It’s been a banner period of fundraising for the University of California, Irvine. After topping $200 million in giving to the school in 2022, UCI has already announced several high-profile donations in 2023, including a June gift of $50 million from Broadcom Inc. Chairman Henry Samueli and his wife, Susan.

UC Irvine Professor [of engineering] Brett Sanders is a beach erosion expert. The UCI Flood Lab has documented those beaches eroding the fastest, from Sunset Beach, south to San Clemente. Not only do beaches serve as a natural defense against big storms according to Sanders but Orange County sand attracts millions of tourists. “Beaches are the number one driver of Orange County’s tourist economy,” said Sanders.

Jack Brouwer, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the Clean Energy Institute (CEI) at the University of California, Irvine writes, “Congress came together to pass the bipartisan 

The UCI/OCC team specially designed “luminOCity” for Placentia nonprofit Homeless Intervention Services of Orange County, measuring out a plot of land where the structure will serve as transitional housing for men ages 18 to 24.

Instead of controlling the power grid from a central location, PG&E had to send crews into the field to manually control the outages. “It’s an incredible travesty, this sort of really crude and unsophisticated approach for dealing with what is a very serious issue,” Jack Brouwer, an engineering professor and director of the National Fuel Cell Research Center at UC Irvine, told the New York Times.

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

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.

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.]

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.