Deans Report 2024

2023-24 ANNUAL REVIEW

TEAM BUILT WINNER

TeamMADE, a home design and construction crew with student members from UCI and Orange Coast College, placed second overall with their luminOCity home in the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon, which was held last fall in Costa Mesa, California.

TeamMADE (Modular Affordable Dwellings for the Environment) was one of 14 teams competing. Many participants were California-based, but other teams included members from China and the United Kingdom. The group had its name show up in several of the award categories, including first place in engineering & construction; first place in market potential; second place in sustainability & resilience; third place in architecture & interior design; third place in communications & marketing; and third place in innovation.

For TeamMADE’s first-place showing in engineering & construction, the O.C. Sustainability Decathlon jury recognized the 750 square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bathroom home’s modular design as one eligible to be built as an accessory dwelling unit throughout California.

LuminOCity was donated to Homeless Intervention Services of Orange County, which has been helping at-risk youth between 18 to 24 years old rebuild their lives. The ADU enables the center to raise their capacity from nine to 17 beds.

FROM THE DEAN

Good engineering is almost by definition creative. We pursue and envision solutions to some of the most complex and urgent problems we are facing around sustainability, health and societal impacts of technology. But how does this somewhat illusive concept of “creativity” get infused into the engineering curriculum? This past year, I have spent time thinking about this very question.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t need our students to become great artists. But I do want them to have the creative confidence of standing in front of a blank canvas and imagining something new and bold – and to will new solutions and designs into existence. To that end, we have rolled out a few experiments in the Samueli School of Engineering, trying to capture this notion of “creative confidence.” One inspirational and fun example of this is the E-SONIC competition that we held jointly with the UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts and the Pacific Symphony during the 23-24 academic year. E-SONIC stands for Engineering-Symphonic Orchestra New Instrument Competition, and the original idea was to have student teams design and showcase never-beforeseen instruments. We had really no idea what to expect from this program, but I am happy to report that the result exceeded all expectations.

But creative confidence can mean so much more than forays into the arts. It can mean the ability to envision commercial opportunities for our research inventions. Or, it can mean daring to take the leap, as a faculty member, from the familiar settings of an academic lab into the unstructured and unchartered startup

world. We are seeing an increasing number of faculty, researchers, and students take this leap, and the theme behind this Annual Review is “Lab to Market.”

The ability to go from lab to market in a major and structurally well-defined way was identified as one of the key goals in our recent strategic plan. The reason why this played such a prominent role in the plan is that we want to make sure that what happens in our labs and our classrooms is relevant and has impact. This means that our innovations cannot stay hidden and bottled up, but are given opportunities to transition from campus and out into the world. And only through a strong, vibrant and structurally robust lab to market culture can we make that transition happen at scale. This Annual Review is in part a report of the strides we have made in this regard, and in part a celebration of the creative confidence that is required to take this leap.

Stacey Nicholas Dean of Engineering

First Place Finish

UCI Samueli School’s Chem-E-Car team placed first at the 2024 Western Regional Competition, beating all other university teams across California and Arizona. The student-designed cars are powered by a chemical energy source and the competition required the cars to run a specific distance that was announced only an hour before the contest. The champion UCI car is named Acid Ron and is powered by a lead acid battery the students created. The contest required the cars to stop at the 22.86 meter mark. Acid Ron stopped the closest at 21.95 meters.

“The car was able to stop so precisely by employing a reaction between sodium thiosulfate and hydrochloric acid,” said Chem-E-Car Lab Lead Lorena Martinez. “We calculated the necessary concentrations of the chemicals to run for the required length and stop at the desired distance.”

Co-Project Manager Zaid Alsharif said four teams of engineering students spent a year of endless hours in the lab to build Acid Ron. They did hundreds of tests throughout the year and were working until 2 a.m. the two nights before the competition. Everything about the car is built from scratch, including the chemical reaction and power source.

The annual American Institute of Chemical Engineers’ Chem-E-Car competition has the potential to contribute new ideas for sustainable technologies and gain sponsorship from companies to help fund the teams.

The UCI engineering team will compete in the international competition in October in San Diego.

Committed to Success

The UCI Samueli School’s CanSat team won second place in the United States and fourth place worldwide in the 2024 CanSat Student Competition in June in Staunton, Virginia.

The annual competition, hosted by the American Astronautical Society in conjunction with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, is a unique opportunity for university students to develop, build and launch a soda can-sized satellite designed to meet specific mission objectives.

impressed with our design because everything was integrated into one mechanic.”

They also borrowed an idea from SpaceX and used pink grid fins around the base to prevent wobbling on the descent. “This helped us achieve rotational control and allowed a more steady descent,” said Liu. “We’re judged not on the ascent, but on going down. Once the CanSat ejects from the rocket, it goes through the whole activation sequence as it descends. That’s when it collects information.”

(below) The Anteater engineering CanSat team took fourth place worldwide and second in the U.S. at the international student competition.

This year’s challenge required the students to design and integrate electrical, mechanical and software components to simulate the landing sequence of a planetary probe. The CanSats were launched to an altitude of approximately one kilometer, where they needed to collect data, send radio-frequency telemetry, and activate heat shields and parachutes to ensure a controlled descent and intact landing. Out of the 140 competing teams, only 32 were invited to the launch event.

Ten members of the team traveled to Virginia for the competition. Team lead Ryan Liu, a fifth-year electrical engineering major, said they had a novel design. “One of the cool things about our CanSat was that the mechanical team developed the actual nose cone of the rocket to act as an aero-braking heat shield. The other teams were

Kaylee Kim, a second-year mechanical engineering major who served as a software engineer, will lead the team next year. She said they learned a lot from this competition and she gained some important takeaways. “Everything was working independently before we left and got on the plane to Virginia. So, we were very chill thinking that everything would be fine.”

However, the day before the competition, when they put it all together and conducted final testing, it did not work. There were problems with the flight software and flow – certain triggers were not activating the sequence of mechanisms. “Because we had been testing each subsystem independently, we kind of assumed it would work altogether, but it turned out it was too much for our power supply,” Kim explained.

They ended up pulling an all-nighter the day before launch and had to make some hard decisions. “One of the big issues with the power supply was the camera, so we decided to get rid of it, as it was only a small percentage of the scoring,” said Liu.

This proved to be the right decision as the UCI CanSat performed so well on launch day, even though the team was operating on just a few hours of sleep.

“As a multidisciplinary effort, it takes a dedicated group of students to successfully design and integrate the mechanical, electrical and software components of the project in only nine months,” said Roger Rangel, professor emeritus and the team’s faculty adviser. He noted that this is the highest rank the UCI team has achieved in seven years of participating in the international contest. “This is a greatly deserved accomplishment as this year’s team was made up of students deeply committed to success.”

(above) Borrowing an idea from SpaceX, the team used pink grid fins around the CanSat base to help prevent wobbling on the descent.

Ambitious Anteater

Growing up in Torrance, Calif., Christopher Arauzo spent his childhood surrounded by immigrant families like his own, where he learned the value of hard work.

Arauzo decided to pursue mechanical engineering at UCI after a high school internship at Marathon Petroleum Corp. As he watched his mentor try to repair a heat exchanger, he realized that almost all major systems require some form of thermal management.

“Pairing that with my love for math

and problem-solving, I was led to mechanical engineering,” Arauzo says. “With every experience I’ve gained, my interest has become more concentrated in thermal and fluid systems.”

Arauzo has been given the prestigious Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship for 2024. Only 31 university students were chosen in the nation for this program, which seeks to inspire the next generation of commercial spaceflight leaders. As part of the fellowship, Arauzo will receive a paid aerothermal engineering internship with ABL Space Systems, a one-onone mentorship with a space industry leader and the opportunity to attend a summit with top industry leaders.

At the Samueli School, he was the team lead for Spacecraft Thermal Management Systems, a studentled undergraduate research project. He also became the chief mechanical and aerospace engineer for STMS. The endeavor allowed Arauzo to learn and grow exponentially, and it also helped him secure a position at Boeing as an extreme environment materials intern.

In addition, he belongs to the UCI chapter of MAES: Latinos in Science and Engineering, where he has mentored underclassmen and written

fundraising proposals for the Office of Outreach, Access and Inclusion and other campus entities.

He plans to pursue his master’s degree in mechanical engineering at UCI, after which he hopes to work in the commercial space industry where he looks forward to solving thermal challenges. “There are so many technological challenges to explore when designing spacecraft,” he said. “Whether it’s rockets or satellites, they won’t function properly without the right materials or thermal management systems!”

What was your favorite class at UCI?

My favorite class was Fluid Dynamics II. Xian Shi [assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering] did an excellent job structuring the course, during which I decided I wanted to work in fluids in addition to thermal.

What advice would you give to a student starting their journey at UCI?

My advice to any new student would be to get involved with research or projects as soon as you can. Join an organization you care about to grow your support system and give back to your community. I would also add that you should not be afraid to be ambitious. Practice overcoming your anxiety about speaking to new people and speak up for yourself. You are capable! Also, make sure you say yes to things that will bring you one step closer to your goals.

“Chris is an outstanding critical thinker who can synthesize complex information and communicate it effectively to others. He is also empathetic, courteous and works well with his colleagues. One could not ask for a better student! I have no doubt as to his continued growth and success in his field and positive impact on his community,” said Stephen Bach, engineering lecturer.

SHOUTOUTS

Open Project Space

When Adam Wu arrived at UCI as a first-year computer engineering major, he knew how to write computer code but didn’t have any experience with hardware. He wanted to gain hands-on project skills, so he turned to one of the Samueli School’s many student organizations for opportunities.

He discovered UCI’s student chapter of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), which offers members the chance to participate in guided projects. Wu was one of more than 200 students who applied to the Open Project Space, a studentled embedded electronics course for beginners.

The yearlong program accepted 100 students and is led by OPS

alumni who are now upper division students. Rachel Villamor, a senior in computer engineering, participated in the program during the pandemic.

“As someone who didn’t have a lot of personal project experience, I got a lot out of it,” she said. “It built the foundation and confidence for me to apply to internships.”

Benjamen Bielecki, a computer science and engineering senior and lead instructor, said a big appeal of the program for students is access to equipment they wouldn’t have otherwise.

“We accept first- and second-year students and transfer students, those who haven’t had the time or opportunities to develop some of these hard skills, like soldering and PCB design and building hands-on projects,” said Bielecki. “These aren’t things that are covered until upper division courses. The challenge is that at that point, you want to have acquired an internship of some kind and companies are looking for those skills.”

Future ExplorerSpace

Third-year UCI mechanical engineering student Ozzy Sanchez-Aldana dreams of working in NASA’s space exploration division. A proud Mexican American, the 21-yearold is the first in his family to pursue a bachelor’s degree.

Sanchez-Aldana developed an interest in robotics while watching “Star Wars” as a child. Curious about the character C-3PO, he made it a point to see more movies with humanoid machines and animatronics. Immersing himself in the world of robotics, he devoured behind-the-scenes documentaries about such films, learning about the technical workarounds of the ’80s and ’90s.

“It was just awe-inspiring to me,” he said, “to see engineers use inanimate parts to create a living, albeit mechanical, being.”

In 2017, as a sophomore in high school, Sanchez-Aldana got his first taste of STEM research interning at Portland State University. While he had wanted to gain experience in the field of engineering, Sanchez-Aldana was placed in PSU’s computer science program, where he learned programming languages like Python/C. It confirmed his passion for engineering; he wanted to do something hands-on rather than just sort out raw data.

“What makes engineering enticing to me,” explained SanchezAldana, “is the ability to appreciate my work and creativity in the palm of my hand. It’s a little hard to do that when I’m kind of just sitting at a desk and programming.”

The 2023-24 recipient of a scholarship from the Eric Clayton Pedersen Endowed Memorial Fund, Sanchez-Aldana says that the award helps him to focus on his studies, save for the future and prepare for his transition from student to working professional.

Sanchez-Aldana intends to pursue a career with NASA’s space colonization projects and Artemis missions to design autonomous devices that collect samples and explore dangerous terrain.

Adam Wu (left) was looking for hands-on experience with computer hardware and found it with the Open Project Space course.

Inspiring Hope

"Engineers are hope-givers,” said Joyce Chen, the engineering school’s 2024 student commencement speaker. “We have to believe what we can make tomorrow is better than what exists today.”

The biomedical engineering senior comes from a family of engineers and Anteaters. She’s been zotting at UCI ball games since she was 8 years old. Her parents, brother and sister-in-law are all Anteaters and the men in her family – grandpa, father, uncles and brother – have the spectrum of engineering covered.

“I used to think engineering was for boys,” she said. She had no interest until her dad started working on medical devices. That’s when she saw the inspiring connection between innovation and helping people.

While airshows hooked her father and brother to become engineers, for Joyce, it was trips to the orthodontist. She was fascinated with braces and asked the dentist endless questions on how they worked. That’s when she set her sights on biomedical engineering, and UCI’s program impressed her.

“My favorite part of engineering is making things,” she said. As a girl, she loved making fun items like bracelets and jewelry boxes. Now at UCI, she’s creating a medical device that could revolutionize an area of women’s health care: the pelvic exam. At the startup company Feminora, she helped design the award-winning OneSpec, a new take on the vaginal speculum – which hasn’t been reinvented in over a century.

“Not only did she take on a design that still required significant engineering and innovation to make it work,” said her adviser Christine King, biomedical engineering associate professor of teaching, “she was able to build it physically through computer-aided design as we grew our team.”

Their speculum promises to be easier for doctors to use and more comfortable for the patient, which means women will be more willing to get preventative care. Joyce said Feminora is the coolest thing she’s been a part of at UCI and women love the concept. “Every single woman that I’ve told we’re reinventing the speculum says, ‘Oh, thank goodness! It’s about time!’”

When she’s not designing medical devices, Joyce likes to lose herself in a world she’s invented in her mind. “I love writing because it’s an escape from reality where your imagination is really the limit,” she said. Joyce has been writing stories and poetry since fifth grade.

This past Valentine’s Day, Barnes & Noble published her first romance mystery "Champagne Problems." Inspired by a Taylor Swift song title, the novel is a wholesome love story between a boy and girl from rival towns whose residents are forbidden to interact with each other. She describes it as “a Hallmark movie in a book.”

As for biomedical engineering, she loves the challenge and potential benefits to humanity that creating medical devices brings. She says the impression that engineering is hard is true. “That’s because you’re solving problems that have never been solved before,” Joyce said. “We have to believe that we can make the impossible possible.”

(top) Student Commencement speaker Joyce Chen enjoys UCI’s Aldrich Park.

(bottom) The Chen family zots in front of Engineering Hall (from left): Lisa, Joseph, Joyce, Diane and Harvey.

Let’s Rock and Roll!

The Creophone, Wube Tubes and Saxatars sound like fictional things in a Dr. Seuss book, but actually they were some of the cool creations by engineering students who had to meet a challenge: invent a new musical instrument for a UCI contest. Their inspirations included harnessing brainwaves, capturing the wind and upcycling instrument parts. That was the ingenious imaginative spirit on display at the first EngineeringSymphonic Orchestra New Instrument Competition (E-SONIC) in May.

“This new instrument competition is all about having the courage to go after new and wild ideas,” said Samueli School of Engineering Dean Magnus Egerstedt who together with Pacific Symphony President John Forsythe conceived of the contest over lunch. “I want our students to have creative confidence –the confidence to embrace a new problem or stand in front of an empty scoresheet and imagine something that didn’t exist before.”

The Pacific Symphony welcomes these inventions as there hasn’t been a new instrument added to the orchestra in a century. “The idea that there could be a new color or texture introduced to orchestral

music through an invented instrument would be an amazing addition to our ability to create beautiful art,” said Forsythe. Winners not only received a cash prize ($1,000 and $500) but will also have the chance to work with the Pacific Symphony to compose and perform a piece around their instrument.

Six teams of engineering students spent months designing and creating their musical inventions. The rules were simple. The instruments had to meet three criteria: it had to be new, playable with notes and have some physical manifestation.

The six entries included three synthesizers. The Creophone, worn over the head, is an EEG-controlled synthesizer that detects specific brainwave thresholds to evoke enchanting chords. Pulstar is an electronic synthesizer, while the May Organ is an amplified electromechanical instrument that fuses concepts from the Hammon organ and digital wavetable synthesizers.

The Wube Tubes is a fusion of recycled wind and string instruments that’s played by blowing into the tubes while plucking the strings. The Saxatar, the winner of the People’s Choice Award, harnesses the wind through the science of fluids and vibrations.

Taesung Hwang, a senior who majors in both computer engineering and music, created the jury’s top choice - the Inductus - which he affectionately calls a “cool big stick.” The

three-foot long rod exudes an extraordinary array of ethereal sounds as a magnet slides inside, passing through coils of wire that send electronic impulses to a microcontroller that transforms the signals into music.

“There’s definitely a deep connection between the arts and STEM fields,” Hwang said. “We can use computer algorithms to generate melodies, harmonies and rhythms. It’s fun putting the two together.”

In addition to the debut of these novel instruments, the evening was graced with performances from a band comprised of Dean Egerstedt and four engineering faculty musicians: Herdaline Ardoña, Pim Oomen, Maxim Shcherbakov and Ali Moraz, who were also advisers to the student teams. They all rotated instruments as they sung engineeringthemed tunes like “Rocket Man” and “The Scientist.”

E-SONIC will be an annual contest and project that UCI students can participate in for academic credit. “This is only the beginning,” said Egerstedt. “Next year will be bigger, shinier, with even more instruments.”

The event included performances from a band comprised of Dean Egerstedt (on drums) and four engineering faculty musicians, from left: Maxim Shcherbakov, Herdaline Ardoña, Pim Oomen and Ali Moraz.

(top) “This new instrument competition is all about having the courage to go after new and wild ideas,” said Dean Egerstedt.

(middle left) Leo Harjanto and Naya Sterritt perform with their musical invention named Wube Tubes, a fusion of recycled wind and string instruments.

(middle right) Taesung Hwang wins the E-SONIC competition with his performance of the Inductus, which he affectionately calls a “cool big stick.”

(bottom) Praneet Iddamsetty performing with the Creophone, an EEG-controlled synthesizer that detects specific brainwave thresholds to evoke enchanting chords.

contributing writers Lori Brandt, Lilith Christopher and Natalie Tso

Universities, government labs and private companies invest billions of dollars in the research and development of breakthrough innovations that have the potential to transform industries and lives — but very few of these discoveries ever leave the lab.

Engineers however, as natural problem solvers, make great entrepreneurs. They’re used to taking complex technical challenges, breaking them down and building robust solutions from scratch. Some of the most notable modernday entrepreneurs started out as engineers, people like Bill Gates, Lisa Su and Jeff Bezos. There are many other examples of successful engineers who became founders and CEOs. A recent study by Crunchbase found that three out of 10 of today‘s most valuable U.S. tech companies were started by people with engineering degrees.

At UCI, a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem helps engineering researchers successfully navigate the path to commercialization. After protecting their intellectual property through a patent process, innovators can choose multiple ways to commercialize their technology, including translational funding for further development, finding industry partners to license technology, or establishing a startup company.

The speed of the lab-to-market process of an invention depends on multiple factors, including regulatory requirements and market demand. Some research discoveries have immediate potential for reaching the market, while others could take years.

Samueli School engineers, with their strengths in math, science and technology, are designing, building, creating and improving products and solving challenging technical problems.

The following pages give just a few examples of Anteater engineers taking innovation from lab to market.

DID YOU KNOW?

The U.S. has the highest number of startups by almost three times the amount of the global leaders combined. In 2021, the U.S. was home to ~63,703 startups. Second was India with over 8,300, and then U.K. with roughly 5,400.

Money is a top concern for those considering a startup. About 33% of small businesses get started with less than $5,000. The majority, 58%, launched with less than $25,000

Approximately 30% of new small businesses fail by the end of year two, while half will fail before year five.

Women and minorities are more likely to own very small businesses in California than larger companies. Women own 22% of very small businesses; Asian Americans own 23%; Latino Americans own 11%

With a mission to help UCI students explore the process of entrepreneurship, the ANTrepreneur Center serves as a hub to help them develop skills necessary to start a business.

(top) Diced silicon chip with a side length of 2mm on a U.S. quarter. The chip contains a blown glass sphere with a diameter of less than 1 mm.

(middle) A fused quartz dual-shell prototype. The two-layer shell structure was co-fabricated using micro-glassblowing.

(bottom) A glass blown microsphere (1 mm in diameter) surrounded by eight satellite micro-domes can enable new classes of highperformance chipscale systems for communication, photonics and navigation applications.

INDUSTRY SPONSORED

During a stroll down a street in Barcelona’s Poble Espanyol, Andrei Shkel saw a man inflating molten glass with a blowpipe and shaping it into a perfect sphere. As a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Shkel imagined an ingenious application for the ancient art: glassblowing could enable the world to make tiny “wine glasses” for small gyroscopes.

That epiphany skyrocketed his career, bringing him to the U.S. Department of Defense to head the mission to miniaturize gyroscopes – the key devices that measure rotation for navigation, positioning and stabilization. From 2009 to 2013 at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), he oversaw $200 million and 300 researchers from 20 companies, 16 universities, six national labs and seven government organizations as they forged ahead to make microchipscale gyroscopes. For his extraordinary contribution to defense technology, Shkel was awarded the Office of the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service in 2013.

What was so revolutionary about Shkel’s idea? Picture this: It takes about three months of manufacturing, polishing and manual assembly of 96 parts to create a single high-precision gyroscope – a process that costs a staggering one million dollars for a single extreme-quality device. The engineering craft is one that only a few companies in the world are skilled to do.

His lab invented glassblowing technology that can create thousands of “small wine glasses” simultaneously by simply putting a specially prepared stack of wafers in a furnace at 1,500 to 1,700 C. “It’s like making muffins,” Shkel says, “we have specialized ovens, and wine glasses pop up like muffins with very little human involvement.”

It is extremely efficient because thousands of wineglass structures can be made instantly as they form and organize themselves organically and symmetrically. The researchers create air cavities inside wafers and the air trapped between wafers expands as the glass starts softening, becoming almost like liquid at such high temperatures. The combination of glass softening and a pressure increase inside the cavity does the magic of forming three dimensional micro-structures. When the shaped glass is pulled out from the furnace and cooled, the lab releases, metalizes and interfaces them with electrodes to complete the product.

The wine glass-like structure, made of fused quartz, is the heart of hemispherical resonance gyroscopes that have applications for defense, medicine, consumer electronics, transportation vehicles and much more. Over a dozen of Shkel’s inventions have

been licensed by industry and are used for advanced braking systems in SUVs, autonomous driving, navigation of UAVs, gaming, stabilizing images on camera phones and more.

Shkel’s groundbreaking work has given him 43 issued U.S. patents, making his MicroSystems Lab a global leader in chip-scale gyroscopes and inertial measurement units (IMU). The processes he invented have achieved a mechanical quality factor in the millions. This means that once stimulated, the resonator will oscillate on its own back-and-forth well over a million times before it loses its energy, which is a record for microscale devices. This quality factor is a key characteristic for precision measurement of rotations and reduction of drift in rotation measurements.

The Korean conglomerate Hanwha recently invested $3 million in MicroSystems Lab’s research to construct a prototype that would cut the cost to produce a high-precision hemispherical resonance gyroscope to just a few hundred dollars. “If we succeed, this would give the sensor in our cell phones the navigation capability of those on Boeing 747s,” Shkel says. Hanwha wants to use the technology for highly autonomous vehicles of the future.

“The Hanwha investment is the largest single industry award UCI has received to advance a faculty invention,” says David Gibbons, director of UCI’s Industry Sponsored Research division. “Given Professor Shkel’s five issued patents, this is an outstanding outcome and opportunity to see his work reach the market.”

Industry-sponsored research generally aims to advance research projects to product development and commercialization and, by doing so, can help move a researcher’s innovation out of the lab and into the market to benefit society.

“This is particularly exciting as I want to see increased industrial engagement more broadly and this is a perfect example of that,” Dean Egerstedt wrote in a congratulatory email to Shkel, pointing out the Hanwha contract demonstrates the tremendous value Shkel’s research brings to the market.

In a project called NEVERLOST, Shkel is working on putting mini gyroscopes and accelerometers in the soles of shoes worn by first responders so their whereabouts can be known at all times. It will go where current

GPS technology cannot – indoors and in covered outdoor environments. His lab is also developing a location-based service that provides path guidance for emergency responders to help them arrive at a goal destination, such as an emergency exit from a building. This project was awarded nearly $1.4 million from the National Institute of Standard and Technology Public Safety Communication Research division.

Shkel’s biggest dream is to make microchips that can restore the inner ear’s vestibular system, which provides a person’s sense of balance and spatial orientation. Currently, there’s no known cure for those who lose their sense of balance and it’s the main reason the elderly fall and hurt themselves. Future microchips could potentially be implanted to prevent those injuries.

Other biomedical applications include developing lower limb prosthetics that are a more natural fit to the patient. AI can collect motion data and make personal adjustments to the device via these miniinertial sensors.

The applications are endless as the lab works to perfect its mini gyroscope technology. “Every time I see a glass shop, I start thinking, ‘What can I do next?” says Shkel, the man who revolutionized gyroscopes with a glance at a glass blower.

EMERGING ENTREPRENEUR

Han Li has developed tools that can control biochemical reactions in living cells. Called artificial cofactors, these tools are able to turn cells into tiny biofactories in which researchers can make a wide variety of useful chemicals. Her discovery could reimagine biomanufacturing and lead to more efficient, sustainable production of useful molecules for food, medicines, energy and materials.

Li’s invention was just a fun scientific exercise at first. She wondered, can we introduce artificial small molecules that bind to synthetic enzymes and reduce or accept electrons to cause a reaction within a cell? And can we do it without interfering in the cell’s natural processes?

“We’ve demonstrated that fundamentally we can do this, so now the question is what cool things can we do with this new tool?” says Li, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering.

Li says it works like a switch. “These artificial cofactors are really a way to direct electron flow inside the cells,” she explains. This engineered process causes a parallel biosynthesis within a cell to make a chemical while the cell continues to conduct its own functions as an organism working to survive. She then developed several distinct applications to make chemicals that are useful for society such as flavor and fragrance, food additives, plastics, renewable fuels and pharmaceuticals.

Li’s research team used the artificial cofactors to make a valuable medicine building block called a chiral compound. “It’s difficult to produce with chemical synthesis, so if we can make it biologically in a cell and then hand it over to the pharmaceutical or chemical companies, they can incorporate it into medicines or pesticides in a more cost-effect and sustainable process,” she explains.

She also used it to make citronellal, a compound used to give candles, soaps and lotions a citrus scent. Currently the compound is produced from orange peels. Using engineered cells to make citronellal would mean no more wasted oranges.

Li has been advancing this research since she joined the UCI faculty in 2016. She won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award ($500,000), NIH New Innovator Award ($2.2 million) and Sloan Early Career Award ($75,000) – all to support this work. But she didn’t consider its market potential until an attendee at a scientific conference mentioned the idea to her after watching her presentation. He referred her to the U.S. Department of Energy’s high-risk, high-impact Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-E), which funds the development of energy technologies.

The ARPA-E grant proposal required a technical-economic analysis, forcing Li to consider the scalability and costs of commercializing her research as well as the potential customers, manufacturing bottlenecks and profit margins – all foreign concepts to her as an academic.

“I knew my tool was powerful and could do impressive things, but only in the lab,” she says. “I didn’t have a concrete idea of how to use it.”

“ARPA-E’s funding is a cooperative agreement – meaning, the agency works alongside Han Li with the resources and goal to push her transformative research into a technology to reimagine U.S. biomanufacturing,” says Kirk Liu, the technology-to-market program adviser at ARPA-E who worked with Li on the project. “This model has launched over 150 companies, of which six were listed in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2023.”

The agency granted Li $1.8 million to further her progress. She was also selected as one of 35 researchers in the nation to participate in an NSF IDEAS lab, a fiveday interactive workshop of experts and stakeholders interested in collaboratively developing solutions to a specific problem or grand challenge. Li was matched with an industry member who ran the numbers on scaling up her tool and using it in the bio-renewable chemical manufacturing industry. After their pitch, the team was invited to submit a proposal.

Li also received a Proof of Product grant from UCI Beall Applied Innovation, a resource hub for faculty innovators, entrepreneurs, investors and industry. She’s accessed many of its services related to intellectual property strategy, conflicts of interest, legalities of technology transfer, peer mentoring and entrepreneur workshops. Li now has three U.S. patents and is on the verge of starting a business.

“When you first talk to industry people, you quickly realize they speak a different language,” says Li. “When I say I have this cool idea, the next thing they do is open a spreadsheet, plug in numbers and spit out a cost analysis. At the IDEAS lab, my teammate performed this analysis and got super excited.”

Her teammate’s company has been making a renewable substitute product for a commodity chemical, which has a big carbon footprint and is not very degradable. This company has customers lined up to buy renewable bio-based alternatives. They know the molecule they want to make but haven’t identified an efficient process. That’s where Li’s innovation comes in.

Li never thought of herself as a business person. She studied biology as an undergrad, then switched to chemical engineering in graduate school and ended up in metabolic engineering. “I found the science of biology fascinating but I struggled with the question of what would I do with my knowledge. With engineering, there is always a purpose in mind, and the thing about biomanufacturing is it’s very versatile. It can make anything.”

EARLY STAGE

Matt Lee ’12 invented a game-changing carbon capture solvent that catches one thousand more times carbon than a forest for less than $100 a ton – a goal set by the U.S. Department of Energy. Current costs range between $250 to $600 today, according to the World Resources Institute.

With his revolutionary technology, Lee and prominent entrepreneur Charles Cadieu founded the new company Spiritus and are now on the cutting-edge of reducing carbon for the U.S. and major companies around the world.

While competing technologies use giant fans to suck up air, Lee’s solvent is brilliantly modeled after alveoli - the air sacs in the lungs where carbon dioxide and oxygen are exchanged when we breathe. The solvent is shaped like round balls that will be laid out like fruit in a carbon-capture orchard. They’ll then passively absorb carbon from the air in just a few hours without making a sound.

The sorbents are then taken back into a capsule, what Spiritus calls a “tree,” to remove the CO2 so it can be transported and injected underground. The whole desorption process is powered by clean energy and the sorbents are reusable.

“We have multiple innovations that reduce energy costs,” Lee says. “We utilize passive air contacting that doesn’t use fans, and we have a novel desorption process that releases the CO2 from the sorbent with reduced energy needs.” This technology makes Spiritus, which means “breath” in Latin, a remarkable innovator in the carbon capture industry.

Lee invented the technology and is chief technology officer and co-founder of Spiritus. He began working on synthesizing porous materials at UCI, where he received a master’s degree and a doctorate in chemical engineering.

“Matt was truly a superstar,” says Ali Mohraz, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, who mentored him. “He had a keen eye to unveil exciting and unexpected science in our journey, a high standard of scientific excellence and an uncanny drive to reach it.”

While at UCI, Lee developed a new method of making porous materials with unique pore connectivity and internal surface geometry, using bijels as templates, an expertise the research group is still known for today.

“My experience at UCI was inspirational in that the faculty, staff and my fellow students always encouraged collaboration and the value of new perspectives that come from working alongside experts in technical areas different from my own,” Lee says. “The carbon capture problem can only be addressed with a multidisciplinary approach.”

Lee began his venture with Cadieu in December 2021, after working for 10 years as a specialist in colloid science at Los Alamos National Lab. Cadieu also founded IQ Engines and Caption Health. IQ Engines was acquired by Yahoo!/Flickr while Caption Health developed new medical technology that was named a 100 Best Invention by TIME Magazine in 2021. Spiritus raised $11 million in funding through an effort led by prominent venture capital firm Khosla Ventures. The startup is one of 12 companies that Stripe, Shopify and H&M Group have selected for carbon captures. “We’ve partnered with some incredible companies who are serious about advancing their net zero goals,” says Lee.

Lee is also working with the world’s largest oil company Aramco, which is set to make a major investment in Spiritus. The Saudi Arabian company signed a memorandum of understanding with Spiritus as it aims to transition to low-carbon technology.

Central Wyoming will also host one of the world’s largest carbon capture facilities built by Spiritus. “Our first facility, which we’re calling Orchard One, is coming along well and on track to begin carbon removal operations in 2026,” says Lee. “That’s a major milestone we’re all looking forward to.”

Orchard One will be able to capture megatons of carbon from the atmosphere and send 2 million tons of CO2 underground every year. That’s the equivalent of removing emissions from 340,000 pickup trucks annually. Spiritus will be able to receive tax credits to the tune of $180 for every ton of CO2 captured and stored in the ground.

“Our vision is a future world where carbon removal becomes a pillar of civilizational infrastructure, similar to waste disposal and wastewater treatment,” Lee says.

“If we can establish carbon removal as such a pillar, then the reversal of global warming truly becomes viable for future generations.”

The carbon capture solvent is modeled after air sacs, or alveoli, in the lungs.

“Our vision is a future world where carbon removal becomes a pillar of civilizational infrastructure, similar to waste disposal and wastewater treatment. If we can establish carbon removal as such a pillar, then the reversal of global warming truly becomes viable for future generations.”

SUCCESSFUL STRATEGY

Nizan Friedman ‘12 and Danny Zondervan ‘14 were graduate students in 2010 when they developed a novel medical device to help people recover from stroke. The two are musicians as well as biomedical engineers and their invention, the MusicGlove, uses technology and music to gamify the physical rehabilitation process and motivate people to exercise. It is used at home or in clinics to help stroke patients with hand paralysis regain function, augmenting traditional physical therapy.

And it works. They’ve sold over 10,000 MusicGloves over the past 10 years and have developed additional products based on its essence – the connection between music, the brain and the addictive qualities of game playing.

The alums started their company Flint Rehabilitation Devices in 2011 with UCI engineering faculty members David Reinkensmeyer and Mark Bachman. They received their first National Institutes of Health phase one grant ($150,000) in 2012 to help them commercialize the MusicGlove. The NIH small business innovation research and small business technology transfer grants program supports early stage businesses like FlintRehab in taking an innovation from the lab to the marketplace.

In 2017, the company launched their second device, FitMi, a full-body hometherapy tool to help patients retrain their brains and improve movement through repetitive exercises set to music. It includes two wireless pucks and a therapy software app, which guides patients through workouts to improve strength and

dexterity for various parts of the body. It offers 40 different exercises, such as arm raises, toe taps and torso twists, designed by rehabilitation therapists for people with a neurologic injury. The pucks contain multiple sensors and algorithms, and movements are tailored to a patient’s stage of recovery. As patients improve, the FitMi exercise difficulty levels increase to enhance recovery.

FitMi has sold three times as well as the MusicGlove and the founders are developing additional iterations for patients with other conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Diseases.

They hired fellow biomedical engineering alum Justin Rowe ‘15 as lead engineer to develop new devices. Flint makes custom hardware, firmware and software for its products and maintains active Facebook support groups and a popular blog for customers. “We are always listening to our customers as to which additional devices they are looking for,” says Friedman.

After years of being in business, they’ve learned that the technology is only a part of the story. A large missing element in athome neurorehabilitation programs is the interaction and expertise of a clinician. They are now repositioning FlintRehab as a remote therapeutic monitoring company in which their devices will be used in conjunction with a therapist to offer personalized rehab at home. In 2021, Friedman and Zondervan started another company that automates the transfer of patient physiological data from a patient’s home to a clinician.

They created a cellular modem called the Tenovi Gateway that connects to a growing ecosystem of medical devices. Data from each medical device is transmitted seamlessly to clinicians using Tenovi’s HIPAA compliant software.

The concept of remote therapeutic monitoring, or “tele-rehab,” has been around for decades. However, in 2022, federal health insurance enabled therapists to bill Medicare for musculoskeletal or respiratory remote therapeutic monitoring.

“Many stroke survivors will not purchase devices that are not reimbursed by insurance,” says Friedman. “Finding reimbursement pathways to rehabilitation at home naturally leads to the largest impact.”

Tenovi connects to over 30 medical devices including those for patients with hypertension, diabetes, congestive heart failure, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and those that require medical adherence. Tenovi has sold more than 150,000 Tenovi Gateways and devices.

Friedman and Zondervan are not only nimble businessmen but successful at garnering funds. They’ve received 25 grants, totaling $15.5 million, from four different NIH agencies since 2012. FlintRehab has grown to 10 employees and Tenovi employs 30 people. They have six U.S. patents and are still developing new devices. The companies have made $40 million in revenue.

“As a small business you are competing against large companies that have an order of magnitude larger budget and human resources,” says Friedman. “The only way to win is to work both smarter and harder.”

data to their clinician who can remotely monitor their progress.

(left) The MusicGlove helps stroke patients regain hand function.

(right) The Tenovi Gateway is a cellular modem that connects patients’ medical device

“By far the most important lesson I’ve learned is the importance of surrounding yourself with a good team,” says Zondervan. “Our success has only been possible because of the contributions of the people who we’ve hired.”

Their engineering education also inspired them. “My experience at UCI was instrumental in shaping my entrepreneurial aspirations,” says Friedman, “and I was fortunate to be co-advised by professors Bachman and Reinkensmeyer, both of whom had extensive experience in translating academic research into commercial products.”

FlintRehab still maintains ties with the Samueli School of Engineering and is releasing a new product called Boost in conjunction with Reinkensmeyer, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and anatomy and neurobiology and a National Academy of

Inventors fellow. Boost is a novel wheelchair armrest that helps stroke survivors safely perform arm exercises right from their wheelchair, in the earliest stages after injury when the brain has the most plasticity.

“It’s been wonderful to see Nizan and Danny take ideas from the lab environment and make them useful for people in the real world. They have worked hard to develop the diverse skills needed to achieve this translational impact.” says Reinkensmeyer.

“There’s a deep sense of happiness and satisfaction in seeing the positive impact our products have had on the lives of stroke survivors,” says Friedman. “Knowing that our work has made a difference in helping individuals on their rehabilitation journey makes it all worthwhile.”

STUDENT DRIVEN

Every year, 39 million babies are born with outer ear deformities that predispose them to teasing, bullying, anxiety and depression during childhood. These conditions disproportionately affect Hispanic, Native American and Asian-Pacific Islander communities that are often underserved. Nonsurgical options for correction must take place within two to six weeks of birth, making access to treatment difficult for many families, particularly those in low income and remote communities.

Dr. Miles Pfaff, a pediatric and craniofacial plastic surgeon at Children’s Hospital of Orange County (CHOC) and assistant professor of health sciences at UCI, had an idea for a noninvasive, affordable solution, and he turned to a group of UCI senior biomedical engineering students for help with designing and developing a prototype. The undergraduates – Christine Ly (team lead), Christine Nguyen, Kathy Duong and Frida Sandoval – produced a customizable, neonatal ear mold called NeoMold.

“NeoMold originated as an idea. By creating a simple, custom and inexpensive way to mold an ear and putting it in the hands of caregivers, when successful, we could avoid a surgery in the future,” says Pfaff, who provided the basic design idea of the mold to the team.

The team’s prototype is 3D-printed and made of a flexible

filament. NeoMold’s minimized design sets it apart from existing bulky and often uncomfortable newborn ear molds and avoids common problems of other devices such as skin irritation and dislodgement. Unlike currently available designs, NeoMold is customizable to each patient’s ear. Each mold is based on a 3D scan of a patient’s unique anatomy and is designed to correct conditions such as prominent ear, Stahl’s ear and lidding.

“We decided to pursue this project because of the potential impact it could have to improve quality of life, and in general, the standard of care for patients with these conditions,” says Ly.

If left uncorrected, infants with these deformities tend to encounter bullying, causing psychological and social stress during their childhoods. Furthermore, NeoMold’s 3D-printed base lowers cost and shortens manufacturing time, aiming to improve accessibility for a wide geographic range and various income levels so treatment can take place quickly after birth.

The team garnered support for the project through UCI’s many resources and opportunities for entrepreneurial students. Christine King, an associate professor of teaching and director of the BioENGINE program, supports biomedical engineering student design projects. She

advised the NeoMold team and allowed them to use her lab and equipment for developing the prototype.

Pfaff said he sought out the engineering students because he wanted to contribute to the momentum that UCI has built around education, innovation and collaboration between different disciplines. “King’s BioENGINE program was the perfect venue for this,” he says.

“There are a lot of aspects students need to consider in design: safety, efficacy, marketability and regulatory affairs,” says King. “We collaborate with industry, startups and physicians to help provide students with the translation of ideas into real-world devices that can be eventually used in health care.”

In the spring, NeoMold placed first at the Beall Student Design Competition, a UCI entrepreneurship event that focuses on product design and technology development. The team attended six months of coaching sessions to prepare their pitch before exhibiting their work at a demo day, and they received $10,000 as first-place winners to continue improving their prototype.

They took second place overall at the Stella Zhang New Venture Competition, hosted by the UCI Paul Merage School of Business. After passing a concept-paper round, the team prepared for the final, which is modeled after the Shark Tank television show. Finalists gave a threeminute pitch followed by a five-minute question-and-answer session with a panel of esteemed entrepreneurs, and NeoMold received a $5,000 prize.

NeoMold also won the Dean’s Choice Award at the Samueli School’s Annual Winter Design Review, the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, the Best Oral Presentation Award from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program and the Nguyen Tarbet IP Law Entrepreneurial Award at the BioENGINE Annual Device Design Symposium. Through

participation in all of these competitions, NeoMold has gained publicity within the UCI community and earned a total of $30,000.

The team has submitted their record of invention for review to Beall Applied Innovation, UCI’s center for entrepreneurship education, to determine the patentability of the product. They hope to license the technology and sell it to industry for manufacture.

“We started everything from scratch so seeing the project go from sketches on my iPad to something that judges were physically holding in front of us at competitions has been very rewarding,” says Ly. “If we didn’t have the kind of support we received, the project would not have come so far in such little time.”

The NeoMold team celebrates its first place finish in the Beall Student Design Competition with Dean Magnus Egerstedt (center). Pictured from left are students Christine Ly (team lead), Frida Sandoval, Kathy Duong and Christine Nguyen.

SEASONED EXPERT

For engineers who want to be entrepreneurs, the gold standard is Distinguished Professor Diran Apelian, who co-founded Ascend Elements, a company that invented ways to recycle EV batteries and is valued at over $1 billion. TIME magazine named it one of America’s Top Ten Green Tech Companies of 2024.

Did you always imagine you’d be an entrepreneur?

No, however I always imagined I’d be in charge of my destiny and that I would work on problems that are important and impactful. In academia, I saw the opportunity to work on problems I cared about and that mattered and I felt an ownership toward them.

What was the key factor to the success of Ascend Elements?

The stars were aligned. EVs were just coming in and people were making fun of Tesla. The masses didn’t think EVs would someday replace internal combustion engine cars but we knew there was going to be a future in lithium-ion batteries. Lithium is not abundant and the elements that go into making the cathode in those batteries are near

critical and precious such as Co and Ni. One needs to recover and reuse the spent batteries at the end of life. Three of us –Yan Wang, Eric Gratz and I – decided to form a company with no money. We had no revenues and started with a federal contract. It required grit, persistence and more grit.

How were you able to raise money?

As chairman of the board, I recruited my cool friends and formed an advisory board. It became evident that we needed a professional team to take us to the next level so I recruited a CEO, CFO and COO who we couldn’t pay so we gave them equity. With the right team, it just took off. The key is putting the right team together and creating the right culture where people are helping each other with no ego trips. We were all aligned with one goal. Leadership influences the environment and the environment influences people’s behavior. So, the human assets are the most important asset, more than financial and capital assets.

Were you surprised at its success?

I’m surprised at how fast it happened. I knew it was going to happen but not in six to seven years. Yes, the success is a sweet surprise and the credit goes to the team.

Tell us about your other company Solvus Global.

At Solvus Global, we harness the power of a creative and multidisciplinary team to solve difficult problems through development and commercialization of next generation technologies. We take ideas, derisk them, and create a product and market for them and spin out companies. We have the best talent to start companies – two of my former Ph.D. students – Sean Kelly and Aaron Birt who are COO and CEO. Solvus Global provides the infrastructure – everything you need to start a company. It functions like a studio model you find at venture firms. I would say think of Solvus Global as a technology incubator.

What advice do you have for engineers who are aspiring entrepreneurs?

What we often find is that an aspiring entrepreneur has an idea – a cool idea –one they are passionate about. But that’s not enough. The question that needs to be answered is: Whose problem is being solved and are they willing to pay for it?

What’s the key to successful innovation?

Anticipate needs that people don’t even know they need, envision the future, also verify and validate and be willing to drop ideas and move on to the next one. Ultimately, one needs to create value for others, and not for themselves. If one succeeds in creating value for others, they will end up creating value for themselves. The focus should be on others.

How do you know if something has market potential?

Some of it is a gut feeling, some of it is your right brain, some of it’s intuition and some of it is timing, and we can’t forget good luck.

How do you develop the marketplace?

Developing a market is a long process; it requires an acumen for listening, forming relationships, earning trust and delivering on the promise.

Where should people get money for investment?

Simply stated, whoever gives it to you; well almost, as one needs to be concerned about the strings attached with the money that is coming your way. The key is to make the case for why anyone should invest in your startup. The value proposition needs to be made clearly and credibly. I have found that people listen to you if they like you, but they need to trust you if they want to do business with you. So much of it is not about the money, but rather earning the trust and developing the relationship. One’s sincerity, authenticity and humanity, if you will, plays a big role.

Why did you start the Essential Skills class?

In French, the root of engineer is genius. Where I grew up in Europe, engineers are leaders. When I joined the materials science and engineering faculty at UCI, I had the privilege to examine the curriculum and suggest courses. To be successful, engineering students should understand the human dimension.

The answer was to develop a course that awakens in our students the essential skills they need to develop for success in professional life. This course is all about the things I wish someone had told me when I was 20 years old. This is my way of giving back, and the success of the course has been most gratifying. What type of personality is suited to be an entrepreneur?

Not everyone can be one, probably only about 10% are suited. However everyone, with no exception, can develop an entrepreneurial mindset. By this I mean having an understanding of why one is doing what they are doing. Who is the customer? Who benefits from this? Whose problem are we solving?

Being an entrepreneur is not easy. You’re living in a world of uncertainty. You have to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You are afraid to fail, but you also have that resilience that if you fail, you have to get back up on your feet quickly and keep going. It’s chaotic. You have to be willing to do many chores from accounting to janitorial work to making a pitch to investors. It’s not for everyone.

What’s your motto?

“Create value for other people and you end up creating value for yourself.”

Nothing is easy. Doing things for the wrong reasons – just to make money – is not a good reason to start a company. If your reasons are genuine or right – you’re serving a need and creating value – you will succeed and it is sustainable.

The Institute for Rapid Antibody Engineering and Evolution with Chang Liu as director is the inaugural Engineering+ Health Institute. Samueli School Dean Magnus Egerstedt announced the selection this past winter. This is the first of three interdisciplinary institutes outlined in the Samueli School’s 2030 strategic plan – Engineering+ Health, Engineering+ Environment and Engineering+ Society. The institutes are funded by a $50 million gift from Susan and Henry Samueli.

Egerstedt explains that E+ is an inclusive concept. “It acknowledges that although engineering is at the center of the big, impactful research questions we are currently facing, we must go beyond historical, disciplinary boundaries and adopt a deeply collaborative approach to be able to address them.”

With $2.5 million over five years, the Institute for Rapid Antibody Engineering and Evolution will mature and scale up a new synthetic antibody discovery, generation and evolution technology called AHEAD. This revolutionary technology essentially boots up an immune system in a test tube using only yeast cells. Originally developed in 2020 by Liu’s group, in collaboration with researchers from Harvard Medical School, AHEAD uses the research team’s rapidly evolving genetic systems to potentially make disease-fighting drugs faster, cheaper, more effective and accessible, which would transform health care around the world.

“Antibodies are the ‘magic bullets’ of biology, acting as drugs, molecular sensors for disease diagnosis, frontline therapeutics for outbreaks and fundamental research tools for biomedical discovery,” says Liu, professor of biomedical engineering. “Yet the generation of specific antibodies that hit desired molecular targets has historically been a challenging bioengineering problem. With this funding and the collaborative research between antibody evolution, design and application testbeds it will catalyze, the problem of antibody generation should become solved within a few years leading to a new era of medicine and life science research.”

The new institute will have three thrusts. First, it will further develop and disseminate the AHEAD technology, making it as effective and easy to use as possible. Second, it aims to serve a critical function in pandemic prevention by generating therapeutics targeting anticipated pathogens and creating a reservoir for rapid outbreak surveillance and response. Third, the institute will embed rapid antibody engineering technologies into the core capabilities of UCI research groups working on a diversity of diseases, thus demonstrating the general power of this approach in biomedicine and giving UCI an advantage in drug development as an important epicenter for rapid antibody engineering.

Health

Members of this institute span the fields of biomolecular engineering, protein engineering and design, immunology, ophthalmology and infectious disease. In addition to Liu, participants include UCI researchers Han Li, Phil Felgner, Krzysztof Palczewski, Wendy Liu, Ryan Hayes and Greg Weiss, along with collaborators outside of UCI such as Andrew Kruse and Debora Marks from Harvard Medical School.

FACULTY ACCOLADES

EARLY CAREER

NAMED/ ELECTED FELLOW

SHAKIRA HOBBS NSBE Rising Star in Academia

HAN LI Finalist: Blavatnik National Awards for Young Scientists

QUINTON SMITH Popular Science’s Brilliant 10

XIZHENG WANG ARPA-E “IGNIITE 2024” Early Career Innovator

RAHIM ESFANDYAR-POUR DARPA Young Faculty

XIAN SHI Hellman Fellow

FANGYUAN DING Hellman Fellow

DAVID REINKENSMEYER National Academy of Inventors

G.P. LI National Academy of Inventors

JULIAN RIMOLI ASME

ARASH KHERADVAR American Society of Echocardiography

BERNARD CHOI AIMBE

FILIPPO CAPOLINO Optica

BETH LOPOUR American Epilepsy Society

SOLMAZ KIA Newkirk Faculty Fellow

MAXIM SHCHERBAKOV NSF CAREER and DARPA Director’s Fellowship

PERRY JOHNSON NSF CAREER and AFOSR YIP

SALMA ELMALAKI NSF CAREER

CHRISTOPHER OLIVARES MARTINEZ NSF CAREER

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT

18 1 16 1

53 9 5 12 28 6 2

National Academy of Engineering Members

National Academy of Medicine Member

National Academy of Inventors

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Member

NSF CAREER Awardees

NIH New Innovators

DOE Early Career Awardees Endowed Chairs and Professorships

Distinguished Professors Chancellor’s Professors Chancellor’s Fellows

DIRAN APELIAN WPI Presidential Medal

ENRICO GRATTON Honorary Doctorate, University of the Republic, Uruguay

WILLIAM SIRIGNANO ASME’s Spirit of St. Louis Medal KYRIACOS ATHANASIOU

Corp. Great Immigrant Award

Medal of Excellence, Cyprus Academy of Science, Letters and Arts

W. Ellersick Prize ZHONGPING CHEN

S. Feld Biophotonics Award, Optica

REGINA RAGAN HENAAC Award for Outstanding Technical Achievement

BRUCE TROMBERG National Academy of Engineering

SOROOSH SOROOSHIAN European Academy of Sciences

ENDER AYANOGLU IEEE Communications Society Joseph LoCicero Award

ANDREI SHKEL IEEE Sensors Council John Vig Meritorious Service Award

A sampling of UCI engineering faculty cited for their newsworthy expertise

Neuroscientists Uncover Brain Region ‘Crucial’ to Deep Sleep

Newsweek - April 11, 2024

Neuroscientists have discovered a surprising new source of deepsleep brain waves, shaking up our understanding of the architecture of sleep and how we treat sleep disorders. “These findings have significant implications for sleep research, potentially paving the way for new approaches to treating sleep-related disorders,” co-author Gregory Brewer, adjunct professor of biomedical engineering at UC Irvine, said in a statement.

Going car-less in L.A.: The environmental benefits and economic costs

Los Angeles Times - August 16, 2023

“We’re not ready to live without cars at this point in most parts of California,” said Jean-Daniel Saphores, professor [and chair] of the department of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine. Saphores, who studied the carless population, said such people generally fall into two categories. There are people … who choose not to have a car for a variety of reasons, whether it’s health, convenience, the environment, or something else entirely. … The other group is made up of people who can’t afford cars, Saphores said.

The Era of Super-Wild Weather is Already Here

Bloomberg - June 18, 2024

“The common denominator here is rising temperatures,” says Amir AghaKouchak, a professor at University of California, Irvine who has studied the future risk of compound events.

“Temperature has increased significantly, and it’s contributing to all of [the disasters] and it’s intensifying maybe the relationship between different hazards.”

What causes fire embers to spread more quickly

ABC News - November 30, 2023

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine who study the behavior of fire embers have determined the majority of fire damage in major wildfires comes from embers that have the ability to move far away from the actual burn site. They also have studied how strong wind gusts can send even large embers flying long distances where they can land and create new spot fires. “We are trying to understand under what conditions the embers are lofted away from the fire,” Tirtha Banerjee, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine, told ABC News. “So, how fast do they emerge? How many of these embers can emerge and how far they can really land?”

Researchers uncover battery-like functions of mitochondria using superresolution microscopes

Phys.org - November 28, 2023

Using new super-resolution microscopes, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Pennsylvania have for the first time observed electrical charge and discharge functions inside mitochondria isolated from cells. “When we first started studying isolated mitochondria, we knew they behaved like a battery,” said co-author Peter Burke, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “Now we can control each individual electrical component and cause it to charge and discharge.”

California’s Flood Defenses Held This Time, but They Are Weakening

The Wall Street Journal - February 10, 2024

“The infrastructure is optimized to move water quickly to the ocean, and it did its job,” said Brett Sanders, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine. “But had we had another storm right after that, we might have gotten close to the limits of that system.” A 2022 report from UC Irvine determined that a 100-year flood event in Los Angeles would expose more than 400,000 people to danger, with property damage of more than $50 billion, comparable to that of a major hurricane.

The Bodily Indignities of the Space Life

The New York Times MagazineNovember 12, 2023

“The bladder may reach maximum capacity before an urge is felt, at which point urination may happen suddenly and spontaneously,” according to “A Review of Challenges & Opportunities: Variable and Partial Gravity for Human Habitats in L.E.O.,” or low Earth orbit. This is a report that came out last year from the authors Ronke Olabisi, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, and Mae Jemison, a retired NASA astronaut.

TMJ Horrors: Chronic Pain, Metal Jaws and Futile Treatments

U.S. News & World Report - April 11, 2024

Kyriacos Athanasiou, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of California, Irvine, said it was because TMJ disorders are more prevalent among women that they were historically dismissed as neither serious nor complex, slowing research into the cause and treatment. The resulting dearth of knowledge, which is glaring when compared with other joints, has been “a huge disservice” to patients, Athanasiou said. In a 2021 study he co-authored, researchers found that the knee, despite being a much simpler joint, was the subject of about six times as many research papers and grants in a single year than the jaw joint.

Sneaky color-changing octopus inspires deception tech

Futurity - January 4, 2024

Senior coauthor Alon Gorodetsky, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Irvine, [said], “For this project, we worked to mimic the octopus’ natural abilities with devices from unique materials we synthesized in our laboratory, and the result is an octopus-inspired deception and signaling system that is straightforward to fabricate, functions for a long time when operated continuously, and can even repair itself when damaged.”

Electric Car Owners Confront a Harsh Foe: Cold Weather

The New York Times - January 17, 2024

The challenge for electric vehicles is the two sides of the battery — the anode and the cathode — have chemical reactions that are slowed during extremely cold temperatures. That affects both the charging and the discharging of the battery, said Jack Brouwer, director of the Clean Energy Institute and a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of California, Irvine. “It ends up being very difficult to make battery electric vehicles work in very cold conditions,” Mr. Brouwer said. “You cannot charge a battery as fast or discharge a battery as fast if it’s cold. There’s no physical way of getting around.”

Heart-saving Advances

UCI engineering researchers have designed a new biointerface technology for organizing engineered cardiac tissues that could pave the way for future light-triggered, life-saving cardiac devices such as pacemakers.

Herdeline Ann Ardoña, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, said that light-based stimulations are better because it could mean that nextgeneration cardiac devices could be light-sensitive and minimize the need for invasive, wired instrumentation.

“The convention in the field is to use metal-based electrodes to electrically stimulate cardiac tissues,” said Ardoña. “Here, we built current-generating interfaces with organic-based soft material components that are light-responsive, and with well-defined surfaces as an interface for cardiac muscle cells.”

The cardiac cell-compatible technology generates electrical currents in response to pulsed light stimulation. It is the first example of a cardiac photoconductive biointerface that is powered by soft material components (peptides and polymers) and is also capable of controlling biomolecular assembly and the organization of cardiac cells cultured atop devices. The findings are featured in Advanced Materials’ Rising Stars special collection

The technology also holds promise for higher spatial resolution stimulation when working with lab-based models. Lab-grown tissue models are beneficial for studying mechanisms of diseases and natural biological processes, or for performing high-throughput drug screening or toxicology studies.

The lead author of the paper is Ze-Fan Yao, a postdoctoral researcher from Ardoña’s group. According to Yao and Ardoña, “In addition to achieving a photoresponsive biointerface, our study with these nanoscale-featured surfaces that drive the assembly of semiconducting peptides also revealed insights on the sensitivity of cardiac tissues to the molecular composition and order of the biomolecules that comprise its microenvironment.”

The paper also features UCI graduate students in chemical and biomolecular engineering, and biomedical engineering: Yuyao Kuang, Emil Lundqvist and Natalie Celt, along with UCI materials science and engineering alumnus Xin Fu ’23, Ph.D., from Professor Emeritus Albert Yee’s group. The work was funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and supported by a seed grant from UCI’s Center for Complex and Active Materials.

“We

built currentgenerating interfaces with organic-based soft material components that are light-responsive, and with well-defined surfaces as an interface for cardiac muscle cells.”

New Theory Extended

Haithem Taha, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and his group developed a new theory of lift to solve a century-old technical challenge in aerodynamics. Based on the principle of least curvature, the new theory fundamentally changes how researchers understand flight. In their recent research, published in the December 2023 issue of Physics of Fluids, they extend this work and propose a new approach for solving fluid mechanics problems based on a principle of minimization. The researchers applied the new theory of lift to the flow over a rotating cylinder, such as the one used on a rotor ship, and managed to find simple analytical solutions without the need to solve the complicated nonlinear partial differential equation of Navier-Stokes. “We named it the Principle of Minimum Pressure Gradient (PMPG). So, this technique turns fluid mechanics problems into an optimization problem,” said Taha.

Stronger DNA Duplexes

A UCI team of researchers is making exciting advances in DNA nanotechnologies. The group, led by Stacy Copp, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, recently reported a new approach to enhance the stability and functionality of DNA nanostructures while still retaining their remarkable bio-enabled properties. The research is published in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. The researchers address the major, long-term issue of thermal and chemical fragility of DNA nanomaterials by creating DNA duplexes that are paired together with silver ions. These silver-mediated DNA duplexes are far more stable than nature’s DNA duplex and can persist up to nearly the temperature of boiling water. They also discovered that under certain conditions, the silver-paired DNA duplexes appeared to assemble into larger nanostructures, which could have novel applications for DNA-based nanoelectronics.

Neural Network

Penghui Cao, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, led an effort to develop a neural network to search and identify materials with optimal compositions to improve the performance of energy systems. The newly introduced neuron map presents an effective process for exploring the vast compositional space of multicomponent alloys and lays the groundwork for discovering ultrastrong and creep-resistant alloys for application in severe environments. The researchers' work appears in the May 2024 Nature Communications. “We reveal the diffusion-induced chemical and structural evolution in complex, concentrated chemical environments and find the critical temperature at which the chemical order reaches a maximum,” said Cao.

Neuron Map Representation of Structure

Blood Flow Data

A team led by Dr. Arash Kheradvar, professor of biomedical engineering and medicine, received funding from the National Institutes of Health to develop a new method for grading mitral valve backflow. Researchers want to determine the efficacy of a noninvasive technique for evaluating the severity of mitral valve regurgitation in which blood flows backwards from the left ventricle into the left atrium of the heart. On average, the disease affects more than 2% of the population with a prevalence that increases with age. The condition can be debilitating and lead to severe heart failure and death. Kheradvar stressed that although detection of mitral valve regurgitation with standard imaging methods such as echocardiography is straightforward, grading its severity is challenging and requires considerable experience. He proposes using a novel technology called “volumetric echocardiographic particle image velocimetry,” which was developed in his UCI lab. V-Echo-PIV will derive three-dimensional information of blood flow in the left side of the heart to accurately measure how much is regurgitating near the mitral valve. Kheradvar said a procedure employing V-Echo-PIV can provide determinative data in as few as four heartbeats.

Clean Hydrogen Hub

California is set to build the nation’s largest clean hydrogen ecosystem after the White House announced it will award $1.2 billion toward the plan. That figure is only part of a $12 billion hydrogen hub led by the Alliance for Renewable Clean Hydrogen Energy Systems (ARCHES), a public-private partnership, which includes the University of California. As an intellectual leader in the hydrogen economy, UCI engineers initiated the move to unite the University of California in this unprecedented effort. Professors Plamen Atanassov and Jack Brouwer are interim directors for business development on the ARCHES leadership team. The ARCHES plan will build infrastructure that can transport, store and dispense hydrogen throughout California. A key focus of the plan are ports that will transition to using hydrogen-fueled trucks and cargo handling equipment. At least 40% of the benefits of the hydrogen hub will flow to disadvantaged communities, who have been engaged in the proposal development process.

Cost-saving Fabrication

Assistant Professor Maxim Shcherbakov is developing a new method of shaping materials that could reduce the cost of fabricating microelectronics, such as those used in cellphones. “We use specially designed microparticles that can funnel light into much smaller spots, modifying materials such as silicon at a scale of down to almost one-hundredth of a wavelength,” said Shcherbakov. He published the new technique, called femtosecond laser-assisted nanostructuring of engineered microstructures (FLANEM), in Nature Communications. FLANEM expands the nanofabrication toolbox and offers exciting opportunities for high-throughput optical methods of nanoscale structuring of solid materials, such as silicon and other semiconductors. This finding is timely as the nation gears up its efforts to increase microelectronics and semiconductor manufacturing as part of the CHIPS and Science Act.

Ironclad Beetle

The diabolical ironclad beetle, a native to desert habitats in the southwest United States and Mexico, and the Japanese rhinoceros beetle are the subjects of a new Air Force Office of Scientific Research-funded project led by David Kisailus, professor of materials science and engineering. The researchers will study structures in the beetles’ exoskeletons that make them so well-adapted to harsh environments and use those blueprints to create new multifunctional synthetic materials useful in national defense, aerospace and other applications.

In a paper published in Nature in 2020, Kisailus directed a team that revealed some of the secrets behind the otherworldly toughness of the flightless insect. In this newly funded AFOSR research, principal investigator Kisailus, with colleague Pablo Zavattieri, professor of civil engineering at Purdue University, will further examine the elytra, or protective forewings, of the ironclad and an airborne relative, the Japanese rhinoceros beetle.

They will combine the use of advanced, high-resolution microscopic, spectroscopic and nanomechanical analysis with computer modeling to study the nano- and microstructures and functions of the different beetles’ elytra. While the rhinoceros beetle’s elytra can open for flight, the elytra of the ironclad – which, as Kisailus’ team previously demonstrated, protect the beetle from events as extreme as being run over by a car – are fixed in place and must serve as a robust shield against strikes from predators while also enabling the insect to survive in extreme desert conditions. By acquiring high-resolution, 3D chemical and structural maps of the surface and within the beetles’ elytra, the researchers will attempt to learn how this incredible creature can not only protect itself from predators, but also stay cool in ultradry and hot environments. Beyond this, the scientists will study the proteins within these structures to understand their role in the self-assembly of these complex features.

“The research will lead to the development of architected materials that not only serve as high-performance structural materials, but also enable multifunctionality, which is not readily achieved in current engineered structures,” Kisailus said. He anticipates that the findings will lead to lightweight, crush- and impact-resistant materials with integrated thermal regulation capabilities for use in protective gear as well as vehicles operated on land, in the air and outer space.

“This work is highly interdisciplinary, leveraging materials science, biology and physics, combined with cuttingedge instrumentation, to reveal new design rules and provide insight as to how biological systems build these unique structures.”

Energy Earthshots

Three engineering faculty – Russell Detwiler, M.J. Abdolhosseini Qomi and Iryna Zenyuk –are participating in projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Earthshots Initiative to accelerate innovations toward more abundant, affordable and reliable clean energy solutions.

The DOE announced $264 million in funding for 29 projects, supporting 11 new Energy Earthshot Research Centers led by DOE National Laboratories and 18 university research teams. There are seven Energy Earthshot categories, and the UCI engineers are collaborators in two of the Earthshots: the Enhanced Geothermal Shot and the Hydrogen Shot. The DOE launched the initiative to spur decarbonization efforts that will help the United States meet President Biden’s ambitious climate and clean energy goals, including a 50% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 and a net-zero carbon economy by 2050.

“We are very excited and proud to see our faculty’s expertise being sought after in these hugely important efforts toward clean energy technologies and decarbonization,” said Efi Foufoula-Georgiou, associate dean for research and innovation in the Samueli School.

Detwiler and Qomi, both associate professors in civil and environmental engineering, are co-principal investigators for the Center for Understanding Subsurface Signals and Permeability, that will advance geothermal systems with the goal of making them a widely accessible and reliable source of renewable energy. Qomi will lead molecular and mesoscale simulations to understand complex chemical reactions at the rock-fluid interfaces and the footprint these reactions leave on electrical sensing signals. Detwiler will lead laboratory experiments in fractured rock cores and micromodels to quantify chemical reactions including mineral dissolution and precipitation, and their influence on permeability and electrical resistivity.

Zenyuk, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, serves as a characterization thrust lead on a project for the new Center for Ionomer-based Water Electrolysis, which aims to improve hydrogen generation by analyzing the use of ion-conducting polymers for low-temperature electrolysis, the process of generating hydrogen from water by applying electricity. Zenyuk’s research focuses on furthering fundamental understanding of interfaces and dynamic processes in water electrolyzers.

“The momentum built from these collaborative projects will position UCI well for future efforts and will create career paths for our students.”

Microsensor Brain Monitor

UCI engineering researchers have developed a novel micro biosensor that could help neuroscientists investigate and better understand normal brain functions and disorders such as autism, brain injury and stroke. Hung Cao, associate professor of electrical engineering, invented the dual L-glutamate/ GABBA implantable microsensor, which he said is “a dream tool for neuroscientists.” The tiny device has a shaft with five microelectrodes (50 microns by 100 microns each) at the tip, that can be inserted anywhere into gray matter to successfully detect the two major neurotransmitters that govern excitation and inhibition, namely L-glutamate and gammaaminobutyric acid (GABA), respectively. These two neurotransmitters govern nearly all processes in the brain, from birth to death. An imbalance of excitation/ inhibition ratios are associated with a variety of neurological disorders, making accurate monitoring of these neurotransmitter levels crucial for investigating underlying causes of these conditions.

ProperData Paper Impact

Professor Athina Markopoulou directs the ProperData Center, a five-year, $10 million NSF SATC Frontiers project that addresses the urgent need for protection of personal data flow on the internet. Last fall, the multi-university research team from the center won the Best Paper Award for its study showing that Amazon collects and uses smart speaker voice data to target advertisements. The award was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2023 Internet Measurement Conference in Montreal. The paper, “Tracking, Profiling, and Ad Targeting in the Alexa Echo Smart Speaker Ecosystem,” garnered attention from the media and Amazon, which subsequently made policy updates.

Thermal Energy Technologies

A research team led by Yoonjin Won, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, was chosen for a multidisciplinary university research initiative (MURI) from the U.S. Department of Defense for a project to improve efficiency of thermal management systems for Navy power and energy applications. The project aims to develop an intelligent framework for liquid-vapor phase change physics that integrates advanced metrology with computer vision and machine learning. Phase change heat transfer, involving boiling or condensation, has been used for over 100 years for energy and power systems. It is an essential element of modern building systems, transportation, refrigeration and power generation. The physics of phase change heat transfer are incredibly complicated due to their chaotic nature and the multiple physical processes that are present in these systems. The researchers will collect high-resolution vision information from phase change flows. By learning physics-based characteristics, this framework will be generalizable, scalable and explainable, enabling the design of new, higher performing phase change heat transfer systems.

Red Baron Races into the Record Book

by Lilith Christopher

Anteater engineer alum Amy Dunford ’14 is breaking records racing the fastest gasolinepowered 350cc pushrod motorcycle in the world. Dunford rides and co-owns the Red Baron, a supercharged 1985 Moto Morini 3 1/2 motorcycle, along with her mentor Robert “Smitty” Smith, a volunteer adviser for UCI’s Anteater Racing.

Dunford was exposed to STEM at an early age because her father was an engineer, but her natural passion for cars drove her interest in mechanics.

“When I was in sixth grade, I heard the exhaust of a newly released Lamborghini and thought it was amazing,” she said. “That was the first moment that I knew I wanted to be a mechanical engineer and understand how that awesomeness was created.”

Dunford attended UCI for bachelor’s degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from 2010-14. When she was a sophomore, her father was killed in a car crash, and she joined the school’s race car team the following year as an escape from her grief. Smitty introduced his Red Baron project to the racecar team shortly after. Dunford supported Smitty at a few races, and officially became the crew chief in 2014.

“Racing became my happy place,” said Dunford, who didn’t miss a Red Baron race for her first four years working with Smitty. “Anytime I had a spare moment on campus and knew Smitty was in the lab, I would be his apprentice.”

Smitty chose the Red Baron’s base motorcycle, a 1985 Moto Morini, because it is entirely mechanical and has a six-speed transmission instead of the five-speed transmission typical of its era. The bike is also known for being stable around corners and dependable on rough terrain, key aspects when hitting top speeds.

Dunford stayed at UCI until 2017, earning a master’s degree and teaching introductory engineering classes. She then moved to Indiana for a master’s degree in engineering education, followed by a job at New York University. During her absence, fellow UCI alumnus Vaz Frnzyan ’18 became the crew chief.

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Samueli School alum Amy Dunford races the Red Baron, a supercharged 1985 motorcycle, with additional sidecar added to qualify for new records.

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Dunford and Smitty competed at Bonneville Salt Flats in August 2023.

Dunford became the rider of the Red Baron in 2021, traveling long distance to make the races. In 2022, she returned to Southern California permanently to become a test engineer for Hyundai. Since, she has completed three racing seasons with Smitty and Frnzyan, as well as engineering alumnae Diana Terska ’19.

“The number of female competitors at events like Bonneville is in the single digits or low teens, and female race engineers that are 100% involved in designing and developing the race vehicle like Amy are extremely rare,” said Smitty. “I’m proud that we have been able to expose many of our engineering students, both male and female, to a real motorsport experience.”

The Red Baron team is part of the Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) Gear Grinders land speed racing club. Since the motorcycle is one of only a few supercharged bikes worldwide in its class, the Red Baron usually competes individually at events to break previous records and earn points for the club. This past season became their best so far when the Red Baron finished second in the SCTA Motorcycle Championship. Racing events take place once a month from May to November at El Mirage Dry Lake in the central Mojave Desert and once a year in August at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, and they feature a variety of motorcycles, trucks, sports cars and other vehicles attempting records. Smitty believes the Red Baron team’s most impressive

engineering feat is the 126-mph record Dunford set at El Mirage in October 2021.

“We developed an 87-mph street bike into a 126-mph race bike with zero destructive testing while the racing norm is to break engine parts and upgrade the broken bits until you run out of money or time,” said Smitty. “We, on the other hand, had almost no parts availability and a very small budget to work with so we used historical knowledge and mathematics to establish the reliable power levels we operate at currently.”

During the winter months when water in the lake bed keeps the team from racing, they tackle mechanical repairs and upgrades. Since last November, Dunford has spent weekends replacing rusted parts, testing new designs and cleaning salt from the bike’s interior after the Bonneville event last August. She is also working on swapping engines and introducing a chemical fuel system to allow the Red Baron to qualify for other classes and pursue new records.

“Mechanical engineering gets us up to speed, and aerodynamics limits our top speed,” said Dunford. “The best reward is when all the tinkering and work that we do in the lab pays off at the track.”

The Red Baron’s 2024 race season kicked off in June with a new class record-setting speed of 107.398 mph. Events are open to the public and race information and technical upgrades are updated on the team’s Instagram account.

Donation Further Boosts Diversity in STEM

A $5 million gift from UCI Foundation trustee Stacey Nicholas endowed and renamed a Samueli School program that supports the recruitment, retention and graduation of students to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in science, technology, engineering and math.

With the gift, the Office of Access and Inclusion was renamed the Stacey Nicholas Office of Outreach, Access and Inclusion and created the Women and Engineering Program, which provides leadership training, mentorship, professional development and other services to promote the success and advancement of women in engineering. The program is open to all students committed to this mission.

“I firmly believe that investing in scholarships and programs for students dedicated to advancing diversity in engineering is not just an act of philanthropy; it’s an investment in our shared future,” Nicholas said. “It is critical to open pathways for all interested students, ensuring that engineering remains an accessible and promising field for everyone. In doing so, we shape not only the future of engineering but also the world it serves, making it stronger, more equitable and infinitely more innovative.”

Nicholas is an electrical engineer who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UCLA. She heads the Irvine-based Opus Foundation, which promotes STEM education outreach and the arts. Active on various dean’s advisory and executive boards for UCI’s engineering and information & computer sciences schools, Nicholas is a strong advocate of programs encouraging students from diverse backgrounds to pursue STEM education, as well as a supporter of the arts and education.

Largest Turnout Ever

“This year’s Beall Butterworth Competition was record-breaking in many ways,” said entrepreneur David Ochi, who serves as director of the product design and development competition at UCI. “The number of students competing eclipsed any previous year by over 25%, and the participants demonstrated user-focused design skills, prototyping, and business and market acumen that upped the game to levels the judges had never seen before in the 12-plus years of this competition.”

The annual competition has two elements: the Beall Student Design Competition, serving students in the Samueli School of Engineering and funded by the Beall Family Foundation, and the Butterworth Product Development Competition, catering to students in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences and funded by alumnus Paul Butterworth. Engineering and ICS students have the opportunity to team up with other UCI students and experience real-world product development and entrepreneurship. The six-month competition includes nine workshops and three coaching sessions, leading up to a final demo day with a panel of industry leaders serving as judges.

A record-breaking 56 concepts were submitted to the competitions this year, culminating in a total of 33 projects for Demo Day. The top teams for each competition received $10,000 for first place, $6,500 for second place, and $3,500 for third place.

Engineering and computer science students "up their game" for the 2024 Beall Butterworth Competition.

Samueli Foundation Funds Collaborative Projects

The schools of engineering at UCI and UCLA share not only the Southern California coastline, but also the name of engineer, businessman and philanthropist Henry Samueli. Both schools are named in honor of the co-founder of Broadcom after he made generous donations to support engineering education and research. And now a recent gift from the Samueli Foundation has inspired 18 new collaborations between faculty at the two campuses.

“There is a huge appetite for and potential of building collaborations across the two Samueli Schools of Engineering in critical areas of engineering and sustainability,” said UCI Associate Dean of Research and Innovation Efi FoufoulaGeorgiou who coordinated the selection process. “This initiative is bringing faculty together to explore opportunities and common interests.”

Funding for the projects began in January 2024. Some proposals included workshops in targeted areas of interest, short visits of faculty and students to both campuses, as well as co-advising a graduate student or postdoc to broaden the student’s learning experience and provide an opportunity for faculty to work together. There were also plans to create new course modules to enable engineering workforce development.

The initiatives chosen focused on efforts that would most likely not be supported by other sources and would provide the seeds for larger collaborative efforts. These include 11 workshops/symposia, one educational activity and one summer module development as well as five early career faculty teams that each received $25,000 to jump start their joint projects.

Industry Experts Talk Trends in NewSpace

The third installment of the Samueli School’s ongoing Industry Insights symposium series held last fall featured the emerging commercial space industry.

“We’re in a new era, the renaissance of the next generation of NewSpace,” said Blue Origin Chief Architect Robert Moeller. The forum gathered experts from leading space companies to discuss upcoming trends and engage with engineering students interested in the field. Moeller was joined by leaders from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Northrop Grumman, Relativity Space and Terran Orbital in panel discussions, and company representatives spoke with students about career opportunities.

Citigroup projects that NewSpace will become a $1 trillion industry by 2040. Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer founded by Jeff Bezos, envisions millions of people working and living in space in the future. These projections mean promising opportunities for young people.

The experts also defined the distinct roles of private companies and the government in the field. The ability to fail is one aspect that sets private companies apart from NASA. “Companies want to iterate,” said Relativity Space Senior Director of Integrated Performance Ryan Kraft. “They move fast and go to broad applications like sending people into space for tourism.”

“Your ability to fail leads to your ability to discover,” said Northrop Grumman Director of Engineering Tony D’Agostino. He encouraged students, “Don’t be afraid to fail going forward.”

Along with the fast-paced growth of the industry, the experts cited another promising trend for students: the need for diversity. D’Agostino said groupthink was one of the past causes of failures in space and demonstrates why a multitude of perspectives is important to helping the industry realize more successful missions.

Future missions will also involve international collaboration and ventures in space will require a global effort. “The space future is for all of us,” said Moeller. “We need diversity and an interchange of ideas. We’re going to build entire new cultures.”

The symposium included a presentation by students from the engineering school’s Rocket Project and ample time for students to network with industry representatives. Companies also hosted booths to welcome student inquiries about job opportunities.

Ahoy Matey

The annual engineering school’s Alumni Hall of Fame took place on a beautiful spring evening aboard the legendary Queen Mary in Long Beach, California.

Faculty, friends and family gathered to celebrate three alumni who were honored for making a significant impact on their profession and bringing distinction to their alma mater. The evening started with a cocktail reception on the Captain’s Deck before guests and honorees made their way to the Queen’s Salon for a buffet dinner.

Engineering Dean Magnus Egerstedt reminded the room full of engineers that their field is profoundly creative. “Our job is to imagine solutions to some of the hardest problems that exist on the planet. These are solutions that don’t exist yet.”

Upon receiving her award, engineering honoree Tasha Higgins ’93 could barely contain her excitement: “Wow, I thought being Mace Marshall at last year’s commencement was the pinnacle, this is like winning an Oscar!”

Here are the 2024 Alumni Hall of Fame inductees.

Jean-Pierre Delplanque, M.S./ Ph.D. 1993 – Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

learning environments for graduate students and postdoctoral scholars equipping them to spearhead discoveries with global impact.

Tasha Higgins, B.S. 1993 – Civil Engineering

Tasha Higgins has three decades of experience in traffic, transportation and construction projects, working in multiple industries including ports, aviation, rail and highways. At the Port of Long Beach, Higgins oversaw a $2.3 billion capital improvement program as director of the Program Management Division, and at Los Angeles County Metro she administered the $20 billion Measure R Highway Program. Today, she is principal engineer at Caltrans where she leads the planning, design and implementation of improvements to state and federal highway facilities in preparation for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Jean-Pierre Delplanque is vice provost and dean of graduate studies at UC Davis. A professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Delplanque’s research and educational activities focus on the modeling and numerical simulation of complex fluid and thermal processes such as rocket propulsion, respiratory flows and additive manufacturing. A first-generation college student, he has become a leader in graduate education and supports the development of inclusive, equitable

Rabi Narula, B.S. 1992 – Mechanical Engineering

Rabi Narula has been an intellectual property attorney and partner at Knobbe Martens for over 25 years. He has developed intellectual property portfolios and strategies for clients involved in a wide range of technologies including medical devices, semiconductor fabrication, food science, automobile technologies and robotics. Within the medical device space, Narula has been the lead IP counsel with emerging and large companies in the aesthetics, cardiovascular, spine, dental and prosthetic fields. Narula earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Stanford and then a JD from UCLA School of Law.

The Samueli School of Engineering Alumni Hall of Fame was established in 2015 to coincide with UCI’s 50th anniversary. Sixtyfour alumni have now been inducted.

Guests and honorees gather on the Captain’s Deck for a cocktail reception at the 2024 Hall of Fame celebration on board the legendary Queen Mary in the Port of Long Beach.

Engineering Alumna Contributes Technology Expertise in the U.S. Digital Corps

Veronica Swanson ’14 (B.S.), ’16 (M.A.), ’23 (Ph.D.) earned all three of her degrees in mechanical engineering at the UCI Samueli School before joining the U.S. Digital Corps (USDC) as a data science and analytics fellow. Launched in 2021 in collaboration with the White House and partners across government, the USDC offers early career technologists an onramp into federal service with the potential to convert into permanent positions. Fellows support agencies with skills including software engineering, product management, design, data science and analytics, and cybersecurity. Swanson is one of 48 fellows selected from 1,355 applicants this year, and she will serve two years supporting the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Tell us about your work at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

I am working (remotely) for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Office of the Chief Information Officer. USDA is working on many projects across its mission areas to promote equity in the services the American public receives and has access to. These projects are related to White House initiatives such as Justice40 and Executive Orders like EO 1385: Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government. I am working with a team to develop a dashboard that will allow decision-makers to view what projects are currently underway across the agency related to different initiatives and track progress.

Why are you interested in public policy?

I’m interested in public policy for its potential broad impact downstream in the lives of many people. My role is more focused on the implementation of policy than policy development. I think implementation is often overlooked, but the way you implement a project has a big effect on its success.

What are some of the challenges the government faces regarding technology/digital transformation?

There are a lot of factors that present challenges for government transformation. Many people have and continue to work on this topic.

In my role specifically, I’ve seen that some challenges stem from the length of time many of these government institutions have existed. Across all organizations -- not just in government -- maintenance or innovation of a system isn’t always a priority if the system works well enough. There are also many competing needs and stakeholders with different priorities.

So, one of the challenges for technologists is to communicate why change is needed, and what we are losing if we don’t invest in specific ways.

What are you hoping to achieve as a fellow?

I think technology implementation has the potential to streamline and connect processes. I’m hoping to help make important information more accessible. If we don’t have data, we can’t make data-driven decisions, and we can’t evaluate the success of policy implementation.

What are your career plans after the two-year fellowship?

At this point, it’s too early to tell. At the end of the program, I’ll be a different person, and what I’m interested in and what I want may be different. I’m a big believer in the idea that a large part of success is being in the right place at the right time. So what opportunities I’ll have available will depend on my experience and networking over the next two years.

How did your UCI engineering education prepare you for this role?

I think my engineering education has helped me develop process-oriented and systematic problem-solving strategies. Those strategies help me tackle projects even if the domain or the programs are unfamiliar to me. I’m grateful for the people I got to meet at UCI. I worked and learned with people from a diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives that I might have not seen otherwise.

What advice would you give to first-year Anteater engineers?

When you’re starting out, it’s important to explore a lot of opportunities, fields and disciplines. Often, when you get a job or pursue academic research, you focus on a topic or process. So, identifying what you are interested in earlier will help you find more fulfilling opportunities later. And, you may end up finding skills from one experience that end up helping you in a domain you thought was unrelated.

Foundation Trustees Tour Clean Rooms

A group of curious UCI Foundation members went on a clean room expedition in May to see where UCI researchers, students and local industry members create micro- and nano-fabricated semiconductors, sensors and devices. They visited the Integrated Nanosystem Research Facility (INRF) at Engineering Gateway and Bio-Organic Nanofabrication (BiON) at CALIT2.

Jim Mazzo, Foundation trustee and co-chair of engagement and stewardship, welcomed the crowd and introduced Hung Cao, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who often uses the two clean rooms.

Cao said the work happening in the facilities involves many of today’s most important technologies being applied in artificial intelligence, renewable energy, quantum materials, Internet of Things and biotechnology. With 15,000 square feet of almostdustless space, the two facilities maintain advanced equipment for processing semiconductors, thin films and biomaterials.

“Well-trained staff are training our students and we have a lot of ambitious projects and cutting-edge research going on here,” said Cao.

After the presentations, the group suited up for the tour. The highly controlled facilities strictly limit contaminants, requiring filtered and recirculated air to preserve the integrity of the micro- and nanofabrication processes that occur within. Visitors must wear head-to-toe coverings to protect the clean environment from outside pollutants.

Alumnus Scores on Shark Tank

UCI mechanical engineering alumnus Justin Huang ’10 won $75,000 on Shark Tank from investor Mark Cuban for Cup-a-Bug. His invention enables people to easily catch and release insects without harming them. “I’ve always been scared of bugs, especially spiders, and I always felt bad about killing them,” Huang said. So he did what Anteater engineers do – he created a solution.

Huang says his device is like using a cup and paper, but from a distance – a three-foot pole to be exact. At the end of the pole is a fully articulated head that can pivot in any direction to make it easy to catch bugs with a polycarbonate box. It even works in hard-to-reach places like corners or high ceilings. The lid slides open and closes to catch the critters, and then the door locks in place. Cup-a-Bug provides an eco-friendly humane solution to an everyday problem.

The device has over 30 custom-designed parts made in SolidWorks, the 3D software Huang learned as an engineering student. “It’s all the stuff I learned at UCI like SolidWorks, finite element analysis, mechanics of behavior,” he said.

He perfected the design during the pandemic when he started gardening and countless flies, gnats and spiders entered his home. In March 2022, he launched Cup-aBug on Kickstarter and in February 2024, he received additional funding from Cuban after his pitch on the popular entrepreneurial television show.

“Everyone can love dogs and cats, but the one animal that doesn’t get a lot of love are insects. They look creepy and people just want to squash them,” Huang said. “I felt bad that they were getting judged by their face value, so I wanted to do something about it.”

UCI Foundation trustees, from left, John Carrington, Mary Carrington, Kate Klimow, Dick Ackerman, Linda Ackerman, Gary Singer, Dulcie Kugelman and Bob Romney suit up for a tour of the INRF clean rooms.

SCI-FI ENGINEER

Mechanical engineering senior Crew Parker (pictured) wrote, filmed and directed the 35-minute sci-film "Meridian," which premiered on May 26 and starred many Samueli School engineering students.

A "Star Wars" fan, Parker started writing the script in fifth grade and felt his time at UCI was the perfect time to consummate it. Nearly a hundred students were in the cast and crew and he’s in talks with Amazon and Netflix about making it a three-season series. "Meridian" seeks to answer the question: What would happen if Luke Skywalker took over after Emperor Palpatine? Can even the best person hold so much power?

Parker believes engineering and the arts are directly correlated. “Engineering requires the utmost creativity to think of something abstract that’s never been solved before,” Parker said. “Filmmaking is a lot of problem solving, especially in sci fi. Someone hands you a script and you need to come up with technology to make it happen.” After graduating in June, he started work at Lucasfilm, helping manage the canon of Star Wars video assets. Parker’s dream is to be a director of a featurelength film.

June’s ceremony celebrated more than 1,200 students’ hard work and success. This was particularly meaningful for most, who four years prior were robbed of a traditional high school graduation due to the pandemic. In his parting message to the newest batch of alums, Dean Egerstedt said, “I want to remind you of a quote from Spiderman’s uncle: ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ And you now have a new superpower, you are Anteater engineers. Use your superpower for good, leave the planet better than you found it.”