ENGINEERING progressengineering.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/SP14_Engineering_Progress.pdfENGINEERING PROGRESS / Spring 2014 7 developing a few months before he completed

IMPACTMAKING AN

in healthcare

ENGINEERINGprogress SPRING 2014

2 UC DAVIS C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

This year, I participated in a college competition to see who could make the longest spinning gyroscope. It was a challenge I didn’t expect to take to. But once I got invested in it, I was hooked! It turned into a challenge I had to win. And I did—with a spinning time of 7 minutes and 20 seconds.

Challenging the next generation of great engineering innovators is no easy task. That is why the College of Engineering needs your help.

By giving to the College of Engineering, you can strengthen the college’s ability to provide a top-quality academic experience to all students. And that will help forward engineering achievement more than you can imagine.

Make a difference you can feel good about. Please give online today at giving.ucdavis.edu.

– Kelsey Johnson ’14

P.S. I feel good about the education I am getting at the UC Davis College of Engineering! Please continue to support their important work today by giving back!

Thank you again for your support!

ENGINEERSSUPPORT AGGIE

Kelsey Johnson

UC Davis Engineering Progress • Spring 2014

Engineering Progress is published twice a year by the College of Engineering at UC Davis.

Enrique J. LaverniaDean, College of Engineering

Jeff LefkoffExecutive Assistant Dean for Administration

Jean-Pierre DelplanqueAssociate Dean for Undergraduate Studies

Jim SchaafInterim Executive Director of Undergraduate Programs and Advising

Jean VanderGheynstAssociate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies

Bruce HartsoughAssociate Dean, Academic Personnel and Planning

DEPARTMENT CHAIRS

Raul PiedrahitaBiological and Agricultural Engineering

Kyriacos AthanasiouBiomedical Engineering

Ahmet PalazogluChemical Engineering and Materials Science

Sashi KunnathCivil and Environmental Engineering

Nina AmentaComputer Science

Kent WilkenInterim Chair, Electrical and Computer Engineering

C.P. van DamMechanical and Aerospace Engineering

OFFICE OF DEVELOPMENT AND EXTERNAL RELATIONS

Oliver RamseyAssistant Dean, Development and External Relations

Paul DornDirector, Marketing & Communications

Derrick BangWriter/Editor

Scott Chernis, Karin Higgins, Watson Lu, Kevin Tong, Michelle Tran, Gregory UrquiagaPhotographers

Academic Technology ServicesDesign

College of EngineeringUniversity of California, Davis1 Shields Ave, Kemper Hall 1042Davis, CA 95616

http://engineering.ucdavis.edu

4 Katherine Ferrara

5 Engineering Through Coffee

6 Entrepreneurship Class

8 Microfluidics

12 The Ultimate Brain/Computer Interface

14 McCallen’s Create Fellowship

16 ViVita

20 Faculty & College News

CONTENTS

4

12

16

8

14


ULTRASOUND ENGINEER

KATHERINE FERRARA ELECTED TO NAE

UC DAVIS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING: INCREASINGLY SELECTIVE

2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013

63.1%60.2%

51.2% 52.0%47.6%

50.7%

45.5%

36.2%

11,365

9,825

8,742

7,946

12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

% of Freshman Applications Granted Admission # of Freshman Applications Received

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

7,4716,8555,768

5,369

PROFESSOR KATHERINE FERRARA, whose research has pioneered using ultrasound to image cancer and heart disease and who played a leadership role in establishing the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition for an engineer.

“This is a tremendous and well-deserved achievement,” said Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi. “Professor Ferrara’s research saves lives, and her election to the National Academy is proof positive from her peers that she is a national and international leader in her field.”

Ferrara was elected for her contributions to the theory and applications of biomedical ultrasound, according to the citation. Ferrara’s current work explores new ways to use ultrasound in medical treatment. For example, anticancer drugs can be encased in tiny capsules that are injected into a patient’s bloodstream and steered toward the tumor with ultrasound. When the capsules reach the tumor, focused ultrasound bursts the capsules, releasing the drugs where they are most needed, and reducing side-effects on other tissues and organs.

Ferrara is the 19th current or retired member of the UC Davis faculty to be elected to the prestigious academy.

E N G I N E E R I N G P R O G R E S S / Spr ing 2014 5

STUDENTS LEARN ENGINEERING

THROUGH COFFEEFROM A LATTE WITH FRIENDS to an all-night study session, students likely drink as much coffee as anyone. But this winter, students at UC Davis are getting a new insight into their favorite hot drink through two new courses that use the roasting, processing and brewing of coffee to teach the principles of chemical engineering.

“From green bean to cup, the process of making coffee is all engineering,” said TONYA KUHL, professor of chemical engineering and materials science, who is co-organizing the course with Professor Bill Ristenpart, Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science.

On one morning during winter quarter 2014, the lab class air was rich with freshly roasted beans as students made careful measurements of the roasting and brewing process.

“All the operations that chemical engineers learn about are in the coffee process,” said Ristenpart. “Fluidized beds, mass transfer, vapor/liquid equilibrium, thermodynamics.”

Kuhl and Ristenpart hope the classes will engage students, teach them some basic principles of engineering, and give them a clearer idea of the problems engineers work on and the techniques that they use to solve them.

“A lot of people don’t really know what engineers do. But brewing coffee is tangible to everyone,” Kuhl said.

At the start of winter quarter, “Design of Coffee,” a general education course open to all students, had a full enrollment of 300 students with more on the waiting list. A second course, aimed at undergraduates majoring in chemical engineering and materials science, had enrolled another 170 students. Both courses are heavily oriented around lab classes.

For an English major like Inez Kaminsky, “Design of Coffee” is a way to fulfill general education requirements in science.

“It teaches a way of thinking, rather than a profession,” she said.

“I need the engineering and science credit, and I really like coffee,” said Ilse Atkinson, a first-year student majoring in political science. “After two lectures, I feel like I’m getting a new appreciation of it. The entire process is much more complex than I realized.”

The coffee courses grew out of hallway conversations about a need for more engineering lab classes earlier in the curriculum, Kuhl said. Typically, engineering majors get lectures on engineering topics, but up until senior year their practical classes are in subjects like physics and chemistry. More specialized engineering labs do not begin until senior year.

“The problem was, how to have a hands-on lab experience in engineering that does not take much time?” Ristenpart said.

Kuhl and Ristenpart started with a first-year seminar in spring quarter 2013. First-year seminars are small-group courses, specifically for freshman students, intended to introduce them to a wide range of topics. After the success of that course, Ristenpart and Kuhl went ahead with planning a full undergraduate program.

Students begin their lab studies by dismantling a coffeemaker to figure out how it works, then experiment with different techniques in roasting and brewing, measuring the chemical and physical changes involved. The course will end with a tasting competition: the object being to make the best-tasting cup of coffee from the same basic ingredients while using the least energy.

“We don’t want it to be a, ‘this is the way you do it’ class,” Kuhl said. “We want them to try different things, different methods and have an experimental design experience.”

Setup for the course included renovating and refitting lab space, and was made possible by generous support from a number of donors, including Chevron Inc., Melita and Boyd’s Coffee, as well as individual donors. These include John Wasson, a 1984 UC Davis alumnus and current president and chief operating officer of ICF International. Chevron and Wasson have made generous donations specifically to assist in the development of new kinds of engineering courses.

Kuhl holds the Jeff and Diane Child-Steve Whitaker Professorship in Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. Ristenpart holds the Joe and Essie Smith Endowed Chair of Chemical Engineering.

“FROM GREEN BEAN TO

CUP, THE PROCESS OF

MAKING COFFEE IS ALL

ENGINEERING.”

– TONYA KUHL



NEW ENTREPRENEURSHIP CLASS MAKES

WAVES AT UC DAVIS

THE UC DAVIS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING launched a quiet revolution this spring quarter: ECH 98, “Starting and Prototyping a Technology Venture,” a trial two-unit course fast-tracked so quickly that its very existence wasn’t known until one week before the quarter began.

“We sent an e-mail to all engineering undergrads, hoping to get enough students to even run the class,” laughs BRUCE WHITE, a professor emeritus in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. “It filled in less than two hours, with a waiting list equal to the size of the class. So we created a second section, which filled just as quickly.”

Even at a schedule-friendly two units, the class represents a major curriculum shift.

“Traditionally, the ECH 98 syllabus is more along the lines of graduate-level coursework,” explains White, who also directs the college’s tech incubator, the Engineering Translational Technology Center (ETTC). “Until now, such material hasn’t been aimed at our young, bright freshmen and sophomores, who arrive prepped for such things by Facebook, Snapchat and the Steve Jobs phenomenon. These young students are fueled by a level of energy that we wish to channel into a positive result; we don’t want it to dissipate. We want to make entrepreneurship part of the UC Davis culture.”

The class is being taught by LUCAS ARZOLA, who earned his doctorate in chemical engineering at UC Davis in December 2012. It could be argued that ECH 98 is the logical next step in a master plan that Arzola began

MOVING FORWARD, ARZOLA

ENVISIONS THE CREATION

OF AN “ENTREPRENEURSHIP

MINOR” THAT WOULD BUILD

ON THIS PROTOTYPE CLASS.


developing a few months before he completed his PhD, when he founded the UC Davis Engineering and Technology Entrepreneurship Club (E-TEC).

The club’s popularity helped pave the way for the Oct. 11, 2013, launch of the Engineering Student Startup Center (ESSC), an increasingly popular space in 2060 Academic Surge, where students gather for hands-on experience in ideation, prototyping and, ultimately, collaborating on technology start-ups. No surprise, then, that Arzola is teaching ECH 98 within the ESSC space; it’s the perfect setting.

“First- and second-year engineering class work is mostly theoretical, with little or no hands-on application,” Arzola explains. “If we can give students an opportunity for hands-on involvement, from Day One, their coursework won’t simply be math and physics. I want to give students a better idea of what entrepreneurship is about, while helping them develop techniques to recognize and pursue opportunities, identify and solve problems. How to set goals, and think creatively.”

The class syllabus gives students plenty of time to let their creative instincts soar. Arzola is guiding his class through the creation and presentation of a viable product, and how it can be enhanced into an improved prototype, complete with a business model that incorporates

technical feasibility and marketing opportunities. Each student team’s ultimate goal is the development of an E-Team grant proposal to the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), as a framework for writing a technology commercialization grant, and evaluating a tech-based business opportunity.

“Students then can choose to actually submit the application, and perhaps get anywhere from $5 to $500,000 to carry their product forward,” White says. “They will have worked through the process of developing a business plan, with marketing, pricing, strategizing, an analysis of investment and return, and so forth. That’s pretty advanced stuff, even for graduate students; working on this with freshmen and sophomores is almost unprecedented.”

Moving forward, Arzola envisions the creation of an “entrepreneurship minor” that would build on this prototype class — perhaps dividing it into separate lecture and lab components — and supplement with fine-tuned follow-up courses that could focus on marketing, the patent process, assembling a company, and protecting one’s product.

“It has been very exciting to create a campus program, and space, that resonate with students, administrators and alumni mentors,” he says, with a broad smile. “Being able to motivate students, help them think big and fulfill their dreams … what job could be better than that?”


ENGINEERING IS A POPULAR FIELD among students in China, and TINGRUI PAN was no exception. The path that eventually led him to the UC Davis Department of Biomedical Engineering began when he enrolled at Tsinghua University, as an engineering major.

“I like doing hands-on stuff,” Pan acknowledges, and this has been true all his life.He graduated from Tsinghua in 2000 and spent a year at UCLA, where he learned micro-nano

technology in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. But he soon grew restless.“I wanted to do more than conventional miniaturization; I wanted to solve big-picture biological

challenges.”Pan applied for a PhD program at the University of Minnesota, where he soon was concurrently

enrolled in the departments of electrical engineering and biomedical engineering; he obtained degrees in both fields.

His PhD thesis, which he completed in 2005, was the first to be published on the topic of using micro-nano technology to solve the problems inherent in glaucoma.

He then joined the UC Davis College of Engineering in July 2006; once established at his new academic home, Pan expanded upon his earlier work.

“I wanted to re-emphasize my engineering background, so I designed my lab to be a microfluidic lab; I also was very interested in micro-nano structures fabrication. And when you work on the micro liquid/solid interface, the key part of the engineering component is the interface itself.”

The distinction between electronics and microfluidics is easy to explain. “Electronics directs electrons; microfluidics directs molecules of liquid. Electrons can show us pictures, colors and so forth. Electronics are more job- and entertainment-oriented: more often used as a tool, and not directly related to you. Fluidics allow the detection of biological substances, most of which are in a liquid format. Microfluidics therefore can be used more for personal medicine.”

A major breakthrough arrived in late 2010, generating considerable media attention: a plug-in interface for microfluidic chips that could form the basis of the next generation of compact medical devices. Pan hopes that such “fit to flow” devices could become as ubiquitous as standard USB connectors on computers and their various peripheral devices. UC Davis filed a provisional patent on Pan’s invention on Nov. 1, 2010.

“One day, such chips will look like a memory card that you can buy from Staples,” Pan promises, “and they will plug into your cell phone and run a sample of blood, urine or other biological fluid, and tell you how healthy your body is. Today’s younger generation already is addicted to computers and portable communication devices; why not build a platform to allow people to use these same devices to monitor their health?

“And it would be cheaper!”Although monitoring personal health with a smart phone sounds impressively cutting-edge, Pan

is quick to explain that low-tech microfluidic gadgets — despite the term’s fancy nomenclature — have been with us for a long time. “Pens operate via microfluidics; they deliver very small amounts of fluid that allow us to write in very fine lines ... and we’ve been using such pens for hundreds of years!”

That said, the process hasn’t been exploited to anywhere near its potential, which plays to Pan’s research philosophy: “I like to work on ‘simple’ things that people haven’t thought of, or don’t understand well; I like to exploit those things.”

No surprise, then, that Pan and the 15 members of his Micro-Nano Innovations Lab (MiNI) research team are involved with numerous projects that could impact our daily lives quite rapidly. One such project, TacSense (originally dubbed mRhythm), expands upon Pan’s longstanding interest in personal health management.

“ALL OF TODAY’S

HOME AND PERSONAL

ELECTRONICS COMPANIES

ARE LOOKING FOR

THE SO-CALLED

HUMAN INTERFACE:

WHAT THEY CALL THE

‘USER EXPERIENCE.’

ELECTRONICS EVENTUALLY

WILL MERGE WITH OUR

BODY SURFACE, AND I

BELIEVE THAT FLEXIBLE

SENSING AND FLEXIBLE

ELECTRONICS REPRESENT

THAT FUTURE.”

– TINGRUI PAN

Tingrui Pan

FROM NANOGLUE TO MOISTURE-WICKING CLOTHING, BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER TINGRUI PAN HAS US COVERED

TRANSPORTS US INTO THE FUTURE By Derrick Bang


Continued on next page

“TacSense is based on a university invention that two graduate students and I developed in 2010: a thin, transparent and flexible capacitive sensor that is 1,000 times more sensitive than any market competitor. All of today’s home and personal electronics companies are looking for the so-called human interface: what they call the ‘user experience.’ [Examples include Google Glass and the rumored iWatch.] Electronics eventually will merge with our body surface, and I believe that flexible sensing and flexible electronics represent that future.”

TacSense has become one of the “tenants” at UC Davis’ Engineering Translational Technology Center (ETTC), the campus technology incubator that helps speed the transfer of innovative, high-impact ideas to the marketplace.

“A lesson I’ve learned: You must take good care of an invention not only by publishing papers, but also by pushing it into the commercial domain, to deliver a product to the community. The time frame can be very short: If you don’t do it, some other researcher will.”

With respect to TacSense, ETTC is helping Pan and his team attract investors while making a name for this new discovery. Another MiNI breakthrough, however, recently earned a shout-out from one of this country’s most visible forums: the f loor of the U.S. House of Representatives. On July 19, Congressman Jerry McNerney (D-California) — who represents the 9th District communities of Stockton, East Contra Costa County and surrounding towns — gave a

brief, informal speech about a discovery that Pan and his team have dubbed StreamTex. In part, Congressman McNerney said:

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to bring your attention to the development of an exciting new fabric that recently was created by biomedical engineers at UC Davis: a fabric that drives moisture away. Two graduate students — Siyuan Xing and Jia Jiang — at the Micro-Nano Innovations Laboratory led by Professor Tingrui Pan, with the financial support of the National Science Foundation, developed a textile that stays dry by forming moisture into droplets that drain away by attaching a network of water-attracting threads to water-repellent fabric.

This project is likely to be developed into materials that will help our firefighters and troops stay cool while in the field, or help astronauts conserve precious liquids while in space.

“That was very exciting,” Pan laughs. “We were happy to hear that Congressman McNerney thought our work was important.”

StreamTex is a perfect example of Pan’s desire to exploit previously undiscovered “simple concepts.”

“Think in terms of plumbing,” he explains. “We want to plumb your sweat into different channels, to eliminate it.


“In the fabric world, people don’t call the process microfluidics; they call it ‘moisture wicking.’ But the whole point is the transport of fluid, from one place to somewhere else. We want to take sweat away from the inner layer — your skin — to the outer layer of the clothes you wear, where it can evaporate.” Unlike conventional fabrics such as cotton, this water-pumping effect continues to work even when the water-conducting fibers are saturated, due to the sustaining pressure gradient generated by the surface tension of droplets.

Traditionally, a shirt is merely a shirt: ornamental apparel at best. But this needn’t be the case.

“Clothes have all sorts of shapes and patterns: stripes, swatches, flowers ... whatever. The patterns on today’s clothing are solely a visual thing: for appearance, not function. People in the clothing industry view fabric as one-dimensional, even though it’s a series of layers. Our goal — which we’ve realized — is to make clothing that is a functional, three-dimensional, microfluidic network.”

Image-conscious joggers already wear fashionable outfits that are characterized by bright swatches of color. One day soon — perhaps very soon — those colorful swatches will work busily to remove sweat as quickly as runners produce it.

StreamTex has been established as a start-up, and Pan already has been contacted by numerous companies that want this technology. “We could see product in one or two years,” he enthuses. “The industry marketplace likes to see revenue quickly!”

Pan’s MiNI Lab also made waves, in the spring of 2012, with the announcement of yet another “simple” product with potentially far-reaching commercial prospects: an incredibly strong “nanoglue” that could be used in next-gen microchip fabrication.

Pan is particularly pleased with this discovery, since it involved repurposing a material — polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) — which,

when peeled away from a smooth surface, usually left a sticky, ultra-thin residue that most researchers viewed as a nuisance.

“People hated this sticky layer,” Pan laughs. “Papers were published, wondering how to eliminate it. So I wondered ... could we turn that ‘bad side’ into a bright side, and transform what everybody hated into a utility? Why not make it into a glue?”

Aside from its value toward the construction of multilayered computer chips, Pan believes such a glue would be equally useful for home applications, such as sticking objects to tiles. “We’re also working on a ‘switchable’ nanoglue,” he explains, “where we’ll be able to trigger reversibility, so that it can both stick and be easy to remove.”

Pan and his colleagues won’t necessarily commercialize this invention themselves, believing that the best solution would be for UC Davis to partner with a major corporation such as 3M.

His passion for these many projects notwithstanding, Pan also is enthusiastic about outreach efforts. (“It’s important to bring the smartest children into engineering and science, in order to maintain leadership in these fields.”) As a result, he puts just as much energy into mentoring the students and grad students in his lab, knowing full well that continuity of scientific development is essential.

“I want the PhD students in my lab to explore different things: things that can have a huge impact. Yes, they’re inked via microfluidics, but we think further than that, which is why we’re the Micro-Nano Innovations Lab, and not the Microfluidics Lab.

“I like helping a very young mind turn into a mature mind,” he concludes. “And, eventually, you see that this person has the potential to become successful.

“That’s the most exciting part.”The most exciting part, that is, until Pan can walk into a downtown

store and purchase a StreamTex-engineered UC Davis logo shirt.

MICROFLUIDICS continued from page 9

“ONE DAY... CHIPS WILL

LOOK LIKE A MEMORY

CARD THAT YOU CAN

BUY FROM STAPLES

AND THEY WILL PLUG

INTO YOUR CELL PHONE

AND RUN A SAMPLE OF

BLOOD, URINE OR OTHER

BIOLOGICAL FLUID, AND

TELL YOU HOW HEALTHY

YOUR BODY IS.”

– TINGRUI PAN


ENGINEERING TRANSLATIONALTECHNOLOGY CENTER (ETTC)The Engineering Translational Technology Center (ETTC) is a technology incubator at the UC Davis College of Engineering designed to speed the transfer of high-impact, innovative ideas to the marketplace to meet society’s needs. ETTC supports technology transfer by facilitating the development of startups, supporting tenure-track professors during a critical stage of idea development, in a familiar, secure environment, while remaining close to their research and teaching mission. ETTC has already launched two firms, Dysonics and Ennetix, and currently has 10 resident startups.

More info: http://bit.ly/ucdavisettc


WHILE IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, SANJAY JOSHI was given a NASA poster of the space shuttle Columbia, emblazoned with the stirring words “Going to work in space.” That poster has followed him ever since: It moved from his bedroom at home to his college dorm, and then his graduate school dorm, and it now hangs on the wall of his office in 2054 Bainer Hall.

“I always knew I wanted to be an engineer, and I’ve been inspired by the space program for quite a long time,” Joshi admits. “When I made it to engineering school, I decided

that was the time to do something about that interest.”As it happened, though, Joshi’s research focus today — as an

associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering — involves combining robotics control systems, artificial intelligence and basic neuroscience, in order to create systems that will help paralyzed people interact with their environments.

His journey to this point has involved several intriguing detours ... although, looking back, each step contributed to the brain/computer

THE ULTIMATE BRAIN/COMPUTER INTERFACEROBOTICS ENGINEER SANJAY JOSHI HELPS DISABLED PEOPLE REGAIN CONTROL OF THEIR ENVIRONMENT

SANJAY JOSHI

By Derrick Bang

interface work that in September 2012 earned Joshi and his Columbia University colleagues — Peter K. Allen, Joel Stein and Lyssa Sorkin — a National Science Foundation grant in the amount of $1.21 million.

Although Joshi built lots of things as a kid — cardboard robots, spacecraft mock-ups — his parents’ careers held their own allure. His father was a medical school professor, and Joshi therefore flirted with the notion of entering medical school. His mother’s field of study is psychology, which also proved tempting. “I was seriously conflicted about whether to go to grad school in engineering or psychology,” Joshi recalls.

Joshi started robotics research at IBM, during a co-op internship taken between his junior and senior undergraduate years at Cornell. An undergraduate degree (Cornell, 1990) and master’s degree (UCLA, 1992), both in electrical engineering, led to a summer job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory; he continued to work at JPL, off and on, while completing his doctorate at UCLA. After obtaining his PhD in 1996 — also in electrical engineering, with a major in control systems — he joined JPL full-time.

“THE THINGS WE

INTEGRATE INTO

OUR THOUGHT

PROCESSES ARE VERY

SUBTLE... CONSIDER

ACCOMPLISHED DRIVERS,

WHO ANTICIPATE

HOW TO DEAL WITH

PROBLEMS BEFORE THEY

OCCUR. ULTIMATELY,

ROBOTS NEED TO

DO THAT, IN ORDER

TO WORK IN HUMAN

ENVIRONMENTS UNDER

VERY UNSTRUCTURED

CONDITIONS.”

– SANJAY JOSHI


Although he enjoyed his participation with the Deep Space One spacecraft, which launched in October 1998 and went to Comet Borelly and Asteroid 9969 Braille, his biggest take-away during those JPL years was the huge collaborative atmosphere. “It was really exciting, being in that environment. When you work together, you can accomplish anything. You feel great being even one small piece of such a huge puzzle.”

Despite this seductive rush, Joshi knew he’d return to academia. “As professors, we get to more intimately direct what will happen, and when. Granted, we do smaller things, but we have more control.”

After a brief teaching stint at Los Angeles’ Harvey Mudd College, Joshi joined the UC Davis College of Engineering faculty as an assistant professor in 2001. “I realized that in order to do the type of research I desired, I had to be at a large institution with many different specialties, because my interests were so interdisciplinary. It was clear to me that in order to properly study robotics, I had to step outside of engineering, in several different areas.”

He soon found a way to blend his dual interest in robotics and psychology, by focusing on emergent behavior derived from the way one’s brain instructs the body to act in a given environment.

“The things we integrate into our thought processes are very subtle; they come from many, many different cues, and not just our conscious thoughts. Consider accomplished drivers, who anticipate how to deal with problems — say, knowing that an erratic driver in the next lane is about to cut you off — before they occur. And so you take action before the problem arises. That’s integrating subtle environmental cues, and it’s not random; we incorporate the knowledge gained from past experience.

“Ultimately, robots need to do that, in order to work in human environments under very unstructured conditions.”

During his first decade at UC Davis, Joshi worked on several robotics projects that explored such behavioral cues. He led one research team in efforts to “teach” robots how to detect — and respond to — the subtle cues that allow people to follow each other when walking down a street and turning a corner. The goal: a superior “follower robot” that could, for example, accompany a doctor during hospital rounds. Other projects involved robots designed to mimic small mammals.

But all of this was mere warm-up for Joshi’s primary goal: to develop brain/machine interfaces that can allow disabled individuals to control various devices.

One project, in collaboration with graduate student Claudia Perez-Maldonado and Professor Tony Wexler, also of the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, developed the technology to read electrical signals from a single facial muscle, and then use these signals to operate a computer cursor or wheelchair.

In the spring of 2010, Joshi received a Hartwell Foundation grant — $300,000 over three years — to help develop machine interfaces that would allow severely disabled children to control devices in their environment. The goal: to devise smart signal processing and computer software that constantly checks how well the user can manipulate the object, then compares this input to previous data, and adjusts results accordingly.

“We need a connection between the brain and the external world,” Joshi explains. “Even though our bodies are flesh and bone, they’re controlled electrically. A thought creates an electrical signal in the

brain; moving a muscle involves an electrical signal that travels from the brain to the muscle. We create and emit electrical signals all the time. These signals can be measured, and the focus of my lab has been to see how much information and control we can get from that muscle electrical signal.”

This is the basic engineering mantra: If it can be measured, it can be manipulated.

“Our goal is to teach the brain to send a signal to a given muscle: a signal that has nothing to do with that particular muscle movement. We’re using the ‘machinery’ inside the body — the wiring — but we’re hijacking it.”

This has far-reaching implications, even for disabled individuals. “Victims of spinal cord injuries still have control of their head, because those muscles are controlled by the brain stem. As long as you can reach muscles above an injury — say, facial muscles — they can be used.

“A colleague at Duke University has shown that with an accomplished soccer player — one who trains for years and years — the ball essentially becomes an extension of the body, in a very deep way. We now know that you not only gain the skill outwardly — playing soccer, playing the violin — but if we image the brain, we find that you create a part of the brain that’s now a soccer ball, or a violin.

“The point is this: You can change the brain so much that it’ll no longer distinguish between your body and an external tool. And that is the interface.”

This work already has progressed beyond science-fictional flights of fancy.

“We can put our entire brain/computer interface into a cell phone!” Joshi explains, the enthusiasm evident in his voice. “We measure muscle signals and send them to a regular cell phone, which has been re-programmed to accept those signals, and allow a person to direct things that are viewable on the cell phone screen. Then, with Bluetooth capability, we wirelessly connect to other devices in the person’s environment, in order to control them.”

In one filmed recording of a recent lab test, a robot is controlled wirelessly by a young man paralyzed in a biking accident, who sends signals to the muscle that moves one of his ears. In this manner, he can manipulate a cursor to hit various dots on his display screen; hitting these dots makes the robot move forward, or turn left or right.

“The important part of our system is that it doesn’t require actual motion,” Joshi explains. “You just think stuff.”

The result: The paralyzed young man is able to control a robot that is a distance away from him, on the other side of a wall. He can’t see the robot, but he can see what the robot sees, via a camera mounted on its body; this allows him to guide the robot through an obstacle course ... merely by thinking his instructions. Everything happens wirelessly.

In a real-world environment, the robot could be directed to answer a phone, respond to a doorbell, fetch a book or perhaps even prepare a meal. The five-year NSF-funded Columbia study initially will focus on 10-12 individuals with spinal cord injuries, to determine if they can be trained in the effective control of brain-computer interfaces.

Joshi’s efforts now are focused on minimizing the hardware necessary for such interfaces, while maximizing the software.

The potential is enormous.“The ultimate goal,” he enthuses, “is Avatar. And we’re well on

our way.”


DAVID AND ROSE McCALLEN vividly remember their early days in Davis, where they moved after obtaining their undergraduate degrees at California State University, Chico.

It was January 1980; David had just begun his master’s program in the UC Davis College of Engineering, and Rose started working at Aerojet, in Folsom, a few months later. She started her master’s

program in 1981, also at UC Davis.“We came from similar blue-collar

backgrounds,” David recalls. “We were the first generation to attend college in both our families. We lived in a small

apartment, and for almost the entire first year, the totality of our furniture was a kitchen table and a beat-up twin mattress on the floor.”

After such humble beginnings, they worked hard and became well-respected fixtures at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Rose now is one of the lab’s high-ranking female researcher and scientist, while David recently shifted gears to become the Associate Vice-President in the Office of Laboratory Management, at the University of California Office of the President (UCOP).

DAVID AND ROSEMcCALLEN

By Derrick Bang

And whenever he visits the UCOP lobby, he carefully reorganizes the magazines to ensure that UC Davis publications are on top of the stack.

But they’ve never forgotten how tough things were, three decades and change ago. Those strong memories played a significant role in their decision to create a fellowship to help dedicated engineering students.

The reason: Both David and Rose credit their success to the start they got in the UC Davis College of Engineering, thanks in great part to the kindness and respect shown by their professors.

“All of our money was spent on books, that first year,” Rose admits. “At times, we didn’t have enough money for food. It was hard to put ourselves through school, and we still remember that.”

“We know what it’s like to be a disadvantaged graduate student, and it’s harder today, because education costs are so high,” David adds.

“There must be students out there right now, who could be future engineers, if they had the resources, and our country definitely needs more engineers,” Rose concludes. “We want to contribute to them: to make it a little easier for them, than it was for us.”

“THERE MUST BE

STUDENTS OUT

THERE RIGHT

NOW, WHO

COULD BE FUTURE

ENGINEERS, IF

THEY HAD THE

RESOURCES...”

– ROSE McCALLEN

FROM HUMBLE BEGINNINGS, McCALLEN’S


GET YOUR UC DAVIS ENGINEERING GEAR!Visit the UC Davis Store at the Memorial Union orshop online for a range of items to demonstrate yourCollege of Engineering pride.

AGGIE ENGINEER?REPRESENT!

Memorial Union Store Hours

Monday – Friday: 8:30 a.m. – 6 p.m.Saturday: 12 – 5 p.m.

http://ucdavisstores.com


WHEN UC DAVIS BIOMEDICAL ENGINEER-ING doctoral student MAELENE WONG joined LEIGH GRIFFITHS’ lab in 2009, her first project focused on confirming what they believed to be a dead end in transplant research: the notion that tissue replacement — for, say, patients needing new heart valves — could be enhanced to a degree that would prevent the recipient’s immune system from rejecting the new organ.

Imagine their surprise, then, when their breakthrough process successfully removed the substances that triggered a patient’s immune response, while still preserving the structural integrity and functional properties of the replacement tissue.

After two years of lab work, things began to happen very quickly. In the summer of 2012, Griffiths and his team — Wong and fellow biomedical engineering graduate students REGINA MACBARB and JENNIFER LEE — participated in the annual UC Davis Entrepreneurship Academy. They soon realized that they must become their own best advocates.

“The Academy opened faculty and grad students’ eyes to the fact that if we don’t utilize our technology, and make a product from it, there’d be no guarantee that anybody ever would,” said Griffiths, an assistant professor of medicine and epidemiology at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine.

Better still, Griffiths and his team attracted the attention of Jim Olson, of UC Davis’ Engineering Translational Technology Center (ETTC), the College of Engineering’s resident “technology incubator” that helps campus start-ups attract support from external

SAVING LIVES ONE ORGAN AT A TIMEBIOMEDICAL START-UP DELIVERS A GAME-CHANGING BREAKTHROUGH IN TISSUE REPLACEMENT

By Derrick Bang

“UNLIKE CURRENT

HEART VALVE

TRANSPLANTS,

OUR PATIENTS

WOULD BE FREED

FROM A LIFETIME

OF IMMUNITY-

REJECTION

DRUGS.”

– MAELENE WONG

investors. “Jim sat down at our table during a mixer,” Wong recalls. “He wanted to hear about our work, so we told him about the research, and its potential. He got very excited.”

The immediate result was the creation and incorpora-tion of ViVita, a company “home” for this work.

And the significance of the name?“We had a lot of brainstorming sessions, blending the

company’s goals with adjectives that had suitable Latin roots,” Wong laughs. “Eventually, we came up with ViVita: a combination of vi (force), vivi (living) and vita (life). We like this blend of roots, because our goal is to restore life — or life force — to patients who require living replacement tissues and organs.”

Roughly six months later, in December 2012, ViVita became one of ETTC’s newest clients...right about the same time that Griffiths and his team achieved a major breakthrough in their research.

Griffiths still can’t quite process how rapidly everything has fallen into place.

“We started, in 2010, with the hypothesis that this would be impossible,” he explains. “In my own doctorate research, back in the day, I worked on defining the tissue components that our bodies would react to, and reject. Although it’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever know all such components, it became clear that they existed in such a diversity that it would be extremely challenging to conceive of a way to remove enough of them to make the tissue tolerated by the body.

“Additionally, attempts made by other researchers violated some basic principles of chemistry, with respect to removing the undesired components. We decided to


“OUR TISSUE

PREPARATION

PROCESS WILL

CREATE TISSUE

REPLACEMENTS

THAT WILL LAST

THE LIFETIME OF

OUR PATIENTS.”

– MAELENE WONG

test these other protocols while adhering to these basic chemistry principles, to see if this would affect the outcome. Results immediately showed that protein chemistry principles not only were important, but were the overriding factor in accomplishing our desired goal.

“A large part of Maelene’s PhD work involved applying these various protein chemistry principles to the problem, and gradually removing the components that the immune system would respond to.

“The goal is to take animal tissue and remove everything that your immune system would recognize as being ‘non-self,’ while being careful not to damage the remainder of the usable tissue. We then put that tissue in a patient, or re-populate it with the patient’s own cells, in order to implant a recellularized organ.

“As time passed, we knew we were doing better than previous authors, but — in terms of what happened when the material was put back into a patient — we still weren’t certain the results were sufficiently better.”

After two years of hard work, the unexpected results — the “magic moment” that all scientists dream of — occurred last December, just as ViVita was embraced by ETTC.

“We did the small animal implantation model,” Griffiths says, the pleasant awe still evident in his voice, “and it’s fair to say that we were surprised. We already had known that our process would look reasonably good when compared to competitors’ products, but in fact it looked viable. The animal didn’t mount any significant rejection process.”

That’s when Griffiths, Wong, MacBarb and Lee knew that ViVita had enormous potential ... and that they had

to become instant MBAs. Happily, Olson and ETTC co-director Bruce White, a UC Davis emeriti professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, have been able to help them overcome that latter challenge.

“No, we didn’t have formal business training,” Wong admits, “but Jim knew what was necessary. Through his mentorship, the four of us were able to hone our research, in order to better assemble the pieces for our business model.”

“We got lucky,” Griffiths agrees. “UC Davis and the UC system, in general, have amazing resources that greatly helped us achieve this goal. We already had started the pre-patent for our invention, but I never had considered being the driving force behind a business that would make our work a reality. The Entrepreneurship Academy showed us that this would be an achievable goal, and since then we’ve had assistance from ETTC and the QB3 program [the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences].

“Everything we’ve learned is a direct response to our relationship with ETTC. They’ve been the sounding board for everything we’ve been able to develop in the company. Without their input, I’m confident we wouldn’t have made such progress.”

“A company must pitch a ‘product,’ and we struggled with that,” Griffiths explains. “In theory, our technology is capable of addressing every organ and tissue in the body. But we couldn’t pitch that, because nobody would believe us. We therefore realized that we had to establish a ‘beachhead product,’ as opposed to the product line that we could develop.

Continued on next page


“You can’t tell people that you’re going to cure cancer; even if you are, you must demonstrate the ability to accomplish an achievable goal in a reasonable time frame. And then you say that, yes, this could lead to a cure for cancer. The pitch must be digestible and believable.”

The ViVita team therefore targeted the roughly 65,000 replacement heart valve procedures performed in the United States each year, which represents an annual market of $755 million and a potential global market of $2.5 billion.

But the ViVita breakthrough doesn’t merely address the current shortage of organs for such procedures.

“Unlike current heart valve transplants, our patients would be freed from a lifetime of immunity-rejection drugs,” Wong explains. “Our tissue preparation process will create tissue replacements that will last the lifetime of our patients. It also will allow for better transplant methods for children, who often need new transplants currently, via additional surgeries, when their bodies grow.”

Looking not too much further into the future, the company plans to expand via the development of a much more diverse product pipeline: Heart muscles, small vessels, bone, liver and cartilage applications are under development.

“The goal is to have organs available off the shelf, although I’m not sure that’ll happen in my lifetime,” Wong admits. “It would be incredible if issues such as 10-year-old Sarah Murnaghan’s very public battle for a lung transplant weren’t raised any more.”

ViVita’s potential made it a clear winner a few months ago, during the 13th Big Bang! Business Plan Competition, an annual event hosted at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management. ViVita took both top honors and the People’s Choice Award, which came with prizes of $10,000 and $2,000, respectively.

While the accolades are extremely gratifying, the cash awards represent no more than the tip of much larger funding requirements.

VIVITA continued from page 17

“We’re already talking to private investors, and it looks like we’ll be pitching to venture capitalists in the not too distant future,” Griffiths adds. “We’re also writing a Small Business Innovation Research Grant.

While contemplating business models and refining their grasp of the psychology of investor pitches would seem enough to worry about, in addition to their research responsibilities, another issue is equally crucial: The clock is ticking.

“We’re very aware that having the best technology doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll be the dominant company in a given market space,” Griffiths admits. “We’re as confident as we can be, that our technology is the best...but we also know of at least one competitor that has progressed further, in terms of entry to market. So, if we don’t achieve our desired milestones in a timely fashion — large-animal trials in the next year or so, the first in-man trials in 2016, and actual patients before 2020 — it may not matter what we do.

“Because it might be too late.”That said, the research always will be dictated by rigorous moral

concerns.“One founding principle of our company is the very strong ethical

principles that motivate everything we do,” Griffiths insists. “We’re constantly skeptical, whatever we do, in terms of wanting to re-validate results as deeply as possible. I can’t imagine any of us founders wanting or agreeing to conduct a first-in-man trial unless we, ourselves, would agree to be that first person.”

Griffiths pauses, and then shares his group’s strongest desire.“We set the goal, at the Entrepreneurship Academy, of one day meet-

ing somebody who’s alive because of our technology, and our product.“So yes, it’s difficult to juggle everything we’re supposed to do. But

when we get home late, and we’re tired, and we really don’t want to read a business plan again, looking for edits, we just think, Well, if we don’t do it, we’ll never save anybody’s life!”

“WE SET THE GOAL...

OF ONE DAY MEETING

SOMEBODY WHO’S

ALIVE BECAUSE OF OUR

TECHNOLOGY, AND

OUR PRODUCT.”

– LEIGH GRIFFITHS



ENGINEERING STUDENTSTARTUP CENTEREntrepreneurial students at the UC Davis College of Engineering have a dedicated on-campus space to prototype their ideas and collaborate on technology ventures. Located in Room 2060 of the Academic Surge building on the university campus, the Engineering Student Startup Center (ESSC) unleashes the creative potential of engineering students by facilitating ideation, prototyping, collaboration, and ultimately, the formation of student-led technology startups.

More info: http://bit.ly/ucdavisstartup


SPRING 2014 FACULTY & COLLEGE NEWS

CRISTINA DAVIS HONORED BY AAMCCRISTINA DAVIS, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been recognized by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) for a project undertaken with colleague NICHOLAS KENYON, a pediatric critical care doctor at UC Davis Medical Center. Davis and Kenyon have been selected as finalists for the AAMC Award for Innovative Institutional Partnerships in Research and Research-Focused Training, for their submission “Building Bridges: An Engineering Capstone Experience in Translational Medicine.” Under the supervision of Davis and Kenyon, the Capstone Senior Design Course has developed strong interdisciplinary ties between the UC Davis College of Engineering, the Clinical and Translational Science Center, and the School of Medicine. Since inception, the program has involved 40 faculty mentors, more than 100 students and ingeniously designed prototypes such as an ICU patient self-hydration unit, an EMG-powered wheelchair, and a low-cost pediatric treadmill for home use by disabled children.

SINCE INCEPTION,

THE PROGRAM HAS ...

INGENIOUSLY DESIGNED

PROTOTYPES SUCH AS

AN ICU PATIENT SELF-

HYDRATION UNIT,

AN EMG-POWERED

WHEELCHAIR, AND A

LOW-COST PEDIATRIC

TREADMILL FOR HOME USE

BY DISABLED CHILDREN.



RICARDO CASTRO RECEIVES ACERS COBLE AWARD

RICARDO CASTRO, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, has received the 2014 Robert L. Coble Award for Young Scholars from the American Ceramic Society (ACerS) . The award will be presented at the ACerS Honors and Awards Banquet, taking place as part of the Society’s 116th annual meeting, on Oct. 13, 2014, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The award recognizes an outstanding scientist who is conducting research in academia, in industry or at a government-funded laboratory. Candidates must be ACerS members, and no older than 35. Selection of the awardee is based on nominations and accompanying evidence of scientific contributions, such as a list of publications, selected abstracts, and the receipt of other awards or recognition. The award honors the late Professor Coble, recognized by the National Academy of Engineering “for his contributions to the theory of sintering of materials, and to ceramic processing.” Coble also spent his professional career enhancing the achievement and advancement of young ceramic scientists.

SUBHASH MAHAJAN EARNS TWIN HONORS

The Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) has confer red a Fel lowship on SUBHASH MAHAJAN , a distinguished professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science. The announcement was made during a meeting of the INAE Governing Council, which took place Oct. 28, 2013. The Academy bestows the rank of Fellowship on Indian and foreign nationals who have demonstrated their eminence and achieved outstanding accomplishments in engineering and technology.

A few weeks later, the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) presented its annual Robert Franklin Mehl Award to Mahajan. This award, considered one of TMS’ pinnacle honors, recognizes an outstanding scientific leader who is invited to present a lecture at the society’s annual meeting, on a technical subject of particular interest to members in the areas of materials science and the application of metals.

PATRICE KOEHL TO DIRECT NEW DATA SCIENCE INITIATIVE

PATRICE KOEHL, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, has been named founding director of the campus’ new Data Science Initiative (DSI). Koehl will embrace this new responsibility in addition to his other appointments as Associate Director of Bioinformatics, at the UC Davis Genome Center; and as a visiting professor in the National University of Singapore’s Department of Biological Sciences.

The goal of the Data Science Initiative is to develop an intellectually stimulating environment for campus-wide faculty to interact with researchers who tackle “big data” challenges. As founding director, Koehl will provide the leadership to define and implement this campus vision, while encouraging a collaborative environment for the computer scientists, statisticians and domain-expert faculty who will work on such frontier research.

Subhash Mahajan

Patrice Koehl

TSA AWARDS $6.2 MILLION CONTRACTS TO UC DAVIS STARTUP

The U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has awarded two contracts, worth a total of $6.2 million, to Stratovan Corp., a start-up that emerged in 2005 from the UC Davis Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization (IDAV). The contracts will help Stratovan develop enhanced automated explosive detection capabilities, while also standardizing the information exchange formats and communications protocols employed by airport security devices. Stratovan was founded by UC Davis graduate David F. Wiley and Bernd Hamann, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Computer Science. Wiley is president and CTO, and Hamann serves as the company director. Stratovan’s CEO is Jim Olson, an active entrepreneur and angel investor who co-founded the UC Davis Engineering Translational Technology Center (ETTC), a “technology incubator” that helps accelerate the transition of innovative, high-impact research from the university to development and commercialization.




RAISSA D’SOUZA RECEIVES MURI GRANT

The U.S. Department of Defense has granted a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Award to a team headed by RAISSA D’SOUZA, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and the Department of Computer Science. The $6.25 million, five-year project, “Predicting and Controlling Systems of Interdependent Networks: Exploiting Interdependence for Control,” will focus on the control of collective phenomena in complex systems. As project PI, D’Souza will collaborate with colleagues from UC Davis, Caltech, Rice University, the University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin.

Raissa D’Souza

Ruihong Zhang


RUIHONG ZHANG EARNS BIORESOURCES AWARD

RUIHONG ZHANG, a professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, has received the annual Achievement Award from the California Bioresources Alliance (CBA). The award was presented by Karl Longley, an environmental engineer at Fresno State University and coordinator of the Water Resources Programs at the California Water Institute, during the annual CBA Symposium at the California Environmental Protection Agency’s Sacramento headquarters. Zhang, one of the symposium’s guest speakers, was honored by CBA for her “outstanding research incorporating good science and practicality in seeking solutions to agricultural organic waste problems, by transforming them into useful products.”

PRASANT MOHAPATRA APPOINTED INTERIM VICE PROVOST OF IET

Professor PRASANT MOHAPATRA, immediate past chair of the Department of Computer Science, has been appointed interim vice provost of Information and Educational Technology (IET) and chief information officer of the Davis campus. Mohapatra, who has held the Tim Bucher Family Endowed Chair of Computer Science since 2009, officially assumed his IET post on July 1, 2013. His appointment is for one year, or until the appointment of a permanent replacement.

Prasant Mohapatra


HARRY CHENG RECEIVES ASME MESA ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

HARRY H. CHENG, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received the 2013 Mechatronic and Embedded Systems and Applications (MESA) Achievement Award, presented by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). Cheng attended the ceremony, which took place Aug. 6 in Portland, Ore., at ASME’s 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conference.

NSF AWARDS GRANT TO ANNA SCAGLIONE AND QING ZHAO

ANNA SCAGLIONE and QING ZHAO, both professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, have received a three-year National Science Foundation grant of $497,796 for their proposal titled “Online Learning and Exploitation of the Radio Frequency Spectrum with Sub-Nyquist Sampling.” Cognitive radio transceivers automatically detect available channels in a wireless spectrum, and then — via dynamic spectrum management — change transmission or reception parameters to allow more concurrent wireless communications in a given spectrum band at one location. Scaglione and Zhao’s project will enable cognitive receivers to better explore the online frequency spectrum.

RAISSA D’SOUZA RECEIVES MURI GRANT

Anna Scaglione

Qing ZhaoE N G I N E E R I N G P R O G R E S S / Spr ing 2014 23

S.J. BEN YOO WILL LEAD GENI PROJECT

S. J. BEN YOO, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been selected to lead a project for the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). The project, titled “Shakedown Experimentations and Prototype Services on Scalable, Agile, Robust and Secure Multi-Domain Software-Defined Networks,” will conduct experiments that are designed to test scalability and interoperability of programmable networks that run the OpenFlow communications protocol.

Yoo will collaborate with Chen-Nee Chuah, also a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Matt Bishop, a professor in the Department of Computer Science.


ALISSA KENDALL, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the 2013 Laudise Young Researcher Prize from the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE). The biannual Laudise Prize recognizes outstanding achievements in industrial ecology by researchers under the age of 36. Kendall received the prize for her work on life-cycle assessments of biofuel production pathways, agricultural systems, vehicles and transportation infrastructure. The prize additionally commends Kendall for her ongoing research on carbon accounting practices and the role of LCA in policy.

Kendall also received a three-year grant of $260,922 from the National Science Foundation. Kendall will be PI on the research project, titled “Dynamic Life Cycle Assessment for Critical Energy Materials: Developing a New Framework for Integrated Industrial Ecology Methods.” As nations increasingly acknowledge the environmental damage certain to be created by the exponential rise of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, a corresponding demand for renewable and energy-efficient technologies will increase the worldwide demand for critical energy materials. Kendall’s project will develop a dynamic approach to modeling material availability and environmental impacts, in order to better calculate sustainability assessments of those same materials.


KENDALL’S PROJECT

WILL DEVELOP A

DYNAMIC APPROACH

TO MODELING MATERIAL

AVAILABILITY AND

ENVIRONMENTAL

IMPACTS, IN ORDER

TO BETTER CALCULATE

SUSTAINABILITY

ASSESSMENTS OF THOSE

SAME MATERIALS.

ALISSA KENDALL

RECEIVES AWARDS FROM ISIE, NSF



CAPPA, CASTRO NAMED UC DAVIS CHANCELLOR’S FELLOWS

CHRISTOPHER CAPPA and RICARDO CASTRO are among the 10 UC Davis faculty members named Chancellor’s Fellows, in an announcement made December 9, 2013, by UC Davis Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi.

Cappa, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has focused on the behavior and properties of atmospheric aerosols, and their impacts on air pollution and climate. His CV lists an impressive 56 publications, including four in Science and four in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He received a doctorate in physical chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2005, and joined the UC Davis faculty in 2007.

Castro, an associate professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, earned two 2005 Early-Career Awards — from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy — for two remarkably distinct research projects in thermochemistry. That was the year he spent six months in Alexandra Navrotsky’s UC Davis lab, before receiving his doctorate from the University of Sïo Paulo, Brazil. He joined the UC Davis faculty in 2009, and since then has become a formidable team with Navrotsky.

SCOTT SIMON DEVELOPS NEW TOOL TO COMBAT HEART DISEASE

SCOTT SIMON, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has played a key role in a study published online in August 2013, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. Using a special microchip that can perform laboratory functions, a team of cardiologists and UC Davis biomedical engineers has identified the cells linked with inflammation and varying degrees of heart disease.

Simon developed the technology used in the study: a “lab on a chip” that mimics the conditions in an actual coronary artery during the early stages of atherosclerosis. Such labs-on-a-chip one day may be used in doctors’ offices, to rapidly assess a patient’s heart disease risk. The tool also may be useful for further research into additional therapeutics.

Scott Simon


UC Davis has been named to a Collaborative Research Alliance tasked with creating a science to detect and model cyber-attacks, predict their impact under various scenarios, and then deliver a response that can counter and neutralize the attacks in real time.

The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has announced a five-year grant for the core and enhanced program in the amount of $23.2 million, with an additional $25 million for an optional five-year extension: a potential total of $48.2 million over the 10-year collaboration. The grant will be shared between Penn State, which is leading the alliance, and UC Davis, UC Riverside, Carnegie Mellon University and Indiana University. The UC Davis faculty selected to work on the project, titled “Models for Enabling Continuous Reconfigurability of Secure Missions,” will include Professor Prasant Mohapatra, Professor Karl Levitt and Professor Zhendong Su, all of the Department of Computer Science.

UC DAVIS JOINS CYBER-SECURITY RESEARCH ALLIANCE


SHU LIN’S ‘MESSAGING CODE’ HELPS NASA WITH SPACE COMMUNICATION

One of NASA’s recent missions, the IRIS Solar Observatory, has been communicating its results via a 7/8 Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) code developed by SHU LIN , a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) spacecraft was launched on June 27, 2013, aboard an Orbital Sciences Pegasus XL rocket. The IRIS mission addresses the need to understand the interface between the photosphere and corona, in our sun’s lower atmosphere: a fundamental challenge in solar and heliospheric science. The mission will trace the flow of energy and plasma through the chromosphere and transition region into the corona, using spectrometry and imaging. The goal is to extend the scientific output of existing heliophysics spacecraft that follow the effects of energy-release processes from the sun to Earth.


Shu Lin

CHRISTOPHER CAPPA HELPS CLEAR THE AIR

CHRIS CAPPA, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has joined the team working at UC San Diego’s Center for Aerosol Impacts on Climate and the Environment (CAICE). The recently established center is being supported by a five-year, $20 million award from the National Science Foundation. The center will leverage the expertise of Cappa and 22 other top scientists from nine universities, to determine how aerosols — the tiny particles found in clouds, haze, dust, smog, smoke and sea spray — released from the ocean influence regional and global climate. Cappa became a member of the scientific team due to his experience with instruments that measure how particles interact with sunlight and water in the atmosphere. CAICE is being led by UC San Diego’s Department of Chemistry and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. It will be eligible to receive an additional $20 million in funding in 2018.

Chris Cappa

KECK FOUNDATION GRANT AWARDED TO

ANGELIQUE LOUIEThe W.M. Keck Foundation’s Medical Research Program has presented a grant for $1 million to ANGELIQUE LOUIE, a professor and vice-chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. The grant will help fund her project “In Vivo 3D Imaging Using Bioluminescent Gene Reporters and MRI,” which she is undertaking in collaboration with Yohei Yokobayashi, an associate professor also in the Department of Biomedical Engineering; and Jared Shaw, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry.

The project proposes novel technology that will facilitate the detection of gene expression in deep, opaque tissues. Armed with such technology, researchers will be able to apply the power of non-invasive imaging to a wide variety of new biomedical applications.

Angelique Louie



JERRY M. WOODALL, a distinguished professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named a Fellow of the National Academy of Inventors. He has been honored as a scientist who has “demonstrated a highly pro-lific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development and the welfare of society.” Woodall is a National Medal of Technology Laureate and a pioneer in the research and development of compound semiconductor materials and devices. He has collected 85 issued U.S. patents, and his work is cited in more than 350 publications.

Jerry Woodall

JERRY M. WOODALL

NAMED NAI FELLOW

WOODALL IS A NATIONAL

MEDAL OF TECHNOLOGY

LAUREATE AND A PIONEER

IN THE RESEARCH

AND DEVELOPMENT

OF COMPOUND

SEMICONDUCTOR

MATERIALS AND DEVICES.

Jerry M. Woodall, left


JOHN OWENS RECEIVES NAE GRAINGER GRANT

The Grainger Foundation has awarded a $30,000 Frontiers of Education (FOE) grant to JOHN OWENS, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Owens and co-PI Tuhin Sahai, of the United Technologies Research Center in East Hartford, CT, will share the grant for their collaborative project, “Parallel Matrix Factorization: Toward GPUs in the Data Center.”

Owens and Sahai will explore how to develop computational models that enable superior decision-making from large amounts of data. A common real-world example concerns making future recommendations to subscribers of an online movie service, based on their ratings of past titles. Owens and Sahai will construct their algorithms on an emerging graphics processing unit (GPU) that takes a more parallel approach to solving computational problems.

KYRIACOS ATHANASIOU RECIEVES LISSNER MEDAL

ROBERT L. POWELL APPOINTED AS STATE SCIENCE ADVISOR

The Bioengineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) has awarded its 2013/14 H.R. Lissner Medal to KYRIACOS ATHANASIOU, a distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Formal presentation of this award, which includes a bronze medal and $1,000 honorarium, will be made during the seventh World Congress of Biomechanics, taking place July 6-11, 2014, in Boston, Mass.

The award, established in 1977, is considered the ASME Bioengineering Division’s highest honor. It recognizes outstanding achievements in the field of bioengineering, which may take the form of significant research contributions; the development of new methods of bioengineering measurement; and a noteworthy educational impact in the training of new bioengineers.

California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. has appointed Robert L. Powell, a professor in the Departments of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and Food Science and Technology, as science advisor for the California Natural Resources Agency. Powell will advise the Brown administration on the complex scientific issues involved in well stimulation treatments, and will assist in developing the scope of the independent scientific study required by Senate Bill 4.

Gov. Brown signed SB4 into law in September 2013. Popularly known as the state’s first “fracking bill,” SB4 will require oil and gas companies to apply for a permit to conduct fracking, publicly disclose the fracking chemicals to be used, notify neighbors before drilling, and monitor ground water and air quality, among other requirements.

LAURA MARCU NAMED A FELLOW OF THE OPTICAL SOCIETY

LAURA MARCU, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been named a Fellow of the Optical Society (OSA). The nomination and selection process is highly competitive: OSA Fellows are chosen based on their overall impact on optics, as gauged via factors such as specific scientific, engineering and technological contributions; a record of significant publications or patents related to optics; technical leadership in the field; and serve to OSA and the global optics community.

Marcu’s primary research interests include in vivo optical spectroscopy and imaging for the enhanced detection of disease (cancer, cardiovascular) in human tissue; fluorescence-based, minimally invasive medical diagnostics technology; high-spatial- and time-resolution optical techniques for molecular imaging; optical bioMEMs; bionanophotonics; and nanocrystal applications to molecular imaging.

Kyriacos Athanasiou


Laura Marcu



BRUCE KUTTER, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been named the next Schofield Lecturer by the International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE). Kutter’s research specialties include geotechnical engineering, earthquake engineering, geotechnical centrifuge modeling, constitutive modeling, fundamental soil behavior, liquefaction, shallow and deep foundations, and soil-structure interaction. He has been recognized by ISSMGE for his longstanding role as a leader in the development and use of centrifuge modeling to study earthquake engineering problems.

BRUCE KUTTER SELECTED AS ISSMGE SCHOFIELD LECTURER

Bruce Kutter, right

KUTTER HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED

BY ISSMGE FOR HIS

LONGSTANDING ROLE AS A

LEADER IN THE DEVELOPMENT

AND USE OF CENTRIFUGE

MODELING TO STUDY

EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING

PROBLEMS.


JULIE SCHOENUNG APPOINTED TO STATE SCIENCE ADVISORY PANEL

The California Department of Toxic Substances and Control has appointed JULIE SCHOENUNG to the agency’s Green Ribbon Science Panel. A professor in the D e p a r t m e n t o f C h e m i c a l Engineering and Materials Science, Schoenung is one of 15 members of the panel. Established to advance the California Green Chemistry Init iat ive, the Green Ribbon Science Panel advises on “scientific and technical matters related to developing green chemistry and chemicals policy recommendations and implementation strategies.”

Julie Schoenung

ADRIAN CHAVEZ, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Computer Science, is one of the 102 researchers to be honored this year with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), via the U.S. Department of Energy. The PECASE is the highest honor given by the U.S. government to outstanding scientists and engineers at the onset of their careers.

Chavez is co-advised by Professor Karl Levitt and Adjunct Assistant Professor Sean Peisert, both in the Department of Computer Science. His research has focused on how best to add security to systems like the U.S. power grid, oil and gas refineries, and water pipelines, to ensure they can protect themselves in the event of a cyber attack.

Sandia researchers, left to right, Adrian Chavez, Matthew Brake, Seth Root and Daniel Stick will be recognized in a ceremony later this year as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering.


GRADUATE STUDENT RECEIVES PECASE AWARD



UC DAVIS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING MAINTAINS RESEARCH GROWTH

Recent figures for the UC Davis College of Engineering’s fiscal year 2012-13 once again demonstrate impressively robust figures for research expenditures. The research expenditures for 2012-13 totaled $91.7 million — corresponding to an average of $489,717 per full-time faculty employee — which represents a 5.3 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. This figure has climbed steadily since the 2009-10 fiscal year, when the average was

$451,000 per full-time faculty employee.When broken down by department, Civil and

Environmental Engineering continues to dominate College of Engineering research

expenditures, with $21.4 million for fiscal year 2012-13; Biomedical Engineering once again runs

a close second, with research expenditures of $18.1 million.

KWAN-LIU MA, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, has received a three-year National Science Foundation grant of $498,196 for his proposal titled “A General Framework for Expressing, Navigating and Querying Uncertainty in Data Analysis and Visualization Tasks.” The project aims to develop a general model for uncertainty analysis that will address fundamental challenges involved with incorporating and conveying uncertainty in the process of data analysis and visualization. The project will be accompanied by an educational agenda that will involve graduate and undergraduate students, integrate research results into teaching, and arrange summer internships for participating students at the collaborating scientists’ laboratories.

KWAN-LIU MA RECEIVES NSF RESEARCH GRANT

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Documents

ENGINEERING progressengineering.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/SP14_Engineering_Progress.pdfENGINEERING PROGRESS / Spring 2014 7 developing a few months before he completed