News
November 9, 2007
Renewable Plastics, Poster Initiative and E. coli: UCSD Bioengineering Grad Student Wins Leadership Award
The plastic containers Adam Feist uses to carry his lunch to his UC San Diego lab are petroleum based. This may change. Feist – a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate at UCSD – is doing fundamental research that could lead to more efficient ways to churn out renewable biopolymers for “green plastics” using microorganisms as factories. Within the bioengineering department at UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, Feist is a natural leader, a dedicated team player and a top-notch metabolic engineer. This combination of leadership, service and scholarship has earned him the 2007 Woolley Leadership Award. Full Story
November 7, 2007
UCSD Engineering Honor Society Wins Most Outstanding Chapter Award
Flip through the 133 page record of the 2006-2007 activities of UCSD’s engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi, and you’ll see why they recently took home the “nation’s most outstanding chapter” award. Full Story
October 18, 2007
Undergrads Dream with QUALCOMM Chips
The biggest challenge for one of the four winners of last weekend's QUALCOMM Innovator Challenge came at a surprising moment: after his team won first prize and $5,000 in the engineering design contest. Over the phone, freshman David Wong had to convince his parents to hand over his social security number so he could fill out the necessary tax-related paperwork to get his cut of the $5,000. Money the team won for their ideas for what is possible with QUALCOMM’s new ultra powerful chip set for mobile devices, called Snapdragon. Full Story
October 16, 2007
Will Breast Cancer Spread? UCSD Bioengineers Answer
One of the many unknowns facing women who are diagnosed with breast cancer is the likelihood that the cancer will spread to other parts of the body – metastasize. Researchers from UC San Diego are looking to change that. UCSD bioengineering professor Trey Ideker is pioneering a more accurate approach for predicting the risk of breast cancer metastasis in individual patients. Full Story
October 8, 2007
Which came first, the chicken genome or the egg genome?
New research published in Nature Genetics provides the first evolutionary history of the duplications in the human genome that are partly responsible for both disease and recent genetic innovations. This work marks a significant step toward a better understanding of what genomic changes paved the way for modern humans, when these duplications occurred and what the associated costs are – in terms of susceptibility to disease-causing genetic mutations. Full Story
September 25, 2007
Primate Sperm Competition: Speed Matters
UC San Diego and UC Irvine researchers have reported that sperm cells from the more promiscuous chimpanzee and rhesus macaque species swim much faster and with much greater force than the sperm of humans and gorillas. Full Story
September 22, 2007
Donors Forge New Group to Support UC San Diego Center Championing Scientific Approach to Preserving Artistic Treasures
Private donors working closely with the JAcobs School have established "Friends of CISA3" -- a philanthropic initiative to support the activities of the Calit2-based research center devoted to innovating and using new technologies to better understand and preserve artistic treasures. Full Story
September 13, 2007
Learning How Embryonic Stem Cells Become Heart Cells
Three teams of San Diego scientists are using a comprehensive new systems-biology approach to learn how to prompt mouse embryonic stem cells to differentiate in the laboratory into cardiac muscle cells, results that could eventually be used to develop completely new treatments for human heart disease Full Story
August 9, 2007
Medical Devices Affinity Group Meets to Brainstorm New Technologies
Nearly 40 researchers, clinicians, basic scientists and engineers from the Jacobs School, Calit2 and UCSD School of Medicine's Department of Surgery met to brainstorm about potential collaborations to develop new medical and research devices. Full Story
August 3, 2007
How Cells Change the Pace of Their Steps
Scientists at UCSD have discovered how cells of higher organisms change the speed at which they move, a basic biological discovery that may help researchers devise ways to prevent cancer cells from spreading throughout the body. Full Story