UC Irvine doctoral student Tia Chung-Swanson didn't miss the reminder of how her life changed a year ago. … One photo shows her on the first day of the UC graduate student strike on Nov. 14, 2022. She’s holding a megaphone. She was one of nearly 50,000 graduate students across 10 University of California campuses whose United Auto Workers-affiliated locals went on strike for higher pay and better working conditions.

Broadcom’s growth has helped spur the Samueli family’s philanthropic efforts in OC; their foundation’s $50M gift to UCI’s engineering school ranks No. 2 on this week’s list of Largest Charitable Gifts of 2023. Read More

Readers fascinated with the super-small semiconductors made by the Irvine tech firms featured in this week’s issue would do well to look at the work of H. Kumar Wickramasinghe, UCI Distinguished Professor and holder of the Nicolaos G. & Sue Curtis Alexopoulos Presidential Chair for Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. [Subscription required, you can request an electronic copy of the article by sending an email to communications@uci.edu.]

For the third straight year, UCI led the donor list, receiving 17 donations of $1 million or more, totaling $114 million. The school received $50 million from the Samueli Foundation to launch three new research institutes under the banner of “Engineering+” for the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. “Susan and Henry Samueli’s generous gift will establish the Engineering+ research institutes, empowering multidisciplinary teams to address key global challenges in health, society and the environment,” Magnus Egerstedt, dean of the school of engineering, told the Business Journal.

When waves strike a hard structure such as boulders or sea walls, they refract and create a backwash that pulls sand away from the shoreline and out to sea, said UC Irvine professor Brett Sanders, who specializes in coastal civil engineering and wave dynamics. While historically sand has kept the ocean away from those hard structures, problematic erosion in the past decade has allowed waves to batter onto rocks put in place to protect the rail line, scouring the sand and eroding the beach even further, Sanders said.

One approach that I believe needs attention — locally, if not nationally — was explained in a recent NPR interview (“Take Two,” with A Martinez, KPCC radio, Oct. 24, 2019) with Professor Jack Brouwer, director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC-Irvine. Brouwer made an excellent case for utilizing fuel cell technology in conjunction with battery storage that is used along with solar and wind technology to comprise a microgrid.

Students from UC Irvine and Orange Coast College designed, engineered and built the two-bedroom accessory dwelling unit - or ADU - to address the state's housing needs and be sustainable. The group worked with Danielian Associates to construct the home. "It was about three months worth of work.