus that all the student project teams could use. EcoCAR is poised to play a similar role.
“This is something that will help shape that new facility to serve the needs of not just this project, but all of the student projects,” said Hill. “Starting a big project like this is going to help us get everything else moving.”
EcoCAR is also the perfect opportunity to strengthen collaboration between the college and ITS. ITS is a world-renowned transportation research institute, and while there’s always been an overlap with engineering, there haven’t been many collaborative projects. With EcoCAR, ITS can leverage its multidisciplinary expertise and industry connections to help student engineers solve real-world problems.
The team also hopes to insert elements of EcoCAR into various parts of the curriculum, either through research course credits or by having students work on EcoCAR in capstone design projects.
Addressing diversity, equity and inclusion issues is at the heart of the EcoCAR challenge and UC Davis is uniquely positioned for success because of its campus culture that embraces diversity.
“When you start talking about smart vehicle technologies, it’s not just about the powertrain anymore,” said Garas. “You have to look at how people use it and we have to consider the audience, adoption and accessibility.”
This starts with creating a team of diverse students.
EcoCAR is recruiting from the college’s award-winning Leadership in Engineering Advancement, Diversity and Retention (LEADR) and AvenueE programs, which help attract, retain and support engineering students from underrepresented backgrounds. Partnering with Introduction to Engineering Design (ENG 3) to include EcoCAR-related projects is another opportunity to hook students with their first hands-on engineering design experience.
The team will also fund key undergraduate and graduate student leaders to make sure they can participate.
“Especially for lower-income students, that funding is critical to their involvement,” said Garas. “If they need to be working to get by in college and they aren’t funded, it’s hard to be part of the project.”
Next, the team will connect with underserved communities. This could range from using ITS’ industry connections, to K-12 outreach, to hosting “roadshows” with the LYRIQ to spark interest in EVs. Hill thinks this is an excellent opportunity to inspire people with UC Davis’ research and start important conversations about the use of EV technology. The team also hopes to use its student members to engage community stakeholders.
“I don’t think we really know how underserved communities could use EV technology, so we need to get this information from different types of stakeholders and then find ways to serve them in partnership with those communities,” said Hill.
Though the EcoCAR team is new, it builds upon a long history. UC Davis competed in AVTC competitions between 1992 and 2008 while advised by MAE Professor Emeritus Andy Frank—widely regarded as the grandfather of the plug-in hybrid EV.
Frank’s nickname was “Professor Fate,” inspired by an ambitious character in The Great Race, and the students took his spirit—and name—with them. “Team Fate” finished first in their class in 1994 and 1995, won the whole competition in 1997 and 2001, received awards for their technical reports four times and racked up awards for teamwork, dynamic handling, powertrain technology, vehicle modeling, telematics and fuel efficiency.
Nitta and Garas were part of Team Fate as students, and many of their teammates have gone on to successful careers in automotive engineering. They hope to bring some of them back to campus as alumni and industry mentors for the EcoCAR team.
“I am personally and professionally indebted to the partnership, collaboration and mentorship of the faculty and students of the UC Davis AVTC programs,” said Tom Bradley ʼ00, M.S. ʼ03, now Department Head and Woodward Professor of Systems Engineering at Colorado State University (CSU). “I’m delighted to be able to contribute to the continued excellence of this program in any role, and CSU will actively seek to collaborate, recruit, share educational work products, and safety and design best practices with the UC Davis program.”
Though Team Fate disbanded after Frank retired, UC Davis has continued its success in automotive engineering competitions through Formula Racing at UC Davis
(FRUCD) since 2009. FRUCD’s experience and success in building all-electric race cars is the basis of the new EcoCAR team that looks to continue Team Fate’s legacy.
EcoCAR has already attracted more than 100 students and held a few introductory meetings to introduce them to the automotive engineering space. The team also recruited two student managers to lead the team’s communications and DEI efforts, respectively, who are excited to help establish the program’s presence on campus and in the community.
“We’re hoping to get as many students involved as possible,” said DEI manager and environmental policy analysis and planning major Vincent Colas. “I’m very much looking forward to ensuring that students feel comfortable in the program and excited about it.”
UC Davis has already made an early impact by hosting the competition’s year one fall workshop from October 7-9, which brought participating teams from across the country to campus to learn more and understand the engineering challenge they face. As the UC Davis team grows, it looks to recruit additional graduate students, faculty, alumni and industry partners, advisors and mentors who can help the team create a new legacy of success.
“We expect it to be a long journey that will hopefully change the lives for the better of the students who participate,” said Nitta.
“EcoCAR is all about developing students, turning out great engineers and professionals and enabling them to impact society,” said Hill.
Alumni couple, Robert (Bob) ’73 and Carolyn Caligiuri ’74, gave a $1.27 million endowment, the largest ever to the UC Davis Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE), in honor of Bob Caligiuri’s first mentor, the late Distinguished Professor Amiya Mukherjee.
Their gift, the Professor Amiya Mukherjee Memorial Fellowship, will raise the stature of MSE and support competitive doctoral students in the department entering into industry and academia.
Bob Caligiuri is Corporate Vice President and Principal Engineer at Exponent Inc., an engineering and scientific consulting firm that solves engineering, science, regulatory and business issues for clients.
He started full-time in 1987 and held executive positions for almost 20 years.
After graduating from UC Davis, Bob Caligiuri went on to complete his Ph.D. in materials science at Stanford University. It wasn’t until recently that he reconnected with the campus.
“I knew Jeff Gibeling, the former interim dean of the College of Engineering, because we both attended Stanford at the same time. We started talking in spring 2021 about ways I could reconnect with the college, and particularly the MSE department,” he said.
He decided to join the department’s advisory board to increase its reputation, use Exponent’s resources to bring industry experts to the university for guest lectures and encourage more recruiting activities by the firm. However, he felt that he and Carolyn could make a further impact.
“I felt it was time to recognize Professor Mukherjee’s impact on my experience and help the department grow,” Bob Caligiuri said.
Mukherjee joined UC Davis in 1966 after being recruited by the College of Engineering’s first dean, Roy Bainer, to establish a materials science program.
In his first few years, he single-handedly developed and taught 14 new courses and established an official materials science curriculum in 1969.
He continued to teach the college’s introductory materials science classes until his retirement in 2007 and served as a “materials ambassador” to his students, making sure they knew how materials enable everything from spacecraft to bridges to circuits. This introductory class is what got Bob Caligiuri interested in materials science.
“What I remember most about Professor Mukherjee is his ability to convey ideas with a lot of energy and enthusiasm; that’s what really connected me with materials science,” Bob Caligiuri said. “I was energized about the whole subject and enjoyed his encouragement to push myself. I don’t know where I would be now if I hadn’t met him.”
At the same time, Mukherjee established himself as a pioneer in materials science and an international leader in the field of creep deformation, where materials deform after being subjected to heat and stress. He authored more than 700 publications and won numerous campus and international awards for his research and teaching. Along the way, he got generations of students interested in materials science, including Bob Caligiuri.
“Amiya was an inspiration not only to his students but also to the faculty around him,” said MSE Professor and Chair Yayoi Takamura. “This generous donation will allow us to continue Amiya's legacy to educate the brightest minds in materials science and engineering.”
UPPER RIGHT: Amiya Mukherjee teaches in one of his classes.
BOTTOM: Mukherjee at the University of Oxford.
The road to obtaining a college degree isn’t the same for everyone.
It twists and turns. It often isn’t paved and sometimes it can even get a bit rocky. For some students—particularly those who are the first in their family to go to college, are from underresourced communities or have underrepresented backgrounds—these bumps in the road can be enough to derail their journey toward a college degree.
Enter AvenueE.
AVENUE E IS A PROGRAM WITHIN THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING that is designed to help community college transfer students smoothly transition to UC Davis, and ultimately, a career in engineering or computer science.
“We believe deeply in our studentsʼ intellect and capacity, and sometimes they just need a little bit of help to realize their potential,” said Yesenia Cervantes-Tucker, director of AvenueE. “We believe that cultivating a diverse STEM workforce is possible, and programs like AvenueE are making a difference in this space.”
The program, which launched in 2017, works to recruit, retain and graduate a diverse population of undergraduate students who go on to successful careers in industry. Originally the program included cohorts of 20 students from Los Rios, Peralta, San Joaquin Delta and Contra Costa Community College districts. The program has now grown to take 60 newly admitted UC Davis students each year from community colleges throughout the country.
Students accepted into AvenueE start by participating in a two-week summer session called the Bridge Program before the beginning of the school year. There they learn about valuable campus resources and meet with university staff and faculty. They also hear from industry professionals who share personal tips for future career success.
“AvenueE helped me connect with my peers, some of whom are now good friends of mine. From the beginning, that offered a sense of security and confidence that eased my transition to the new, fast-paced environment at UC Davis,” said current AvenueE student from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Nadiyah Helal ’23.
Once the academic year begins, students enrolled in AvenueE have access to individualized tutoring, workshops and professional development opportunities. The program connects students with faculty or AvenueE alumni mentors who can answer questions about UC Davis, as well as professional mentors who share insight about careers in industry. The program also has financial awards and exposes students to various financial assistance options to help pay for tuition and other expenses.
The goal of this holistic support is to help students thrive during their undergraduate experience, as well as prepare them for internships, jobs and graduate school.
“We’re proud of the connection that we’ve developed with our students,” said Cervantes-Tucker. “And that they see us as a resource—whether they have questions about opportunities on campus or need advice on how to apply for an internship or are just going through a difficult time—
that they know that we are here to help them be successful with their degree.”
A huge contributing factor to the success of the program has been the support from individual and corporate partners, according to Cervantes-Tucker. Chevron was a founding corporate partner of AvenueE providing financial support of programs and students awards. Since then, numerous other partners have lended support, including the Koret Foundation, U.S. Bank and AT&T, UC Davis Office of the Provost, STEM Strategies, UC Davis Division of Student Affairs, as well as dozens of individuals.
These partners are invaluable, according to Cervantes-Tucker, because they serve as mentors, participate in workshops, help implement activities, and create opportunities for students to gain access to internships and jobs. They also serve as thought partners on the AvenueE advisory board and contribute financially to the program.
The success in the College of Engineering has also inspired other STEM-related colleges and schools within UC Davis to create similar programs to help with diversity, equity, and inclusion. AvenueM is a similar program within the School of Medicine and AvenueB is geared toward helping students in the College of Biological Sciences.
“We all know there is a need to increase diversity in the workforce, especially in the STEM fields,” Cervantes-Tucker said. “These programs help students think about the possibility of a career in engineering and connects them with a community that is here to help them be successful as they challenge themselves and earn a college degree.”
Nadiyah Helal is passionate about climate action. So it is probably no surprise she felt drawn to UC Davis, which has been consistently ranked the number one school in the U.S. for sustainability. Once here, she felt very supported by the community, including AvenueE, which exposed her to a myriad of resources.
Helal has not wasted any time getting involved. She is currently a sustainability intern at TRC Companies, a Climate Action Fellow with the UC Office of the President and UC Davis Health Sustainability, a Millennium Fellow with the United Nations Academic Impact and a project lead with the UC Davis student chapter of Engineers Without Borders, on top of working on two projects as an undergraduate student researcher.
“As transfer students, we face some disadvantages because we have less time to make connections and discover opportunities,” Helal said. “We have to learn everything quickly. But with AvenueE's help, I obtained a research position to study a topic I am excited about, starting from my very first quarter.”
As soon as Justin Asahan transferred into UC Davis after four years at community college he felt supported by AvenueE. The program gave him financial support and a sense of community.
“It was great to have a peer group assigned to me before I even started classes, so I felt like I was already at a head start,” Asahan said. “We planned classes together, formed a study group, and I knew I could reach out to them anytime.”
Asahan also appreciated how AvenueE connected him with peers who participated in AvenueE the year before. They lent him advice on everything from which professors to take classes with to good spots to eat. Asahan said he can hardly wait until he graduates; not just so he can pursue graduate school, but also so he can give back “to the community that built him up” and help future cohorts of AvenueE students.
“It’s really easy for you to get lost along the way when you transfer,” he said. “AvenueE helped me stay on track and made me feel like a true student where I could stay at Davis.”
Shanice Blake is accustomed to change. At 15 years old, she moved to the United States from Jamaica. So, when it came to transferring to UC Davis, Blake thought it would be easy.
“Transferring was hard. Everyone tells you it’s going to be hard, but you don’t really know until you are in it,” said Blake, adding how difficult the academic rigor of a quarter system was for her.
Fortunately, she had AvenueE.
“That community was so beneficial because we got to meet two weeks before school started and know that when we started school that we already had friends,” Blake said. “It helped me navigate transferring, which can be difficult and stressful.”
Through the program she also spoke with industry professionals about their biomedical engineering careers. Now, as a quality control engineer at biomedical company Abbott, Blake comes back to UC Davis and shares advice with current AvenueE students.
“I didn’t see a lot of people like me in school when I was growing up. I feel like I want to give back and be a mentor for others who look like me,” she said, “So sharing what I know with AvenueE students was definitely a fullcircle moment.”
KATERINA ZIOTOPOULOU, M.S. ’10, PH.D. ’14 IS CONSUMED WITH THE SHIFTING OF THE WORLD both professionally and personally.
As an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Ziotopoulou’s work is focused on developing tools to improve the way we gather data about and understand soil behaviors and the resilience of soil-structure systems during earthquakes.
Likewise, as a new mother, Ziotopoulou is now managing a complex, 24-hour schedule of feeding, changing and (sometimes) sleeping shifts with her husband as they co-manage the raising of their newborn son, Vasilis. All the while, Ziotopoulou, who just obtained tenure, must also serve as a mentor to students in her lab and continue serving her community, both within and outside of the university through her roles in numerous committees.
It is a juggling act that many women in academia face as the timelines for growing their careers coincides with their desire to grow their family. As challenging as it is at times, Ziotopoulou says it is a phase of her life that she is “choosing to embrace.”
“I am trying to keep my head focused on the good parts of being an academic and all the flexibility it allows me. I can invest in my personal life, even if it also means I sometimes work late into the night or on the weekends,” she said. “It doesn’t work for everyone, but I’ve found ways to make it work for me and my priorities.”
A native of Greece, Ziotopoulou became interested in earthquakes after one shook her hometown of Athens in 1999. Her father was a civil engineer at the time and Ziotopoulou got to tag along with him as he met with people after the earthquake and assessed the damage.
“Up until that time, I hadn’t quite grasped the social aspect of helping people as a civil engineer,” she said. “But when I saw my father helping people after the earthquake, I said ‘Ah! That has an impact. You get to help people.’ That opened my eyes.”
She enrolled in the National Technical University of Athens and obtained an undergraduate degree in civil engineering, while her diploma thesis focused on geotechnical earthquake
engineering. For her master’s and doctorate degrees, Ziotopoulou decided to give up the city life of Athens, travel across the Atlantic for the first time, and come to UC Davis because of “the top-notch research that exists here.”
After earning her Ph.D. in 2014, she taught at Virginia Tech for two years before returning to UC Davis to accept a tenure-track position in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
At UC Davis, Ziotopoulou and her research group work on computer simulation tools that allow engineers and scientists to better observe, understand, and predict soil behaviors during seismic activities.
“What we do is reduce the physical world into a one, two or three-dimensional representation wherein different equations represent the laws of physics,” she said. “Each component of the system—the soil or the structures— are also represented by equations. You then can apply different simulations to those equations and observe what happens under different scenarios.”
The simulations can then better, for example, inform foundation design and ground improvement methods. She and her team have produced tools that are currently widely used both by researchers and industry professionals nationally and internationally, toward assessing and managing risks associated with earthquake-induced ground failure.
For example, Ziotopoulou and team recently compiled the most detailed experimental data yet seen on how liquefaction-induced downdrag, a condition wherein soil settling after extensive liquefaction during an earthquake event can drag a pile downwards, can add to the structural load applied to a deep foundation during earthquake shaking. Their dataset was awarded a 2022 DesignSafe Dataset Award, recognizing the dataset's diverse contributions to natural hazards research, and also made publicly available on the NHERI DesignSafe cyberinfrastructure.
For her work Ziotopoulou has earned national recognition including a 2021 Arthur Casagrande Professional
Development award from the American Society of Civil Engineering. The annual award is given to one recipient under the age of 35 in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in geotechnical engineering.
She also received one of three 2018 Wakeham Mentoring Fellowships, an honor given to faculty and their mentees to support the exploration of mentoring best practices. Ziotopoulou sees mentorship and being there for her graduate students to be as important as being there for her son.
“I do believe a lot in the teaching mission of being on faculty. I’ve found a great home for teaching students here at UC Davis,” she said “My teaching experiences here have been very, very rewarding.”
One of the projects she is working on that she is most excited about is emerging research revolving around the integration of artificial intelligence into geotechnical engineering. It is work she is pursuing through an early career award she won in 2021 from the National Science Foundation. The five-year grant is intended to enable young faculty to pursue research that paves the way toward a lifetime of contributions, according to Ziotopoulou.
“In many ways an early career award will be successful if it creates more questions than it answers,” Ziotopoulou said. “My project in particular requires a lot of crossdisciplinary work because you need knowledge from other fields to find solutions. So, I am very excited about the potential for that project to reshape more traditional
geotechnical earthquake engineering approaches, as well as the opportunity to grow my skill sets as well as those of my students in the process.”
Ziotopoulou says she’s inspired to keep going, not just because she’s a woman in an engineering field and wants to lead by example, but more so because she’s simply fascinated by the work.
“There’s never been a plan. I just enjoy my work, do my work, and keep my eyes open for what life throws my way,” she said. “If I were to do all this again, I would do it in the exact same way.”
Nearly 70% of all videos watched on YouTube are recommended by its AI algorithm, and that number is even higher on social media services like Instagram and TikTok. Though these AI algorithms can help users find content that’s interesting to them, they raise serious privacy concerns and there is growing evidence that people are being radicalized by some of the recommended content they consume online.
If this is what “bad AI” looks like, an interdisciplinary group of researchers at UC Davis are trying to develop “good AI” to push back against it and empower users with more control over their privacy and the content they’re recommended. Developing a holistic and customizable good AI is a difficult technical and social challenge, but one of the utmost importance.
“While working on the positive impacts of AI, I realized how it could also negatively impact societal and online
usage patterns,” said Prasant Mohapatra, UC Davis vice chancellor, Office of Research and Distinguished Professor of computer science (CS). “Online sources are having a tremendous impact on our society and biases in the online algorithms will unconsciously create unfairness and influence the beliefs of people, as well as propagate false information and instigate divisions among various groups.”
After receiving funding to work on a project related to AI, cybersecurity, privacy and ethics for public good, Mohapatra and his colleagues—CS Associate Professor Zubair Shafiq and Professors Ian Davidson and Xin Liu, Communication Professor Magdalena Wojcieszak and graduate students in each lab—decided to tackle the challenge.
“This is not some hypothetical problem that we’re dealing with. This is a real, real problem in our society and we need to fix it,” said Shafiq. “Every possible angle from which we can approach this problem and make a dent in it, short term or long term, is absolutely important.”
All major websites like YouTube, TikTok and Google have their own AI algorithms, and some even have multiple algorithms running at the same time. They can also interact with each other. If someone searches for new cars on Google, YouTube’s algorithm might notice this and show them car-related content next time they open their feed. This recommended content on YouTube could then influence recommendations on another website.
Most websites track users’ browsing activity to train their AI recommendation algorithms or sell the information to data brokers, who then combine it with publicly-available offline data to make inferences about a person’s interests. This helps advertisers place effective, targeted ads, but people don’t have control over what data brokers learn about them and what advertisements they see as a result.
Good AI’s job is to understand these complexities send out false signals that prevent bad AI from zeroing in on users’ interests, either to prevent harmful recommendations or to keep information private.
“One way to define privacy is the accuracy of certain attributes that someone infers about us—so you think you know something about me, but 80% of that is wrong,” said Shafiq. “Therefore, our goal is to maximize the inaccuracy of the inferences.”
The team’s first prototype does this for YouTube recommendations. After their recent study found that YouTube’s algorithm can potentially recommend increasingly extreme biased political content, the team built a tool that monitors the bias of recommended videos on a user’s homepage and injects politically-neutral video recommendations to help reduce the overall bias of their feed.
As they continue to develop that system, they are looking at the AI algorithms behind TikTok, Google and Facebook and plan to expand to more sites in the future. Not only will their studies help develop better good AI down the road, but it will also shed light on how these different websites use people’s data.
“These systems are opaque to the end user, who doesn’t really know what’s happening and what data they’re feeding off,” said Computer Science Ph.D. student Muhammad Haroon, who led the YouTube study. “One of the larger themes of this collaboration is to make these systems more transparent and give users a bit more control over the algorithm and what they’re being recommended.”
While it’s possible for an average user to manipulate algorithms in the same way good AI does, it requires more time, effort and education than most people have. Therefore, the easier and more seamlessly good AI can run, the more likely it is to be adopted.
“If the burden of using the tool is significant, the average user is just not going to use it,” said Shafiq. “If the good
AI intervention can work automatically and baked into the devices, that is going to take the burden off the average user.”
The team also acknowledges that some people might want algorithms to recommend them relevant content, so they’re working to make good AI customizable. Shafiq’s vision is to eventually allow people to pick and choose which interests they want AI algorithms to learn about.
“We believe that every user has the right to control the algorithm that they’re interacting with,” he said. “This is quite challenging but technically achievable and something that we are actively working towards.”
Shafiq believes that ultimately, AI will be subject to government regulations, but it’s a slow process. Content creators rely on the algorithms to get views and targeted advertising is a $100 billion business that supports the platforms, advertisers and data brokers alike, which means companies don’t have much incentive to fix their AI algorithms.
However, with consequences like the growing antivaccination movement and the January 6th insurrection, Shafiq feels the team can’t wait for these processes to play out and hopes good AI is the shortterm solution the world needs.
“Eventually, I think it is a public policy issue and we will, as a society, realize that that’s how we need to approach this, but in the meanwhile, we cannot let this be a wild west,” he said. “We’re working on this somewhat controversial idea not just because we want to do it, but because we believe we have a social responsibility to tackle this problem.”
“We believe that every user has the right to control the algorithm that they’re interacting with. This is quite challenging but technically achievable and something that we are actively working towards.”
– ZUBAIR SHAFIQ
Richard Corsi was invited to speak at the White House Summit on Improving Indoor Air Quality on October 11, 2022. The purpose of the summit was to bring together stakeholders from academia, business, government, K-12 schools and health care to discuss the importance of indoor air quality for improving overall health and wellbeing of society, plus the need for improved policy for integrating better indoor air quality standards into all segments of life.
Corsi’s panel was focused on “Innovations in Air Quality.” During his segment, Corsi spoke about creating innovations that are accessible and low cost. Corsi also shared that UC Davis is one of only three universities in the U.S. to have an undergraduate course on studying indoor air quality.
“We will get there if we keep in mind employing technology for the greater good of all society, that we leave no community behind,” he said.
Corsi said this ethos, which is a core value of the college’s Next Level strategic vision, was the impetus behind the creation of the Corsi-Rosenthal box—his well-known DIY air filter that has become a global phenomenon among those concerned about indoor air quality.
Corsi emphasized the need for policy makers to create an indoor air quality act that mirrors the Clean Air Act, which was initially enacted in 1963 for improving outdoor air quality. He shared his idea to create multidisciplinary innovation hubs around the U.S. where people from industry, government, community, and academia—from a multitude of disciplines—study the issue of indoor air.
“I think we need that and if we act now, bring people together from different disciplines and invest significantly in moving forward and evolving a clean indoor air act, 10 years from now or 22 years from now, we will be a lot better than we are now,” he said. “If not now, when? This is the time.”
The Corsi-Rosenthal Box has been designed to reduce the inhalation dose of virus-laden respiratory aerosol or other harmful aerosol particles. Scan the QR code below for a tutorial.
has been a pillar of the College of Engineering for decades. Thanks to support from donors from the 2022 Give Day, it is sure to continue for decades to come.
Give Day is a 29-hour online fundraiser held every year in conjunction with UC Davis Picnic Day. This past Give Day the university raised a record-breaking $4.1 million from more than 5,000 gifts to support colleges and departments across the university.
Since then, the College of Engineering’s eight departments and several student groups have been applying the $144,664 they raised during Give Day to support student engagement in hands-on research.
An example of this is HackDavis. HackDavis is a collegiate-level hack-a-thon that connects UC Davis students with hands-on technology experience through building impactful technological projects for social good. The club develops projects for organizations and nonprofits such as Habitat for Humanity, the Children’s Scoliosis Foundation and Breathe California. The students also provide technology support to campus initiatives and departments, such as The Pantry and UC Davis Athletics. For athletics, HackDavis created a new app that allows Aggie fans to earn points for attending games and even get prizes.
A key component of Give Day are the various philanthropic challenges donors are asked to meet.
Similar to matching gifts, a Give Day Challenge is established by a donor to seek a certain number of donors to a department, club or fund. Once the challenge is met, the donor’s gift is activated. From this Give Day Challenge, nearly $13,000 was raised for HackDavis. HackDavis was one of several Give Day Challenges sponsored by the Dean’s Executive Committee–a group of executive-level leaders, including venture capitalists and successful entrepreneurs, who work closely with the College of Engineering in an advisory role.
“Those extra Give Day funds unlock many opportunities,” said Vivek Shome, HackDavis co-president and a fourth-year, double major in computer science and applied math. “A huge thank you to the donors. Without your support, none of the events would be possible. Even the smallest dollars can pay for hours and hours of infrastructure and security.”
OF ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER
ENGINEERING, which won the College of Engineering’s Battle of the Departments for most gifts and most money raised for the third year in a row, will dedicate the $29,851 it raised to renovate and equip its instructional labs with upgraded computers, increased lab bench space and electronic test equipment.
“As technology rapidly advances, we must maintain labs with the most up-to-date equipment so that we can prepare our students to lead the industry through hands-on experience with cutting edge technology,” said André Knoesen, Distinguished Professor and chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “These gifts will enable us to make critical upgrades, such as to our lab benches and electronic testing equipment.”
The department plans to purchase educational devices for loan to students who are unable to afford the devices
required to complete classwork and conduct research. It also helped students in need to acquire the necessary textbooks before their first day of class.
Electrical and Computer Engineering wasn’t the only department to pursue updating its labs with Give Day funds.
A challenge gift from Bob Howe ʼ68 and Mary Dexheimer is allowing the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering to upgrade its labs and equipment to provide better hands-on experience for the students while funding design projects to provide teamwork, project management and goal-oriented
experience for the students. It will also support undergraduate student projects in the capstone design courses, recruitment of underrepresented students to the graduate program, and seminars and lecture series that will expose students to entrepreneurship and innovations.
Gifts also went to support giving students in the departments of Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering research experience.
BME Advisory Board Member Donald Chigazola ʼ78 and his wife, Deborah, made a challenge gift to support hands-
Funds donated to the College of Engineering through Give Day went to support scholarships, new lab equipment, textbooks and financial aid.
on learning through B-Hours, a program that connects the Department of Biomedical Engineering undergraduate students with working professionals in the community.
Give Day donations made to the Ed and Mary Schroeder Fund are supporting undergraduate students with paid lab experience within the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Without this fund, many working students would not be able to participate in undergraduate research experiences due to their need to spend time outside of class in paying work, according to the department.
Students from the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering teamed up to organize a cross-department Graduate Research Symposium on September 20, 2022 with funds from Give Day.
The one-day event gathered more than 100 undergraduate and graduate students to showcase their research to one another and to faculty through presentations, panels, sessions and informal networking.
“Part of the goal was to let us take control of it and build up that experience of organizing a big event like that, and also a chance to practice presenting in a less scary setting than in a full-blown conference,” said symposium organizer Nicki O’Shea, a second-year graduate student researching nanoceramics. “It was great to give people the opportunity to meet with each other and learn about their research. A lot of people have said they are looking forward to next year.”
UC Davis and the College of Engineering will celebrate Picnic Day on April 15, 2023.
Student clubs and teams, departments and the Dean's Office feature their latest and greatest for alumni and friends on Picnic Day.
The annual Give Day, the 29-hour online fundraising drive, will be held on April 14-15.
THE HUMBLE BATTERY: a device most people rarely think about until the phone runs low, the car won’t start, or the smoke detector beeps in the middle of the night.
While they may take a back seat in our interactions with the devices they power, batteries are a critical factor in advancing technological innovation. From the first lead acid batteries invented in the 1860s –grandfathers to those D-cells that powered (and leaked in) our flashlights and portable radios – to the compact nickel-metal hydride batteries that would make digital cameras and portable laptop computers feasible, to the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that give life to our smartphones, revolutions in battery technology have been behind major transformations in electronics.
Now, engineers at UC Davis are working to develop a new type of battery to support alternative energy systems that could help to enable a future where the entire world is powered on renewable energy.
It’s already possible to generate enough renewable energy to supply the human enterprise with a massive increase in wind and solar collection according to Adam Moulé, professor of chemical engineering at UC Davis. However, more abundant and affordable ways to store it are needed. Energy sources like the sun, wind and tides are intermittent, supplying power only at certain times of day. In a solar energy system, for example, we would need to store enough power during the 6-8 hours of full daylight to use during the remaining 16-18 hours.
Recently, the focus has been on lithium-ion batteries to store solar photovoltaic electricity. Lithium-ion batteries can store more energy for longer times than their lead-acid forerunners, but these batteries are problematic. They take a tremendous amount of energy to produce, mining involves a host of ethical issues, and spent batteries are hard to recycle and generate hazardous waste. Crucially, lithium is nowhere near plentiful enough to provide storage on the necessary scale.
“Even if we mined all the lithium on earth,” said Moulé, “we would not have even a tenth of what’s needed for global energy storage.”
Amount of renewable energy needed each day to replace fossil fuels and to power the entire human enterprise
Amount of time that photovoltaic systems collect power
Amount
Until we can reliably and cheaply store renewable energy at scale, the world will continue to rely primarily on fossil fuel-based power grids.
“Energy storage is a critical grand challenge facing humanity,” said Moule. “We have to store intermittent energy renewably to prevent catastrophic climate change.”
This is the impetus behind the effort to unite faculty around living-lab energy storage demonstration projects that will facilitate getting a variety of alternative energy and storage solutions ready to scale up and bring to market. There are many ideas for how energy could be stored; the living-lab concept enables students and labs to try out a new idea for a low enough cost to discover what is practical and what just looks good on paper. Seed funding from a Next Level Research Award, which funds interdisciplinary research in the College of Engineering’s strategic research impact areas, is helping to generate momentum for two initial projects: the processing of waste streams into biofuels, and the latent heat battery.
The latent heat battery, or LHB, offers one approach for storing solar heat energy. The idea is to create a compact solid-state heat-battery that stores energy in a phase transition using highly abundant materials. Essentially, it works by heating up an alloy of silicon and aluminum past its melting point during the day, and then extracting and converting the heat released as the alloy resolidifies at night into energy to power household or industrial processes.
Everyday activities from heating homes and water to cooking and doing laundry require enormous amounts of energy. The goal is to shift these processes from using burnable fuel to electricity or direct solar heat that can be generated using intermittent wind or solar power. An LHB can store heat when solar radiation is abundant during the day to be used when the heat energy is needed in the evening or at night. This particular design could be scaled up to unlimited amounts because silicon and aluminum are among the most abundant elements on earth.
The LHBs of all kinds are still theoretical ideas for which there are no building-scale demonstrations, Moulé cautions. Advancing the technology involves collaboration between mechanical, civil, chemical, and materials science engineers to model and test at mid-and high-temperatures, develop containers, and analyze data.
“Our goal this year is to put together a first demo of a small project,” he said.
Assistant Professor Matt Ellis in the Department of Chemical Engineering will do a series of simulations that look at how well the LHB can exchange heat at different temperatures and how quickly heat could be released. These simulations will enable the team to design LHBs of the correct size for applications like providing air and water heating for a typical American house.
Distinguished Professor Jerry Woodall in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is leading the effort to build an LHB that uses a silicon/aluminum alloy to store heat at approximately 577°C, with the goal of designing a prototype 1kW storage device that can be used to gather data and test materials. Working with the Western Cooling and Efficiency Center (WCEC) and the Energy Efficiency Institute (EEI), the group aims to demo the battery as
the heat source for the heater, heat pump cooler, and water heater for a building, and possibly a heat engine to convert heat energy to electricity.
Meanwhile, Professor Vinod Narayanan in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and director of the WCEC is leading Department of Energy-funded research on high-temperature solar heat for power generation and industrial applications, for which high-temperature thermal storage would be required.
The long-term goal to scale the battery up and bring it to market is part of a larger goal in the college to develop and demonstrate a range of technologies that can create a renewable energy grid. Partnerships with campus organizations such as the EEI, the WCEC and the Energy Graduate Group can help take the research to the next level by supporting lifecycle analysis, process control, building integration, permitting, policy and economics issues. They can explore how well the technology works, whether it’s affordable, what changes to policy and code would need to be deployed, and help accelerate the generation of IP, commercialization and product integration.
Though animals respond well to music, humans are usually the ones that choose it. To help change this, a senior design team in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering (BAE) developed a device that lets horses choose which music they want to listen to.
The team’s client, Dr. Susan Keen in the UC Davis College of Biological Sciences, wanted to give the horses in the UC Davis Equestrian Center more agency, as they can get bored in captivity without enrichment. After a lot of trial and error and advice from their advisor, BAE Professor David Slaughter, the team built a lightweight, portable frame with three positions, bounded by PVC pipe and an ultrasonic sensor.
“I liked how open-ended this project was,” said biological systems engineering major and team lead Sean Lupo. “We didn’t have anything that we were building on and we had to start from the ground up. It felt like this was a true engineering experience.”
When a horse walks into a position, it trips the sensor and starts playing one of three pieces of music—two jazz and a lullaby. Horses can then pick a favorite song or switch between them. The team also tracks how long each horse listens to each to determine which songs
“Since humans have different personalities and different taste in music, we wondered if that applies horses too,” said Lupo.
The team—Lupo, Andrew Butler, Elijah Stockwell and Melanie Siu—tested the device with five horses. Initially, the horses were either afraid of the device or confused by it, but they got the hang of it. When the team would leave for an afternoon and let the horses freely use the device, the data showed that they listened for extended periods of time.
To the team’s knowledge, the device is the first of its kind and it will play a role in future research at UC Davis. The team wants to continue developing the device to include more effective sensors, visual cues and feedbags so the horses can eat while they’re listening.
By Sharon Campbell Knox
The Next Level research vision is making great strides. Last spring, the College of Engineering announced four impact areas, identified in consultation with faculty, with the aim to be national leaders: Revolutionizing Energy Systems, Strengthening Climate Resilience, Advancing Human Health and Transforming Mobility. Strategic actions to advance work in these areas are in motion. Raissa D’Souza, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and computer science, was recently named associate dean for research, and is now leading these efforts.
In March the college launched a program to provide seed funds for early-stage research and interdisciplinary forums in these areas, and invited all faculty to apply. Nine projects were awarded funding, representing an exciting range of projects involving faculty in each of our departments. Funded projects range from 3D-printing earthen houses and making sustainable windmill blades from bamboo and mycelium to engineering the body’s own nanoparticles to deliver drugs directly to the brain. One group of engineers is working to develop and demonstrate storage solutions for alternative energy sources – read more in this issue, and view the projects on the college's website.
Seed funding also enabled an Accessible Smart Health Technologies Forum which was held in September at the UC Davis Health campus. The forum brought together engineers and clinicians to share research, advance collaborations, and delve into issues of equity and access as sensors, artificial intelligence and other smart technologies transform the ways we can diagnose and deliver medical care.
A series of meet and greets for strategic research initiatives, including those that span multiple colleges, and a second round of seed funding is planned for 2023.
Transit expert Kari Watkins has joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an associate professor. Her work targets expanding mobility options by improving public transportation, walking, cycling, and other alternatives to driving. The college is currently recruiting two tenure-track assistant professors to advance our vision with respect to strengthening climate resilience and revolutionizing energy systems, and expect to bring the new hires onboard in fall 2023.
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