Undergraduate Research
Today’s global complexities demand new approaches to training tomorrow’s engineers. At the Samueli School, hands-on experience and participation in research play a key role in educating undergraduate students.
Today’s global complexities demand new approaches to training tomorrow’s engineers. At the Samueli School, hands-on experience and participation in research play a key role in educating undergraduate students.
Cyber-physical systems security researchers at the University of California, Irvine can disrupt the functioning of a power grid using about $50 worth of equipment tucked inside a disposable coffee cup. In a presentation delivered at the recent Usenix Security 2020 conference, Mohammad Al Faruque, UCI associate professor of electrical engineering & computer science, and his team revealed that the spoofing mechanism can generate a 32 percent change in output voltage, a 200 percent increase in low-frequency harmonics power and a 250 percent boost in real power from a solar inverter.
UC Irvine professor of electrical engineering and computer science Peter Burke has broken a Guinness World Record – for flying a drone halfway around the world. Burke and his team used cloud computing and the internet to fly the drone 11,440 miles, from Irvine to the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. Read More
The National Academy of Inventors has named two University of California, Irvine researchers as fellows. Guann-Pyng (G.P.) Li, a pioneer in the development of microelectronics for advanced health and sustainable energy applications, and David Reinkensmeyer, who combines robotics and neuroscience to create devices to help people with movement rehabilitation after neurological injury, are among 162 academic inventors made fellows by the NAI this year.
Engineers often use statistical estimates called IDF curves to describe the intensity, duration, and frequency of rainfall in each area. The curves, published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), are created using statistical methods that assume weather patterns remain static over time. “Design engineers at cities, consulting companies, and counties use this for different purposes, like infrastructure design management, infrastructure risk assessment and so forth.
The UC Irvine/Israeli Scholar Exchange Endowment for Engineering Science program supports research activities, international collaborations and educational activities with Israeli universities, including Tel Aviv University, The Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), Ben Gurion University and Hebrew University. The program, established in 2007 with a $2 million endowment from the Samueli Foundation, seeks to build bridges between UC Irvine engineers and their Israeli counterparts and solidify the Samueli School’s role as a global leader among engineering schools.
The Advanced Power and Energy Program at the University of California, Irvine, joined the U.S. Department of Energy, KB Home, SunPower, Southern California Edison and Schneider Electric on May 22 to officially open the novel microgrid communities located in the Shadow Mountain master plan in Menifee, California.
Tirtha Banerjee, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Irvine, and co-author of the study, explained this study was accomplished by comparing data from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection between 1920-1999 to current wildfire data between 2000-2019. “CALFIRE data show that each new year of the 21st century has been a record-breaker in terms of wildfire damage in California,” Banerjee said. Read More
“When we first started studying isolated mitochondria, we knew they behaved like a battery based on some work from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and UCLA, but we could not control them very well inside the cell to probe them,” said co-author Peter Burke, UCI professor of electrical engineering and computer science.