New Engineering Dean Gears Up for Fiscal Challenge
Skilled in adaptative research, Gregory Washington has a mission: partner or perish
Gregory Washington, UC Irvine’s new dean of The Henry Samueli School of Engineering, knows the mechanics of staying cool under pressure.
An accomplished systems engineer, Washington researches “smart” materials that respond to temperature changes, stretching and other stimuli, and which can be used for everything from heating car seats to harvesting energy from computers to recharge batteries.
“If you pull on them, press them or otherwise strain them, they actually will produce electricity,” he explains. “So any entity that’s vibrating or moving, I can extract energy from it and then use that for a very useful purpose.”
