“Always when there is a hurricane, you have compounding effects of ocean flooding — surge — and terrestrial flooding,” said Amir AghaKouchak, an associate professor of hydrology and remote sensing at the University of California at Irvine.
The modular unit was designed and built by a group of 30 students from UC Irvine and Orange Coast College as part of the inaugural Orange County Sustainability Decathlon. The competition brought together college students to not only get hands-on architecture experience, but to do so with affordability and sustainability in mind. … “The ADU gifted from UCI and OCC is going to give us the ability to expand our program. Currently with just the home that we have, we can serve up to nine individuals, both male and female,” Alfa Hernandez, program director at HIS-OC, said.
Johns Hopkins University microbiologist Jocelyne DiRuggiero wanted to find out how it’s possible for a microbe to carry out photosynthesis in an environment where there is essentially no water available. So she collaborated with University of California, Irvine, materials scientist David Kisailus, who probed the biogeochemical relationship between microbe and rock using a battery of analytical tools usually reserved for studying nonliving materials.
Newsha Ajami, [UCI alumna, Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering and] chief development officer for research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, adds that it’s especially important to capture stormwater as droughts are becoming more common. “Water, if we protect it as soon as it hits the ground and keep it clean, we can actually reuse it and repurpose it in various ways, especially during the wet years that we get,” Ajami says.
Deadline: N/A
Company: Resonant Inc.
Products: RF filters for cellular phone market
Locations: Santa Barbara and San Francisco Bay Area
Qualifications needed: MSc.
Contact: Sohrab Samadian, Vice President of Engineering, ssamadian@resonant.com
“This emerging fusion of the AI and engineering fields represents a profound opportunity to make breakthrough research advances as well as to address some of the most pressing challenges facing society today,” said Pramod Khargonekar, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Irvine, and chair of the visioning event.
Iryna Zenyuk, Ph.D., is a researcher, associate professor of [chemical] and biomolecular engineering, and associate director of the University of California, Irvine National Fuel Cell Research Center. … Dr. Zenyuk also sees a major shift toward fuel cells for trucks. “For long-haul truck drivers and their employers, time and every pound of payload is money,” she said. “Heavy-duty trucks are virtually impossible to decarbonize with batteries.
That kind of contamination would make contact with the water dangerous, said Sunny Jiang, professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
The Hazel Crow Opportunity Fund supports expenses for WICS members to participate in conferences that focus on computer sciences, such as the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Nationwide, women earned only 18 percent of the bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science in 2010, according to the National Science Foundation. That's less than half the proportion in 1985, when 37 percent of those degrees went to women.
However, there’s no guarantee that an engineered cell will load the desired cargo into its vesicles. “The cells decide what to encapsulate,” says Young Kwon, a biomedical and materials scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Nguyen’s team is studying how cells make those decisions, to find ways to ramp up exosome loading with artificial cargo. Researchers have identified strands of code common in natural exosomal RNAs that probably play a part in packaging the molecules.
“Fire has made us civilized, but we still don’t understand it fully,” said Tirtha Banerjee, [UCI engineering assistant professor] …. “Scientists have been “just completely caught off guard about how fast things are changing,” said James T. Randerson, [UCI Chancellor’s Professor, Earth system science]. … Banerjee and his team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers flew their drone repeatedly over the area, mapping it …..
But even before that, [Microsoft] has been exploring ways to use fuel cells, beginning to explore the technology in 2013 with the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, where they tested the idea of powering racks of servers with solid oxide fuel cells, or SOFCs, which are fueled by natural gas. Read More
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University of California, Irvine's environmental engineers have developed a new framework for characterizing snow droughts around the world. "Snow is an important global water resource that plays a vital role in natural processes, agriculture, hydropower and basic socioeconomic conditions of various regions," said lead author Laurie Huning.
A disappearing California beach is partly behind the weekslong closure of one of Amtrak's busiest routes in the latest example of how changing weather patterns and eroding shorelines pose a threat to the state's coastal rail corridor. … “That stretch of the coast has really lost a significant amount of sand over the last decade or two,” said Brett Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of California, Irvine.
One promising solution is hydrogen storage, and the University of California, Irvine just launched the first such project in the United States, paving the way for other universities or municipalities to do the same.
UC Irvine researcher Jack Brouwer, a professor of mechanical engineering, said SB 100 didn’t go far enough. Under a bill focused on decarbonizing the electric grid, homes could move more toward electrifying appliances which could be a lifestyle shift for some Californians, Brouwer said.
UCI’s engineering school was renamed The Henry Samueli School of Engineering on Oct. 19, 2000, after Samueli, co-founder, chairman and chief technical officer of Broadcom Corp., made a generous donation in December 1999.
Samueli, who earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from UCLA, began his career at TRW, Inc., where he was responsible for the development of military broadband communications systems. Later, he was chief scientist and co-founder of PairGain Technologies, Inc. a telecommunications equipment manufacturer.
In a state severely hobbled by drought and wildfires, flood concerns may not seem top-of-mind. But a new study out of UC Irvine found that Los Angeles County's aging flood systems may not be ready for a major flood. "Right now, our research suggests that our infrastructure and the way we've built it out is much more vulnerable to this type of event than I think anyone would have guessed," said Brett Sanders, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCI and one of the authors of the paper.
