Convergence Issue 21

SPRING 2018

The magazine of engineering and the sciences at UC Santa Barbara

FOCUS ON:

COLLABORATION DAVID HENKE LINKEDIN ALUM

MICRO-HAMMER ANATOMY OF A COLLABORATION

big data

GATEWAY TO WORLDS OF NEW MEANING

College of Engineering

A message from the Deans

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f there is one value that unites such diverse entities as UC Santa Barbara, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NASA, and top technology companies around the world, it is that collaboration is key to progress. Leaders in every kind of organization know that developing comprehensive solutions to complex challenges requires groups of experts having diverse knowledge, skills, and perspectives.

ROD ALFERNESS Dean and Richard A. Auhll Professor, College of Engineering

PIERRE WILTZIUS Susan & Bruce Worster Dean of Science, College of Letters & Science

Here at UCSB, and especially in the College of Engineering and the College of Letters & Science, collaborative research has long been valued and pursued to an extent matched by few other universities. For decades, UCSB professors, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers have worked together and with industry and government partners across disciplines to take on major scientific and technical challenges.

The result is that today, even as many universities struggle to break down walls separating long-siloed departments, UCSB researchers leverage their decades of collaborative experience to ask more-interesting research questions and to create breakthroughs in a wide range of fields. The team approach, which involves sharing space, equipment, expertise, and ideas, has become an identity element and a defining point of distinction for the UCSB enterprise.

At a time when major funding agencies increasingly seek strong collaborative groups to address major challenges, they see the UCSB advantage. When industry seeks an academic research partner, they see UCSB as uniquely qualified, having all the right expertise and equipment in place and none of the barriers to forming interdisciplinary teams. And when our graduates enter the professional world equipped with diverse knowledge and skills beyond their areas of specialization, they have an advantage in terms of flexibility, efficiency, and creativity.

The culture of collaboration is deep and strong at UCSB. Chancellor Henry Yang and department chairs across campus support it, and students expect and seek out collaborative experiences. Working here, we see daily the advantages of teamwork and cooperation, of sharing resources, of co-advising students across disciplines, and of keeping our doors and our minds open to new ideas and fresh perspectives from unexpected directions.

To readers who might be less familiar with what collaboration looks like, who does it, and why it matters, we offer this special issue of Convergence. And especially to our donors, who make possible so much of what we do, we hope that this issue serves to justify your support and to further your interest in the ongoing collaboration we share.

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CONTENTS 3 News Briefs Shrinking PICs, a megamagnet, bridging gaps, big-data for ecologists, and looking beyond 5G. 7 Collaboration U The many faces and forms that teamwork takes to make UCSB great.

COVER Image 23 Centered on Collaboration UCSB centers and institutes attract diverse researchers who share interests.

11 The Long Reach of Big Data Machine learning and massive data sets combine to open new worlds of meaning.

15 Oh, to Be Young (and Interdisciplinary) Graduate students benefit greatly from working on collaborative research.

(Science does, too.)

34 Collaboration Voices Faculty — and Chancellor Yang — share thoughts on a distinguishing feature at UCSB.

21 David Henke: Alumnus, Connected This connected Gaucho spent 35 years managing teams for tech giants.

Artist’s representation of collaboration at UCSB’s College of Engineering.

Illustration by Brian Long

29 Comprehensive Undertakings UCSB’s collaborative approach earns large awards for major initiatives.

31 Calculating Collaborators Thanks to their unique tools, applied mathematicians are the invaluable chameleons of interdisciplinary work.

17 Anatomy of a Collaboration How a team came together to create an innovative biomedical device.

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The Magazine of Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa Barbara Issue 21, Spring 2018 Editor in Chief: James Badham Director of Marketing: Peter Allen Art Direction/Design: Brian Long Artwork: Peter Allen, Brian Long UCSB Public Affairs Contributors: Julie Cohen, Sonia Fernandez

convergence.ucsb.edu Web Design: Robert LeBlanc Web Graphics: Brian Long

College of Engineering CONVERGENCE 2

NEWS BRIEFS Minding the Gaps

Smaller SWaP, Bigger Performance If the parts in a satellite, a drone, or other specialized device are large in Size, Weigh a lot, And consume Power inefficiently — in other words, if their SWaP is high — then the device itself will be bigger, heavier, and more expensive to build, launch, or operate, and that is not desirable.

A pair of UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering faculty have received a grant to develop Lidar photonic integrated circuits (PICs) that have ultra-low SWaP and are intended for precise measurements of atmospheric constituents such as carbon dioxide.

Associate Professor Jonathan Klamkin and emeritus professor Larry Coldren, both in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, have received a highly competitive NASA research award to produce low-SWaP integrated micro-photonic circuits as part of the space agency’s $14 million Advanced Component Technology Program.

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“Photonic integrated circuits can reduce SWaP dramatically — by several orders of magnitude — so they can be deployed on smaller spacecraft that cost much less and launch more frequently,” Klamkin says. “Today, systems like this don’t fit even on large satellites.

The upshot is significantly more scientific measurements at substantially reduced cost.”

The Lidar PIC will enable spectroscopic measurements of Earth’s atmosphere with increased sensitivity and enable near-infrared (NIR) multi-wavelength analysis so that a single integrated device can be used to monitor carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

“The level of integration we are applying is well beyond what is available commercially,” Coldren said. “We are building an entire Lidar sensing system on a single chip, or at most, a few chips. The goal is to realize a pocket-size system for sensing CO2 that can be deployed on small spacecraft.”

UCSB professor of chemical engineering Baron Peters surveyed his field and saw important gaps. For instance, many textbooks have titles that are essentially some version of Kinetics and Reaction Engineering, suggesting that they cover both fundamental reaction processes and design principles for equipment and devices that harness and manage reactions. But most of those books focus almost entirely on reaction engineering. “In thermodynamics, students not only learn to design heat engines, but also take entire courses on the fundamental laws of thermodynamics,” Peters says.

“When it comes to kinetics, we don’t have the same sort of dual treatment.”

Peters saw another gap between physicists and chemists, who use two different theoretical frameworks that split off from each other in the 1930s. Peters explains that these silos are really branches of one overarching “rare events” approach to kinetics, and that the compartmentalized state of the field has real repercussions.

Associate Professor Baron Peters “Physicists, materials scientists, chemists, and engineers are often using the one theory or method they learned, and not the one that is most appropriate for their research,” he says. “In fact, the most powerful tools emerged after the 1970s, and few investigators learn those, because they can be found only in the dense original literature.”

To address all those gaps, Peters wrote a groundbreaking book titled Reaction Rate Theory and Rare Events (Elsevier, 2017). It took nine years to write because, he says, “I had to unify three fields.”

Upon its release, the publisher noted the book’s timeliness, appearing as it did at a moment when “Science is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary in nature.”

Photograph by Sonia Fernandez

Megamagnet Promises New Science Magnetic resonance imaging already saves lives, yet the world’s most advanced form of spectroscopy has yet to reach its full potential in nonmedical arenas. Now, a recent breakthrough in high-magnetic-field science provides possibilities for the advancement of magnetic resonance via high-field superconducting magnets that can tolerate much stronger magnetic fields. The superconductive product requires much less power and space than conventional electromagnets, for the first time making it possible to conduct science at very high magnetic fields beyond just huge facilities, such as the National High Magnetic Laboratory (NHMFL) in Tallahassee, Florida.

It may soon be possible at UC Santa Barbara, too.

From May 17 through 19, the campus hosted “Big Mag @ UCSB,” a workshop intended to identify the transformational science that would be enabled by coupling a 32 Tesla superconducting magnet — which is about 1 million times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field — to UCSB’s terahertz free-electron laser (FEL), the only facility of its kind in the U.S. The summit brought together scientists from around the world whose research would benefit from the proposed Magnetic Resonance eXploration (MRX) facility at UCSB, the potential uses of which range from studying conformational changes in proteins to creating and probing new phases of quantum matter.

(Mega)magnetic personalities: Songi Han and Mark Sherwin

“We want to figure out the most exciting questions in condensed-matter physics, chemistry, biology, and materials science and what would be needed from a magnet to address those questions,” said conference chair Mark Sherwin, director of UCSB’s Institute for Terahertz Science and Technology and a professor in the Department of Physics. “This workshop was an opportunity to brainstorm new use cases for the instrument, interface with partners from industry and the NHMFL, forge new collaborations, and shape the future of the proposed MRX facility.”

“Bringing a very-high-field superconducting magnet to UCSB to create the MRX facility would provide a unique opportunity to fulfill a national need and enable many experiments that cannot be done at the NHMFL,” said chemistry professor Songi Han, a member of the “Big Mag @ UCSB” program committee who has been working with Sherwin for more than a decade on filming proteins in action. “Accessing highpower pulsed magnetic resonance at magnetic fields up to 32 Tesla coupled with frequencies up to 4.5 terahertz will create a new frontier in high-magnetic-field science.”

CONVERGENCE 4

NEWS BRIEFS Where’s the Bear works well, notes Krintz, vice chair of UCSB’s undergraduate program in computer science. “We don’t get any coyotes wrong. We don’t get any bears wrong.

We get about 12-percent error on deer — there are lots of deer — and we are trying to improve on that. Now, all the ecologists are saying, ‘Count deer, count bear. Tell me if the bear is healthy. Is it the same bear, is it the same deer? How many deer are there with antlers?’”

Where’s the Bear integrates recent advances in machine-learning-based image processing to automatically classify animals in images captured by remote, motion-triggered camera traps. So far, the system has helped the Sedgwick team aggregate and analyze more than 1 million images. And because the hardware lives at Sedgwick, all the data processing is done within yards of where the data is collected.

A remotely photographed brown bear at a Sedgwick Ranch Reserve watering hole.

Where’s the Bear?

Over the years, millions of images of animals — mountain lions, black bears, deer, and many other species of interest — have been captured by camera traps on the 6,000-acre Sedgwick Ranch Reserve, part of UC Santa Barbara’s Natural Reserve System. The images are a treasure trove of information that could be immensely useful to land managers and ecologists, but most remain stored on hard drives — unsorted, uncatalogued, inaccessible, and, thus, unused.

Now a system created by UCSB computer science professors Chandra Krintz and Rich Wolski, aptly named “Where’s the Bear?” is bringing machine learning to the task of identifying and classifying animals caught on camera.

Assigning to computers a vexing task that until now was the sole purview of people saves enormous manpower — what once took fourteen days to do can now be done in three hours — and the approach has potential far beyond Sedgwick to other reserves, and beyond ecology to agriculture and even medical imaging.

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According to Wolski, the project can inform research in endless ways, from identifying which species are present — thereby indicating, too, which are absent — to illuminating the effects of drought by revealing how animals respond when more, or less, water is available. The technology can also enhance understanding of the health of, say, the bear population, or enable more accurate deer counts to better inform the number of hunting licenses issued each year. Ranchers can use it to monitor livestock; farmers can use it to monitor their crops.

“There is nobody bridging the gap between what the reserves are doing and what scientists need to do to consume this valuable scientific resource,” Wolski says. “We’re hoping we’re providing the technology that will eventually allow researchers all over the world to have access to those images.”

Sedgwick Reserve director, Kate McCurdy, sees Where’s the Bear as a boon. “We’ve done data handoffs to researchers before, but it’s pretty unwieldy to give someone five hard drives of digital images and say, ‘Good luck finding the thing that you’re looking for,’” she says. “We need to be able to hand off a spreadsheet that’s been processed and say, ‘Here’s the data. Here are all the pictures of the deer we’ve taken over the past five years; you can crunch your own numbers and find the trends.’ To be able to develop non-invasive tools that are cheap and easy to use for land managers, property owners, ecologists, and students is huge.”

Beyond 5G: UCSB Is Lead for Ambitious New Project Imagine a roomful of a thousand students all simultaneously experiencing an augmented-reality lecture and demonstration. Or, how about riding in an autonomous vehicle that can detect, in real time and despite inclement weather, an accident or obstacle miles ahead? For those scenarios to be possible, we need a new, enhanced generation of wireless communication.

That is the focus of the newly established ComSen­ Ter, a $27.5 million center for converged terahertz communications and sensing at UC Santa Barbara, led by UCSB professor of electrical and computer engineering professor Mark Rodwell.

“Our center is simply the next generation of communication and sensing, something that may become ‘6G,’” said collaborator Ali Niknejad, ComSenTer associate director and a UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences.

The next-generation 5G (for 5 GHz) network is expected to be deployed in 2020 and provide significantly enhanced speed and performance. ComSenTer’s research will go further, laying the foundation for using extremely high frequencies in the range of 100 GHz to 1 THz, which, according to the researchers, will enable thousands of simultaneous wireless connections having ten to one thousand times more capacity than will be possible on the 5G network.

Augmented reality, next-level imaging, sensing with terahertz imaging radar, chemical sensors, and new medical imaging modalities are some of the potential applications that ComSenTer researchers will seek to realize.

ComSenTer is part of the new $200 million, five-year Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), a consortium of industry research participants and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), administered by Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC). The partnership will fund research centers at six top research universities: UCSB, Carnegie Mellon University, Purdue University, the the University of Michigan, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Virginia,.

UCSB also is a collaborator in two other research centers in the JUMP initiative: CRISP (Center for Research on Intelligent Storage and Processing-in-memory), led by Kevin Skadron at the University of Virginia, and ASCENT (Applications and Systems driven Center for Energy Efficient Integrated NanoTechnologies), led by Suman Datta at Notre Dame University.

CONVERGENCE 6

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Illustration by Peter Allen

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COLLABORATION U The many faces and forms that teamwork takes to make UC Santa Barbara great

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oday, the most impactful science results when researchers collaborate across disciplines. And while singleresearcher investigations generate important new knowledge and advance disciplines, other tasks, such as discovering a new material and moving it toward real-world application, producing a new biomedical device, or designing a more-efficient laser circuit, require teams of experts in multiple disciplines, from materials, physics, and applied mathematics to mechanical engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, chemistry, chemical engineering, and even the social sciences.

That kind of collaboration is a particular strength at UC Santa Barbara, where it has been hardwired into the culture, particularly in engineering and the sciences. It is the result of visionary efforts by chancellors, deans, and faculty, and has led to an institutional orienta-

tion that rewards collaboration, which, in turn, leads to better, more-comprehensive solutions and well-rounded graduates who become highly effective professionals.

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COLLABORATION happens naturally here.

In creating a materials department in 1987, then-dean Robert Mehrabian and first department chair, Anthony G. Evans, decided to give professors joint appointments, usually in two related departments, as a way to foster interdisciplinary interaction. Thirty years later, collaboration is practiced here to an extent that few other universities can match. Science wins. Engineering solutions win. Efficiency wins. Students and faculty win. The world wins.

“Many of the problems that we work on are complicated and require lots of different disciplines to make progress,” says Tresa Pollock, CoE associate dean and Alcoa Distinguished Professor of Materials. “We have always hired here with an eye to people who are interested in working on these multi-investigator programs, co-advising students, and taking on problems that require more than one department to be involved. Among all of us, we can put together approaches that we wouldn’t have taken individually.”

“Collaboration happens naturally here,” says Dean Rod Alferness. “We have scientists who care about the ‘so what?’ of things — the application and the impact. Our faculty tend to be more scientifically oriented than at many engineering programs, so there is constant collaboration among those who work on the fundamental science and those who see how to use it to generate engineering solutions.”

CONVERGENCE 8

Like “sustainability,” “collaboration” has become a buzz word that is used a lot, often without much to back it up.

“There’s a lot of talk about interdisciplinary and collaborative research at many universities, but here, it works better than anywhere I’ve been,” says Pierre Wiltzius, dean of the Division of Mathematical, Life and Physical Sciences.

“It’s part of our institutional DNA.” Physical proximity helps, too, he adds: “If you’re in the sciences or engineering at UC Santa Barbara, you’re never more than a five-minute walk from your collaborators.

You run into each other all the time, and that has tremendous value in sparking serendipitous conversations.

We are more like a village than a big city. People are less separated into their individual fiefdoms.”

Even as the National Science Foundation and other agencies increasingly fund collaborative teams, faculty in some places can be penalized for collaborating when they are up for promotions or tenure, on the assumption that they may have ridden the coattails of others.

“I’ve never heard that here,” says mechanical engineering professor Megan Valentine. “In fact, if you come up for tenure and you have not been working with other people and you’re not tapped into research centers but are this lone operator, there’s a question of what’s happened, why haven’t we engaged this person more deeply or more broadly. We don’t keep junior faculty in isolation to see what they can do. They get involved in large collaborations and assume leadership positions much earlier here.”

Further, young faculty trained in a non-collaborative style may have a narrower skill set and more constrained knowledge, and find themselves isolated from, and unwilling to share with, colleagues with whom they are competing for recognition and resources. At UCSB, facilities are shared, labs are shared, and, most importantly, ideas are openly and willingly shared.

“Innovation is not a predictable progression,” says Chancellor Henry Yang. “It is an unpredictable process characterized by basic discoveries, experimentation, and adjustment, and the collaborative exchange of information, people, and resources is the hallmark of this process.

I am very proud that UC Santa Barbara has developed a culture and an environment that supports highly interdisciplinary and highly collaborative research.”

“The barriers for collaboration here between traditional academic departments and disciplines are as low as they can be,” adds Wiltzius.

Big data is another factor driving collaboration, as, increasingly, the skills and knowledge of computer scientists, computer engineers, data analysts, and others outside such disciplines as the life sciences and earth science are needed to make use of enormous data in models that provide deeper understanding of complex problems.

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There’s a lot of talk about interdisciplinary and collaborative research at many universities, but here, it works better than anywhere I’ve been.

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Photograph by Matt Perko

Graduate students at work in the new BioEngineering lab, where faculty and students from various disciplines share facilities.

“The most interesting solutions occur where disciplines meet,” says computer science professor Ambuj Singh. He is engaged in several projects that involve big data, among them one that has multiple PIs at several universities, to understand and support optimal group decision-making processes. (See “The Long Reach of Big Data” on page 11.)

Collaboration shows another face at UCSB’s many centers and institutes, which bring together researchers from diverse fields who share an interest in a specific area of endeavor, whether brain science, bioengineering, solid-state electronics, energy efficiency, or synthetic polymers. (See “Centered on Collaboration,” on page 23.)

The value of collaborating within and across disciplines shows up for students, too. (See “Oh, to Be Young,” on page 15.) “The most important benefit of collaboration in my view is the effect on the education of students, who interact with multiple faculty and thus develop their own unique profile rather than being ‘clones’ of their advisors,” says Professor Carlos Levi, Mehrabian Chair in Materials. “Because we bridge the gap from science to technology, and industry is often part of these collaborations, students also benefit from the interaction with high-caliber industrial researchers and develop excellent communication skills.”

“What I find wonderful about UCSB is that, without agenda, without kind of knowing what something is going to lead to, it’s very easy to have conversations with people about things they’re doing and things you’re doing,” says mechanical engineering professor Matt Begley. “People are very willing to just have an open discussion about a problem, even if it isn’t their problem, even if it doesn’t obviously connect to what they’re doing, and at a lot of places, that’s not true.”

In this issue of Convergence, we look into what collaboration is at UCSB — who does it, what forms it takes, what difference it makes, and, most important, why we should care. A good starting point is the notion, shared by several people who appear in the issue and summed up by Megan Valentine when she says, “The result of collaboration is never one plus one equals two; it’s more like one plus one equals seven.”

CONVERGENCE 10

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WITH MACHINE LEARNING TO MINE THEM, MASSIVE DATA SETS OPEN NEW WORLDS OF MEANING

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ncreasingly, big data and its partner, machine learning, are driving and enabling collaboration.

Advances in sensors, cameras, scientific instrumentation, software platforms, deep neural networks, and computing power have made the promise of artificial intelligence real. The results show up in platforms that can identify patterns and scour meaning from millions or even billions of data points to better understand and manage a vast range of dynamical systems, from smart buildings and new materials to human biology and social systems.

Big data can take the form of simple data points that record, say, clickthroughs on websites or entries on a spreadsheet, or it can be digital imagery, such as video, photographs, remotely sensed lidar images, or microscopy images. UCSB researchers are on the front lines of this data-fueled revolution, developing systems that make such multimodal big data a powerful tool for engineering.

According to B. S. Manjunath, professor in the Department of UCSB Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the campus’s Center for Multimodal Big Data Science and Healthcare, big-data approaches require three main elements: experts in the field under study who can frame the research questions and form hypotheses; computational-science experts to design algorithms and data structures; and information-processing experts to address the signaling and information-theory components.

Because so much science-related data takes the form of digital images, UCSB researchers were recently awarded a $3.4 million grant from

Illustration by Brian Long

the National Science Foundation’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure to fund a broadly interdisciplinary Large-scale IMage Processing Development (LIMPID) project. Their work is based on a platform called BisQue (Bio-Image Semantic Query User Environment), developed by Manjunath’s group. BisQue had its roots in microscopy imaging and was developed to support a wide range of image informatics research for the life sciences. With its ability to process databases and perform image analysis, BisQue makes it easy to share, distribute, and collaborate around large image datasets.

“You can think of BisQue as Google Docs for scientific images,” Manjunath notes. “Imaging data has become ubiquitous, and much of big-data science is image-centric.

Working with such data should be as simple as working with text files in Google Docs, so that people can collaborate and share information in real time. Not too many places have that kind of infrastructure for data science. It has taken us twelve years to build, and it’s something that sets us apart.”

In the field of marine science, most of the billions of images of ocean creatures and habitats that have been amassed to date must be manually processed, according to co-PI Robert Miller, a research biologist in UCSB’s Marine Science Institute. “Until now, we’ve had to look through them and count things, scoring the number of organisms, like algae and fish. And there are millions of these images being taken all around the world every month, if not every week, by scientists, amateurs, divers, you name it.”

But much of that data is going unused. “Even deep-sea survey photos and videos that cost millions of dollars to get are often times just sitting on hard drives, because there’s no willingness to look through it all and get the information out of it,” Miller says. “And there’s not only biological data in there. There’s also data about the seafloor, geology, even archaeology. It’s a huge amount of data that’s being wasted.”

BisQue is unique in its ability to handle a wide range of imaging data across diverse scientific applications, from marine and materials science to neuroscience and medical imaging.

For instance, recent advances in materials tomography are generating an enormous amount of nanoscale microscopy imaging data, which must be reconstructed, shared, and further analyzed. Manjunath is working with UCSB materials scientist and co-PI Tresa Pollock to integrate algorithms developed specifically for processing materials imaging data into BisQue. CONVERGENCE 12

Thanks to the LIMPID/BisQue project, he says, “In the Thanks Santa Barbara to the LIMPID/BisQue Channel Marineproject, Biodiversity he says, Observation “In the Santa Network, Barbara whichChannel is supported Marine byBiodiversity NASA and Observation the Bureau Network, of Ocean which EnergyisManagement, supported by we NASA are and developing the Bureau imof age-analysis Ocean Energy pipelines Management, and models we to areprocess developing underwater new image-analysis imagery and automate pipelinesthe and processes models to of process identifying underand water quantifying imagery marine and automate organisms.the LIMPID processes will expand of identithat fying work to and the quantifying point where marine UCSBorganisms. will become LIMPID the epicenter will expand of imagethat analysis work technology dramaticallyfor to marine the point science.” where UCSB will become the epicenter of image analysis technology for

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Working with such data should be as simple as working with text files in Google Docs, where you can collaborate and share in real time.

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marine Meanwhile, science.” at UC Riverside, professor and LIMPID collaborator Amit Roy-Chowdhury will work with neurosciMeanwhile, ence researchers at UCto Riverside, analyze large professor volumes and of LIMPID live imagcollaborator ing data thatAmit capture Roy-Chowdhury neuronal activities will work in thewith Drosophila neuroscience (fruit fly) nervous researchers system. to analyze The UCSB large scientists volumesare ofalso live imaging collaborating data that with capture Nirav Merchant neuronal at activities the University in the Drosophila of Arizona, where (fruit fly) BisQue nervous and system. the cyberinfrastructure The UCSB scientists CyVerse are also will be collaborating leveraged to with further Niravenable Merchant image-based at the University scientific discoveries. of Arizona, where And atBisQue the UC and San the Francisco cyberinCenfrastructure ter for Digital CyVerse Innovation, will be another leveraged team, toDrs. further Rachel enable A. image-based Callcut and Scott scientific Hammond, discoveries. haveAnd deployed at the the UC BisQue San Francisco platform for Center use on forpatient Digitalimages Innovation, and associated Drs. Racheldata.

A. Callcut There, BisQue and Scott is already Hammond servinghave as a deployed user interface the for Bisque pixplatform el-level annotation for use onand patient machine images automation and associated of images. data.

In this collaboration, BisQue is already serving as a user interface Distinct from for pixel-level the image-based annotation LIMPID and project machine is autothe U.S. mation Army–funded of images.

Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project focusing on modeling and optimizing Distinct team decision-making. from the image-based CoE computer LIMPID science project is professor the U.S. Ambuj Army-funded Singh (PI) and Multidisciplinary professors Francesco UniversityBullo Research (meInitiative chanical engineering) (MURI) project and focusing Noah Friedkin on modeling (sociology) and op-are timizing combining team their decision-making. various expertise CoE to computer model andscience underprofessor stand team Ambuj decision-making Singh (PI) and andprofessors the kinds Francesco of intervenBullo tions that (Mechanical could make Engineering) teams more andefficient.

Noah Friedkin They are (Sociology) using data from are combining multiple sources controlwhere theory,decision-maksocial science, and ing ismachine embedded learning into to systems, modelsuch and understand as sports teams, team decision-making stock-market trading, and the andkinds small-group of interventions surveys. that

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could The ultimate make teams goal,more Singhefficient. says, “isThey to move are using toward data teams from in which multiple humans sources and where machines decision-making work togetheristo embedsolve ded a specific into systems, task. We such are as already sportsdoing teams, that stock-market with driving trading, whenever andGoogle small-group Maps surveys. tells us which way to go, and we drive there.”

The ultimate goal, Singh says, “is to move toward teams inSingh whichexplains humansthat andleaders machines in all work kinds together of organizations to solve amust specific often task. form Weteams already that dobring that with diverse driving; skills Google to bear in Maps solving tells families us which of tasks. way toThe go,MURI and we collaboration drive there.” is interested in a series of questions whose answers could help Singh to understand explains that and leaders improveinthat all kinds process, of organizations such as: What must are the often dynamics form teams behind thathow bring a team diverse makes skillsa to decision? bear inHow solving doesfamilies a teamof member tasks. The learn MURI about collaboration the skills that is interested other team inmembers a series ofhave? questions Why do whose some answers peoplecould get help decisions to understand right andand some improve get them thatwrong? process, What suchleads as: What teamare members the dynamics to change behind theirhow appraisal a teamofmakes each other a de- in cision? the process, How does and a how team does member that affect learnthe about nextthe round skillsof that decision-making other team members the teamhave? will face?

Why do some people get decisions right, and why do some get them wrong?

What “We’re leads trying team to members go beyondtojust change a phrase theirthat appraisal says, ‘A of each teamother is doing in the a task process, well or and not how doing does it well,’” that affect Singh theexnext plains. round “Weofwant decision-making to be able tothe quantify team how will face? much better or how much worse something is being done. And we “We’re want totrying knowto togo what beyond extentjust thea entire phrasedecision-making that says, ‘A team process is doing can be a task captured well orinnot terms doing of aitmodel well,’”that Singh can exexplains. plain the“We process, wantand to be whether able toitquantify is possible howtomuch get assisbetter tance or from how AImuch in terms worse of improving somethingthis is being decision-making done.

And process we want itself.” to know to what extent the entire decision-making process can be captured in terms of a model Clearly, that he can adds, explain “You cannot the process, do that and with whether just a single it is possible scientifictodomain get assistance alone, sofrom we’re AI working in terms with of improving multiple this faculty decision-making members. Francesco process Bullo itself.”is leading research on the controls and dynamics of the systems, and Noah Clearly, Friedkin heisadds, looking “You at aspects cannot do of social that with science just atheory, single scientific and howdomain to model alone, the dynamics so we’re working of groups with onmultiple different faculty kinds of members. tasks. I’mFrancesco there for the Bullo computer is leading science research and the on machine the controls learning.” and dynamics of the systems, and Noah Friedkin is looking at aspects of social science theory, and Thehow same toArmy model Office the dynamics of Research of groups that funded on different the MURI kinds project of tasks. also greenlighted I’m there forathe parallel computer project science led byand Techthe nology machine Management learning.”Program professor and chair, Kyle Lewis (see “New Scientific Method?” on next page), The which same focuses Armyon Office other ofaspects Research of that group funded learning the and, MURI especially, project collective also greenlighted intelligence. a parallel project led

by Technology Management Program professor and chair, The MURI Kyle Lewis grant was (seeawarded sidebar), with which the focuses understanding on other aspects that theofgroup groupit learning funded would and, especially, support and collective collaborate intelligence. with LewisThe andMURI her team, grantleading was awarded Singh to with quip, the “Mayunder-

be we are the subjects, and they actually funded our study of groups so that they can study us as collaborating groups!”

These are just a few examples of the many UCSB research projects where big data is a keystone of collaboration.

Photograph by Tony Mastres

And on the big-data horizon: a possible campus-wide initiative to integrate data science programmatically into every department on campus. So far, Singh has spoken with over fifty members of the faculty and administration in the run-up to a formal proposal. Now that’s a collaboration.

The computing center run jointly by the Materials Research Lab (left) and the California NanoSystems Institute faciliatates collaborations around big data.

NEW SCIENTIFIC METHOD?

BIG DATA CAN SUBTLY SHIFT HOW SCIENCE IS DONE

Big data not only serves as a starting point for collaborative research; it can also slightly rewire the traditional scientific method.

For instance, Kyle Lewis, professor and chair of the Technology Management Program (TMP) in the UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering, is collaborating with a related MURI project (see oppostite page) led by computer science professor Ambuj Singh. With funding also from the U. S. Army Office of Research, Lewis is partnering with Singh and his team, mechanical engineer Francesco Bullo and sociologist Noah Friedkin, to study learning behaviors in small groups. Specifically, they are investigating how scientists on an interdisciplinary team “learn to develop shared knowledge so that they can

communicate efficiently and work together effectively.” In other words, the project is a collaboration intended to understand and optimize important elements of collaboration.

Lewis explains the process: “We have a theoretical phenomenon that I might understand very well from the social science perspective, and the mathematicians might ask, ‘Can we create a model that not only reflects the theory with fidelity, but also extends it so that we can develop and test new hypotheses about team collaboration?’”

Bullo, Friedkin, and Bullo’s graduate student Wenjun Mei “did the heavy lifting” to develop the mathematical model, Lewis explains, adding, “And once we had a model, we wondered

if we could study the phenomenon and replicate it with human beings.

So, can we now go into the laboratory with humans and find out if the processes work as we have formally described them as working?

“It’s kind of the reverse of how our science would typically work,” Lewis adds. “Rather than studying human behavior and trying to construct a formal mathematical model based on empirical evidence, you’re developing a mathematical model that is consistent with theories of human behavior and then seeing if you can replicate it in empirical studies. It’s a really exciting way to think about research — using the mathematics to articulate a formal model and then trying to test the model with real people.”

CONVERGENCE 14

OH, TO BE YOUNG (AND INTERDISCIPLINARY)

UCSB graduate students benefit from working on the front lines of collaborative research.

15 Spring 2018

They’ve learned to collaborate (clockwise from center left): Kaila Mattson, Jonathan Klamkin, Anton Van Der Ven, Luke Patterson

“

Our students are better at Mechanical collaboration when they engineering PhD student Luke graduate from UCSB Patterson, who is part of the micro-hammer collaboration (see because they create page 17), recalls that when he visited UCSB as a prospectheir own identity. tive student, “I had a sense that

”

everyone was very serious about their research but not in a territorial way. People seemed completely open to discussing their ideas and working together. It’s a big reason why I came here.”

Students are among those who benefit most from the collaborative orientation of engineering and the sciences at UC Santa Barbara. Graduate students, especially, gain a great advantage from being co-advised by multiple faculty members in different departments, exposing them to a broad range of perspectives, knowledge, tools, and techniques. And because UCSB lacks the kind of research fiefdoms common at many universities, students become part of a dynamic collaborative exchange with their fellow graduate students. As a result, graduate students, who are on the front lines of research, regularly provide key insights and breakthroughs.

“Our students are better at collaboration when they graduate from UCSB because they create their own identity,” says computational engineer and materials professor Anton Van Der Ven. “They’re not a clone of one professor.

They synthesize something new from two or three groups. Co-advising students enriches the whole endeavor, and as professors guiding students who are unafraid to try to merge completely different fields, we absorb new insights and ways of thinking from them all the time.”

Kaila Mattson (PhD ’16), a chemist at The Dow Chemical Company in Michigan, echoes that view. During her time at UCSB, she had an office in the highly collaborative Materials Research Laboratory. “The open-door policy that all faculty had was a tremendous boon,” she says. “Every professor I interacted with was more than willing to sit down and answer my questions about science and see if they could provide insights, even if I wasn’t in their group.”

There are few, if any, barriers to prevent students from spending time with a lab group they are not officially affiliated with in order to learn something important to their research. That freedom to make choices and follow their curiosity allows them to gain both knowledge and confidence in their own resourcefulness.

“Students appreciate all the skill sets and tools that are taught in different disciplines,” says chemical engineering professor Glenn Fredrickson. “I have students from chemical engineering and occasionally from materials, physics, and chemistry. They’re all getting PhDs and comparing notes on what courses they take and what they’re learning. They learn from each other all the time.”

Jonathan Klamkin, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Chemical Engineering, earned his PhD at UCSB (Professor Emeritus Larry Coldren was his advisor) but is also familiar with what he refers to as “the traditional university model in the U.S., where professors have their own labs and the door’s closed, and it’s not as collaborative.”

At UCSB, he says, “It’s different. We work on really tough projects that one person can’t do alone. Students work together, and the net product is something they all benefit from, not just because it’s so cutting edge, but also because they learned to work together.” Citing that familiarity with collaborative group work, he adds, “There’s definitely a concentration of UCSB graduates in industry, because they’re productive and entrepreneurial and know how to work as a team to make a finished product.”

The team approach has also extended his ability to contribute. For instance, after doing some cell work himself when a fellow student was away, he became more aware of how long the procedure he was doing takes and what, therefore, is a reasonable number of proteins to ask others to test for. “There’s an advantage to being able to speak multiple languages,” he says. “I can talk intelligently with my biology collaborators and understand what they’re saying, but I can also provide better input.”

“Working collaboratively, you can tackle larger and more-complex challenges,” Mattson notes.

“I was trained as synthetic chemist, and my core competency is creating new molecules. But that work is much more powerful if I team up with someone in engineering who can see ways to use them in applications that might be beyond my core competency. It takes the research so much further. I notice that colleagues who take a more siloed approach are less efficient and can lack such richness in their science.”

For mechanical engineering professor Megan Valentine, giving students the opportunity to partner pays multiple dividends. “Student training is better if they have access to multiple faculty and are given the incentive and the freedom to be creative, to ask questions beyond the boundary of one group,” she explains.

“Students are at ground zero. They know a lot of other students. They know a lot of faculty, and if you can give them the agency to think collaboratively, they can bring things to the table that we might not see. And that’s the way it should be. It’s good training for them, and we get better science.”

CONVERGENCE 16

MICRo-HAMMER

ANATOMY OF A COLLABORATION

The kernel of the idea came to Foster as she thought about the fruits of some consulting work she had done for Owl Biomedical, which developed micro-fluidic cell-sorting technology. Foster found herself wondering what else she could do with similar technology “that would be fun and exciting and make it possible to do something that currently could not be done.”

A self-described “applied mechanician by training” who focuses on “building little tiny machines that you either can’t see or can barely see,” Foster had been interested for some time in finding biomedical applications for her work.

17 Spring 2018

OW A TEAM CAME TOGETHER TO CREATE AN INNOVATIVE BIOMEDICAL DEVICE

As is true of any collaboration, this one didn’t just happen. It took effort, communication, awareness, planning, dedication, and a touch of serendipity. There was no single starting point.

H

A

bout a year ago, the world’s smallest hammer came into being. Developed at UCSB, it was designed to apply impact loads to cultured human neural stem cells, which could then be studied to better understand the effects of traumatic brain injury (TBI) at the cellular level. After a year of testing the device, cells are now being hammered and studied by the team, which includes UCSB mechanical engineering professors Kimberly Foster and Megan Valentine; Neuroscience Research Institute professional researcher and lecturer Adele Doyle; PhD students Luke Patterson and Jennifer Walker; and industry partner Owl Biomedical, Inc. in Goleta.

Illustration by Brian Long

CONVERGENCE 18

Photograph by Matt Perko

Cool project: PhD student Sarah Grundeen (electrical and computer engineering) removes neural stem cells from a cryostorage tank, to be hammered in an experiment. Grundeen is co-advised by Adele Doyle and electrical and computer engineering professor Luke Theogarajan.

The origin story of this collaboration includes the fact that, as an athlete and former bicycle racer who had seen many of her favorite athletes get knocked unconscious, Foster had long been interested in TBI. Despite the fact that about 1.7 million TBIs occur every year in the United States, she says, “We have remarkably limited understanding of TBI at the cellular level — which cells are affected and why, what exactly happens to affected cells, and which system is responsible for the associated loss of function and should therefore be the target for therapy.”

nisms of neurological diseases. They began to discuss how their research might be mutually beneficial and which funding agencies they might want to target.

That interest was present as an undercurrent during Foster’s occasional meetings with Valentine, who was studying molecular mecha-

“Even before there was a discussion of the micro-hammer, I had the desire to tap in to the micro-tool area,” says Valentine, who came to

19 Spring 2018

“

I spent a lot of time talking with people in biology about what would be interesting to hammer with this mechanism.

”

UCSB in 2008, attracted partly by the university’s strength in micro-bioelectronics.

Foster describes the decision to include Valeninte on the team as a “no-brainer,” saying, “I really like the style of Megan’s work. She’s interested in the link between force and function in cells, and she’s working at a very fine scale.”

“My prior training that really impacts this study is expertise in cell mechanics,” Valentine says.

“How do cells respond to force, what are their elastic properties, what are their viscous properties, how do those cellular properties depend upon the constituents, and what’s the relationship from molecular features up to cell-level responses?”

Photograph by Matt Perko

Valentine’s lab group has developed techniques useful in studying mechanics and applying loads to cells. But, she notes, “We were never able to push the envelope to achieve strains and loading rates that were relevant to brain trauma.” With Foster, she adds, “We eventually identified this question of what happens when cells are experiencing really high loads and high impacts, and what are the tools that might allow us to study that?”

He was given office space with Foster’s group, and while looking for possible projects, she described her idea for the micro-hammer.

Together, Foster and Patterson designed the prototype hammer as an unfunded project, hoping to acquire the proof-of-principle data required by funding agencies.

Once they had built the device, Foster began thinking about which cells she should hammer with it. “It was an interesting question,” she recalls, “and I spent a lot of time talking with people in biology, even outside of UCSB, about what would be interesting to hammer with this mechanism.”

Photograph by Matt Perko

Against that background of dovetailing interests came PhD student Luke Patterson.

Having majored in physics and mechanical engineering as an undergraduate at Westmont College, he entered UCSB in 2014 knowing that he wanted to do collaborative research and was interested in the nervous system and going in a biomedical direction.

Hard-hitting team (from left): Megan Valentine, Kimberly Foster, and Adele Doyle.

With Patterson already on board, Foster asked Valentine and Doyle to join. Queenan helped to write the proposal, and six months later, the project Foster originally thought of as a long shot was funded.

“

Serendipity then occurred when Bridget Queenan was hired as the associate director of the UCSB Brain Initiative (BRI), and over an introductory lunch one day, Foster shared the micro-hammer idea with her. Queenan then mentioned the hammer to her colleague Adele Doyle, and encouraged her to contact Foster.

She thought that Doyle’s expertise in measuring mechanosignaling at high-throughput using techniques she had developed for reading genetic expression in single cells would be a good fit for the project.

“Bridget ended up seeing connections that we had not necessarily observed in each other,” Doyle recalls.

Right around that time, Foster saw an article about President Obama’s nascent federal brain initiative and a call for proposals for team research on ideas for neuro-engineering. She set out to formalize the team.

I think we’re one of the few groups who can get into this range of very high forces and very rapid force impacts.

”

The group decided to use neural stem cells because they flow well through the device, and the researchers could study whether force affected the cells’ unique capacity to become other types of cells.

“Since TBI patients also suffer increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia years after the initial injury, a current roadblock to patient care is understanding how regenerative cells in the body, such as neural stem cells, respond to external brain impact,” says Doyle.

“We wanted to define this and then help design improved clinical treatments.”

Foster and PhD candidates Patterson and Jennifer Walker have spent the past year working to refine the hammer to make sure it functions correctly, while also working with their faculty PIs on design and parameters for experiments they could run when it was ready to go. The student researchers also collaborated with counterparts in the Valentine and Doyle labs to learn about microscopy and molecular measurement techniques, respectively, that could be useful for the experimental work.

With the device now operating, the researchers are hammering , collecting, and culturing cells and applying their techniques to investigate various states of interest they observe.

“I’m really excited by the micro-hammer project,” Valentine says. “I think we’re one of the few groups who can get into this range of very high forces and very rapid force impacts.

And the fact that we can do that on thousands of cells in a single experiment and then collect the cells and track them over time — that’s incredibly unique.”

Watch for further collaborations as the research evolves.

CONVERGENCE 20

DAVID HENKE B.A. MATHEMATICS, 1978

21 Spring 2018

Illustration by Brian Long

ALUMNUS, CONNECTED

David Henke spent 35 years building and managing teams for Silicon Valley giants David Henke graduated from UC Santa Barbara in 1978, before the school had a computer science department, as the top undergraduate mathematics student in his class. He then spent 35-plus years as an architect, programmer, and senior manager in the software/internet field. He founded two successful software startups, TeamOne Systems and CAE Systems, and earned a reputation for recruiting the best talent, developing successful teams, and leading keystone projects while serving as a senior executive in charge of engineering and operations at such companies as Yahoo!, AltaVista, and LinkedIn. He is currently an advisory board member for Avid Secure, NerdWallet, Brigade Media, SignifAI, and Elementum SCM, and a member of the Dean’s Cabinet at the UCSB College of Engineering. Henke has been a “collaborator” since he was a kid growing up in Whittier, California, a small city east of Los Angeles. His friends were the children of Mexican-American immigrants, and gangs were present in his neighborhood. “If you lived there, you learned to speak some Spanish, and you learned to get along,” he says. Decades later, he directs a portion of his philanthropical giving to support immigration reform. Convergence caught up with him recently to discuss his career of collaboration.

C: You began your professional life as a programmer. How did you move into team leadership?

C: Were there any specific methods you used to ensure that teams would succeed?

DH: I was the founder and principal programmer at two startups. Then I left and went to a great company called Silicon Graphics, which did all the computing for Industrial Light and Magic [founded by George Lucas to create special effects for Star Wars]. While I was there, I went from being an individual contributor to leading teams, because they told me I had to or I’d be fired [laughs]. They needed to get 64-bit computing to work and said they needed me to lead a team to do it. I soon realized that I could get a lot more done leading teams of people who had common objectives.

DH: One thing we did at LinkedIn was to reorganize our teams so that engineering, product, site-reliability, and quality-assurance people all sat together. That way, they could build solutions together, and there could never be any finger-pointing. They either won as a team or lost as a team. Obviously, we wanted them to win. That was total collaboration; it was all about the team.

C: What do you think makes you good at what you do?

DH: I’m a good team builder and recruiter. If you put five all-stars on a basketball court, they can be really terrible, or they can play together like the [Golden State] Warriors and win a couple of NBA titles. This is a very important concept, because even teams in the same company don’t always get along. They’re competing for resources. They have different priorities. If you work for me at LinkedIn, you’re working for LinkedIn; I don’t care if you’re on Team A, B, or C. And if you make an argument that we have to do this because it’s my team and my objective, and you don’t understand that Team A and Team B also have to be considered in this equation, then you can’t work for me. You don’t have the right attitude. Pretty much everybody I hire is smarter than I am. They may not be a better leader or a better coach, but they’re better players. That’s good. That’s how you win. You get the best people, and you put them together.

C: You have given generously to multiple causes. What’s your perspective on that?

DH: I am a big believer in giving back, both in time and money. I support medical research, immigration reform, and the foster system for kids. But my favorite philanthropy is for education, starting with UC Santa Barbara. It represents our future.

C: You have recruited hundreds of people over the years. Have you tapped UCSB as a source of computer engineers?

DH: When I joined LinkedIn, there were two hundred technologists; four years later, we had twenty-seven hundred. One of the things we did was to create an intern program and another was to recruit new college graduates. The CEO was responsible for going to the Ivy League schools, the VP of production went to the Big Ten schools, and I was responsible for going to Caltech, UCLA, and Berkeley. I told them I’d do it, but we had to add UC Santa Barbara, because it wasn’t on the list. I said, “You guys have no idea how good the school is.” I volunteered to make connections and form relationships with the professors, who, I hoped, would send us some of their most talented masters and PhDs in the areas we care about. That’s what we did, and it paid off.

C: Can you talk a bit about your “site up” perspective?

DH: “Site up” refers to the site being up and fully functional all the time. It’s crucial to people who run companies like Yahoo or LinkedIn or Google or Facebook. Those are 24/7 operations, so there is no rest, because if you go down, your customers cannot access the service.

Availability, security, performance, and functionality are key. At Yahoo!, it was hard to do because it was what I call a loose confederation of warring tribes. At LinkedIn, which had a more unified approach, we were able to go from being down at least once every day to being up 99.9 percent of the time.

CONVERGENCE 22

CENTERED ON COLLABORATION LIKE VORTICES OF INNOVATION, UCSB CENTERS ATTRACT DIVERSE RESEARCHERS WHO SHARE INTERESTS. 23 Spring 2018

P

erhaps not surprisingly, Bridget Queenan, associate director of the UCSB Brain Initiative, has a “brainy” metaphor for how UCSBs many research centers and institutes work.

On a sketch of a human brain, she maps the areas responsible for specialized functions — vision, smell, touch, and so on. She then points to the regions between, called ”association areas.”

Because specialization is so valuable, Queenan says, “You wouldn’t want to get rid of it and say, ‘OK, the visual part of your brain is doing too much vision stuff.’ Instead, brains have evolved association areas, which take information from multiple specialized areas to solve problems that require more than, say, just vision or just hearing.

In the university parallel, she adds, “You have departments that specialize, and the people in them are experts who can make each other better.

You don’t want to get rid of that and force the Chemical Engineering Department to become the Physics Department. But some problems are unwieldy, and to solve them, you have to create a place where anyone from any department can meet to pursue a common interest. Centers pull different specializations together in new and unexpected ways.”

UCSB engineering and the sciences is home to many such focal-point centers and institutes. Each has its own identity, focus, and way of operating.

Quite a few overlap, and all foster collaborations that benefit faculty, provide outstanding training for students, develop industry links, and generate better science. Here are a few examples of the nearly twenty centers for engineering and science on campus. Keep in mind that each is far more complex and connected than we have space to describe here. To see a list of all the centers in the College of Engineering, go to engineering.ucsb. edu/research/research-centers.

Some, like the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation (CCDC), have a fairly informal structure but are nonetheless tremendously successful, as witnessed by the College of Engineering’s No. 3 world ranking in automation and control.

For many projects in his field, says CCDC director and professor of electrical and computer engineering, Andrew Teel, “Long-term success requires a confluence of people who have many different ideas, talents, and strengths, and within the center, we have all those people.”

The main priority at CCDC is to provide graduate students with a sense of community, to help them

Illustration by Peter Allen

investigate possible research paths when they arrive, develop and navigate a suitable course of study, and make it easy while they are working on a problem to meet others outside their lab who may be working on related problems.

Another type of entity is the Materials Research Laboratory (MRL), directed by Professor Ram Seshadri, who has appointments in materials, chemistry, and biochemistry. MRL recently received its sixth consecutive multi-million-dollar grant as a National Science Foundation Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC). Se­ shadri notes that the lab is one of the two most productive in terms of papers published.

MRL epitomizes how resources are leveraged at UCSB to benefit the many, most notably in its inventory of advanced equipment and instruments.

“It’s one facility and it’s seamless, and it doesn’t matter who you work for on campus, you can use those facilities on a recharge basis,” says chemical engineering professor and regular MRL collaborator Glenn Fredrickson. “And we have professional scientists who will train the students how to use the equipment and interpret the results of experiments run on it.”

Kaila Mattson (PhD ’16), a scientist at Dow Chemical in Midland, Michigan, who had an office in MRL while at UCSB, reflects that. “MRL was transformative, personally and scientifically,” she says. “It is a truly fantastic place to conduct research and grow as a scientist. Collaboration is not just encouraged at MRL; it’s expected.”

Kristin Denault (PhD ‘15) is another alumna who was housed in the MRL as a graduate student studying the crystal structures of phosphor materials. Through an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) fellowship, she was encouraged to take classes in the entrepreneurially focused UCSB Technology Management Program (TMP). An entrepreneur was born: she tied for second place in the 2014 TMP New Venture Competition, and today runs her own startup in Santa Barbara, Fluency Lighting Technologies, which is “working to develop next-generation energy-efficient lighting sources.”

“Being a part of MRL opened my eyes to opportunities after grad school that I didn’t even know existed, one of them being to start a tech company,” she says.

Materials professor Craig Hawker leads the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), which supports a combination of entrepreneurial and outreach programs, and serves as an incubator for both start-up businesses and large research CONVERGENCE 24

Photograph by Matt Perko

ing (CSC), UCSB’s high-performance computing center in Elings Hall.

The Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials (MCCAM), directed by Glenn Fredrickson, is built on a long-term industry partnership with Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation to develop new market-driven materials, especially polymers, Fredrickson’s specialization. The result for Mitsubishi is access to patentable market-driven materials it needs, while UCSB gets millions of dollars in annual research support, and graduate-student researchers get to work with industry before they graduate.

collaborations, with partners such as TMP and the UCSB Office of Research. CNSI now also has what Hawker describes as “the only wet lab incubator space on the Central Coast,” adding, “It is really fostering an ecosystem. That’s the point about centers at UCSB. We all contribute something, and UCSB entrepreneurial programs really address startup companies that need lab space that isn’t available anywhere else.”

One long-running center project involves developing organic electronic materials, particularly for flexible electronics. Fredrickson explains that chemistry and materials professor Gui Bazan makes the “conjugated polymers,” chemical engineering professor and department chair, Rachel Segalman, and others characterize and optimize the materials, chemistry professor Quyen Nguyen studies their electrical properties, and emeritus physics professor Alan Heeger tests their performance in transistor devices.

Like MRL, CNSI maintains its own trove of shared top-of-the-line equipment, and together, the two operate the Center for Scientific Comput

“We have people with appointments in chemistry, materials, chemical engineering, and physics all pulling together,” says Fredrickson.

Materials mix (from right): Professor Craig Hawker examines a solution with Assistant Professor Chris Bates and PhD student Yvonne Diaz, who is co-advised by Hawker and chemistry professor Javier Read de Alaniz.

BEYOND SUBJECT MATTER CSEP PROVIDES CRITICAL SKILLS FOR CAREER ADVANCEMENT

Ricardo Alamillo (BS ’10) grew up in Santa Paula and attended Santa Paula High School, which lies in an agricultural area and does not send many graduates to college. But Alamillo wanted to be an engineer and applied to UCSB. He entered on a Dan Burnham Scholarship after attending the Summer Institute of Math and Science at UCSB, one of many programs run by the Center for Science and Engineering Partnerships (CSEP), which is hosted by the UCSB California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI).

While at UCSB, Alamillo participated in several more CSEP programs, and received advice during his involvement in the na25 Spring 2018

tional Society for the Advancement of Chicano and Native Americans in Science. After graduating, he earned a PhD at the University of Wisconsin, and is now an engineer at Apeel Sciences, a burgeoning local company started

by CoE alumnus James Rogers (PhD ’12).

Alamillo is also working with Apeel’s Engineering Department leadership team to design career-planning programs, especially for younger engineers, similar to what CSEP offered, because, he says, “I want them to have the same opportunities and resources I had. No one in my family or my network had graduated from college. The CSEP programs provided resources, a network, and a support

system for me and other ambitious like-minded people to get through college and achieve our full potential.”

Jasmine Hunt (PhD ’10) was a more traditional student. “She was really good at research but also really good at communicating,” recalls her advisor, Craig Hawker, materials professor and director of the entrepreneurially oriented CNSI. Through her involvement in CSEP programs, Hawker says, “She got turned on to policy, and after earning her PhD, went to Washington, D.C., for a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She loved it, stayed, and is now chief of staff for Senator Dick Durban (D-IL), the ranking Democrat on many committees.”

“We work with faculty, with community members, and with local industry on new initiatives to train the next generation of scientists and engineers,” says CSEP director, M. Ofelia Aguirre. “It is through these valued partner-

The Center for BioEngineering (CBE) occupies the new Bio-Engineering building, which houses professors and graduate students from all five CoE departments and two faculty members from chemistry and biochemistry, while involving faculty from several other areas. “It’s a mixture of people like [chemistry professor] Irene Chen and me, who are chemists trained as biologists, and then every flavor of engineer,” says center director Kevin Plaxco.

directed at dramatically increasing energy efficiency and ensuring a sustainable-energy future.

Photograph by Matt Perko

“IEE is organized by solution groups, so people who are involved with similar problems meet,” says Bowers.

A new IEE building scheduled for groundbreaking in summer 2018 will have space for more than one hundred grad students and seventeen laboratories, including an experimental research data center. The data center will be of special interest to faculty in computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering for projects related to the various aspects of making more-efficient data centers.

Researchers affiliated with the CBE tend to work on one of two main tracks, which Plaxco describes as “engineering for biology and engineering from biology.” The former, he says, refers to “using physical tools, such as micromechaniUCSB centers and institutes are cal devices, and the intellectual conduits for connection, stimulating constructs of engineering, such dozens of collaborations every year.

PhD students at work in the new BioEngineering lab. as our understanding of control Their success provides a tremendous dynamics, to better understand biology.” The latter refers to “using the service and wide visibility for UCSB research, especially, says Glenn materials, mechanisms, and concepts that evolution has invented to Fredrickson, among government funding agencies and companies who solve biology’s problems.” On both tracks, important advances result want to do big group grants. “They look at UCSB and say, ‘Wow, this is only from interdisciplinary collaboration. a fantastic place, with all the right people and all the right skill sets and no barriers to collaboration’” he notes. “There’s a congruence between The Institute for Energy Efficiency, begun in 2008 and directed by how they operate and how we operate.” professor of electrical and computer engineering, AIM Photonics deputy CEO, and Fred Kavli Professor of Nanotechnology John Bowers, serves as a hub for research in semiconductor materials, electronics and circuits, photonics, and related fields, as a magnet for research grants

ships that we are able to have an impact on student success.” CSEP partnerships and programs can also have a big effect on securing grants for scientific research.

Increasingly, funding agencies require research grant proposals to have strong “broader-impacts” components and evaluation, whether for professional development, mentorship, community outreach, or education. “To secure funding in an increasingly competitive environment, your science has to be great, but so do your education pieces,” says Hawker.

A process might start when a faculty member comes to CSEP seeking a broader-impacts component to include in a grant proposal. Aguirre and her staff of seven then work with the professor to identify suitable CSEP programs, or even to create a new one to fit the professor’s specific needs. In one such program, the School for Scientific Thought, high school students come to campus on five consecutive Saturdays to take a free class

developed and taught by an instructor who is a UCSB graduate student or a postdoctoral research training fellow. Each class is based on the instructor’s science and engineering research, and the instructor is mentored by faculty advisors and CSEP staff.

“The graduate students learn to develop and teach a course, which requires them to communicate science effectively, a critical skill whether they go into industry, government, or academia,” says Wendy Ibsen, CSEP associate director. “We have all the existing infrastructure: we recruit the high school students, train the teaching fellows, and handle all the logistics. The instructors just have to provide the content and focus on teaching.”

Spending five Saturdays meeting graduate and undergraduate students can change the high school students’ perspective — and their lives. “They can go from thinking college is out of the question to thinking, ‘I could come here.’ And they do come,” Ibsen says.

Another powerful collaboration is the PIPELINES program (Initiatives for Powerful Engagement and Learning in Naval Engineering and Science), a partnership with the Port Hueneme naval base in Camarillo, funded by the Office of Naval Research. PIPELINES networks students and veterans with local industry and, says Maria Teresa Napoli, CSEP community college programs manager, “helps them develop valuable skills that make them competitive job applicants.”

PIPELINES consists of teams of undergraduate students working on real-world Navy engineering design projects, under the guidance of an engineer at the base and a UCSB graduate student. Students also participate in various professional-development activities at UCSB. Explains Napoli, “CSEP was looking for new ways to help students develop workplace-relevant skills. A partnership with the base made that possible.”

CONVERGENCE 26

THANK YOU!

TO EVERYONE WHO PARTICIPATED IN #GiveDay2018

As you read this special issue of Convergence highlighting collaboration at UCSB engineering and the sciences, we hope you know that as a donor, you are an integral part of our collaborative enterprise. We are truly in this together, and we’re forever grateful for your support.

If you missed GiveDay but want the satisfaction of supporting progress that matters, consider a gift to The Dean’s Fund.

27 Spring 2018

Photograph by Matt Perko

GET THE BEST, KEEP THE BEST That’s the motto of the Dean’s Fund, which enables the College of Engineering to recruit top graduate students and to hire and retain the best faculty in a highly competitive environment.

PLEASE JOIN US IN A COLLABORATION THAT MAKES THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE.

giving.ucsb.edu 805-893-GIVE

UCSBGIVEDAY

04 · 12 · 18 CONVERGENCE 28

Comprehensive Undertakings UCSB’S COLLABORATIVE APPROACH EARNS LARGE AWARDS FROM MAJOR SCIENCE INITIATIVES

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ew materials are constantly needed to enable a wide range of emerging or prospective high-performance technologies that are important to economic growth, environmental sustainability, and national defense. But moving those materials from discovery to useful application has, until recently, “taken decades, so materials solutions were viewed as too slow and too expensive,” says Alcoa Distinguished Professor of Materials and UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering associate dean, Tresa Pollock.

To address that, in 2008 Pollock chaired a nationwide National Academies study committee whose members interacted with multiple federal agencies and proposed a major national materials-development project.

“We made the point that computation was expanding rapidly, that there were lots of new experimental tools, such as high-throughput experimental (HTE) methods, and that, accordingly, it was time to put some effort into speeding things up,” she recalls.

That approach was effective, and in 2011, President Barack Obama announced the Materials Genome Initiative (MGI), aimed at forming the infrastructure to develop advanced materials twice as fast as was previously possible at a fraction of the cost. Pollock and fellow materials faculty member Professor Anton Van Der Ven attended the MGI White House kickoff event in 2012.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) participates in the MGI by awarding Designing Materials to Revolutionize and Engineer our Future (DMREF) grants. Nine grants, worth nearly $10.7 million, have gone to UCSB materials engineers, more than to any other university, reflecting the CoE’s strength in both collaborative materials science and in attracting major grants that that leverage the collaborative environment. As PIs on the projects, Pollock, Van Der Ven, and professors Irene Beyerlein, Michael Chabinyc, Glenn Fredrickson, Matthew Helgeson, Ram Seshadri, Chris Van de Walle, and Stephen Wilson have collaborated with 29 Spring 2018

each other and with other UCSB colleagues, industry partners, and PhD students and researchers at UCSB and beyond.

“These DMREF programs are a very significant investment at NSF,” says Pollock. “There are four-hundred-twenty-three faculty involved nationally, each program has a group of four or five faculty, and each faculty member has a PhD student, so the total number of people involved equates to roughly half the number of PhD students who graduate in materials in the U.S. every year. It’s having a big impact through sheer numbers of people who are just thinking about speeding things up.”

The PIs mentioned above may be involved in multiple DMREF projects that have some shared goal or subject matter or require similar skills and tools. Other faculty members join teams on projects that require their specific expertise. In one project for which Pollock is the lead, the team is developing an integrated framework for designing multi-component, multi-phase single-crystal alloys. They are also developing novel computational and experimental tools that can be integrated with existing tools to address fundamental barriers to designing and synthesizing the new alloys.

In those and related projects, Pollock conducts research on processing and mechanical behavior that guide the discovery of novel alloys.

Materials professor Carlos Levi, Mehrabian Distinguished Professor of Materials, is involved in two MGI projects; his role is to understand the oxidation behavior of alloys that are of interest for such higher-temperature applications.

The DMREF projects may also require the skills of mathematicians and computationally oriented scientists, including mechanical engineering professor Matthew Begley, Fredrickson (chemical engineering), mechanical engineering professor and department chair, Frédéric Gibou, Van Der Ven, and Van de Walle (materials), and. All perform computa-

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NINE GRANTS, WORTH NEARLY $10.7 MILLION, HAVE GONE TO UCSB MATERIALS ENGINEERS, MORE THAN TO ANY OTHER UNIVERSITY.

Illustration by Peter Allen

tional analysis, but they focus on different length scales and time scales and have varying, but complementary, specializations.

Fredrickson, for instance, who directs the Mitsubishi Chemical Center for Advanced Materials at UCSB, specializes in simulating polymer self-assembly, structure, and function, while Van de Walle works primarily with colleagues in the Solid State Lighting and Energy Electronics Center to establish quantum-level theoretical knowledge used to guide research on semiconductors for energy-efficient electronics. His DMREF project has been focused on accelerating the development of materials that can serve as ultraviolet light sources, by applying computational techniques that allow the team to study alloys and defects in them.

Van Der Ven also works at the atomic and sub-atomic levels to establish theory related to the crystal structure and performance of new materials having different purposes than the ones Van de Walle studies, while Begley focuses on the mechanics of new materials. In that work, he often creates simulations to examine the materials at a scale beyond (larger than) the crystal scale to understand how they will actually function under a variety of forces and conditions.

Gibou concerns himself with the phase change of materials. “As a melt of [newly amalgamated] metals solidifies, the space between the atoms changes, and that has a tremendous influence on the material,” he explains. “During that process, the atoms may be arranged one way in one region of the solid and differently in another region of the same solid.

Those regions, or phases, have a huge influence on the performance of the material, and understanding them is an essential first step in simulating the entire life of a material, from the ‘cradle’ though its life in an engineering application.”

DMREF and other grants associated with MGI from the Air Force, the Navy, and the Department of Energy reflect UCSB’s broader success in

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securing grants within major government-funded initiatives that require large interdisciplinary teams to accomplish their objectives. That success is a direct result of the university’s well-established and broadly recognized culture of collaboration.

UCSB regularly receives multi-million-dollar, multi-year grants from the Department of Defense Multiple University Research Initiative (MURI) to pursue a wide range of projects aimed at rapidly developing new technologies. The collaborative nature of the university has also led to its being named West Coast Headquarters for AIM Photonics, led by electrical and computer engineering professor John Bowers, an initiative of the American Institute for Manufacturing Integrated Photonics focused on developing an end-to-end photonic integrated circuit ecosystem in the United States.

Large grants for collaborative research have been awarded to UCSB researchers under the National Institutes of Health Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative, the Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and the Department of Defense, especially through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which itself depends on a collaborative ecosystem comprising universities, industry, small business, and government.

By now, collaboration comes naturally to UCSB researchers, and that, in turn, drives the increasing flow of large collaborative grants to the campus. But there is much more at stake in such efforts than securing research dollars and more-effective materials science and engineering.

Pollock indicates how it all relates to the future of the field when she says, “This is enabling an entire new generation of scientists and engineers who are naturally poised to take on major science and technology leadership positions in academia, industry, and government.”

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31 Spring 2018

Illustration by Peter Allen

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ig data, machine learning, complex algorithms, sophisticated models, powerful computers — together, these interrelated elements have altered the research landscape. Models are used to simulate polymer self-assembly, the behavior of materials and mechanical systems, processes driving climate change, group decision-making dynamics, agricultural best practices, heating and cooling of skyscrapers, and much more.

Models make it possible to “see” effects that would otherwise be available only by running an impossibly large number of experiments. They save time and money while dramatically increasing insight and understanding. And all models have one thing in common: they require complex mathematics to make them work.

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under the umbrella of what he calls “big data dynamics,” or “using data to analyze and understand the properties of large, data-intensive systems in order to design and control them better.”

In describing one of his operating principles, he highlights the collaborative versatility of mathematicians. “I’m looking for methodologies that can be applied to broad swaths of data across different fields,” he says. “If somebody gives me data from cell biology, I’d like to be able to say something about it with the algorithms I’ve developed previously, without having to change my thinking too much. I want scalability across different types of systems.”

other people are aware of can help us in solving our own problems. I’m surprised all the time by how other people see a problem.”

In the realm of big data, it is computational scientists who collaborate with others to mine salient truths from a billion data points. “Data does not exist in isolation, but rather as a tool to solve specific problems articulated by subject-matter experts, so experimentalists and applied mathematicians are connected,” says Mechanical Engineering Department chair, Frédéric Gibou. “Computation allows you to play with physics a little bit in a way that would be hard experimentally.”

In terms of the collaborative exchange, Gibou adds, “Experimentalists can tell you things that you can’t find out on your own. In reverse, the experimentalists can ask me to do a simulation on something that might be too expensive for them to run as an experiment or that would require an impossible number of experiments to get some statistics.”

I’M SURPRISED ALL THE TIME BY HOW OTHER PEOPLE SEE A PROBLEM.

It is the sophistication, the elegance, and the universality of partial differential equations that allow UCSB’s many applied computational scientists to contribute to a remarkably wide range of collaborative research projects.

Some practitioners specialize more than others. Chemical engineering professors Glenn Fredrickson and Scott Shell focus on simulating biochemical processes, such as polymer self-assembly, while materials professor Chris Van de Walle develops theoretical understanding of the quantum-level physics of semiconductors intended for lighting and other energy-efficient electronic applications.

Others cover a wider range of topics.

Mechanical engineering professor Igor Mezic is widely known for developing algorithms use to model very large systems, with much of his work falling

“It often happens that equations you use to describe one phenomenon are very similar to the equations you need to describe or understand a completely different phenomenon,” says materials engineer Anton Van Der Ven in describing the versatility of computational engineers. “Somehow, the way things interact is the same.”

Van Der Ven focuses on the atomicand electron-length scales to understand why a certain crystal structure is formed from a mixture of elements and to predict useful properties the material might have.

Of that process, he adds, “In developing software tools and methods and collaborating with a lot of people, we recognize that, first of all, some things that we’ve developed can be applied somewhere else, but also things that

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Simulation is also valuable when confronted with a universe of “ifs,” says Linda Petzold, professor of computer science and mechanical engineering.

She is currently several years into a large collaborative project funded by the U.S. Army to better understand the process of coagulopathy, a condition in which the blood of a person who is bleeding thins to the point that coagulation, or clotting, stops, putting the patient in grave danger of bleeding out and dying.

Some of Petzold’s collaborators are trauma surgeons, and together, they are examining what is known as the coagulation cascade, a deeply comCONVERGENCE 32

plex process that requires multiple proteins to bind with each other in precise and precisely synchronized ways for coagulation to occur when and where it is needed, and not to occur otherwise.

The system is well known but not well understood, largely because, Petzold says, “It’s so complex that no human being can get their head around it, so it has to be modeled.

By running a model, we can simulate things like a blood vessel with blood flow in it and the interactions that occur within the blood, and between the blood and the endothelium, the lining of the blood vessel. We can watch the coagulation develop with DATA DOES NOT EXIST IN computer graphics and test out all ISOLATION, BUT RATHER AS sorts of scenarios and ideas about what would happen if this condition A TOOL TO SOLVE SPECIFIC or that condition were present.”

PROBLEMS ARTICULATED BY

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SUBJECT-MATTER EXPERTS,

Petzold exemplifies the free-roaming SO EXPERIMENTALISTS AND ability of the computational scientist.

APPLIED MATHEMATICIANS She has built models to simulate the ARE CONNECTED. forces on car suspension systems, and in a recent collaboration with UCSB ecologist Cheryl Briggs, she modeled the interactions between frogs and fungus, in an effort to understand the causes of a fungal outbreak that is killing frogs around the world and to identify possible actions to mitigate that disaster.

“If I see an interesting problem that seems amenable to modeling, I’ll go for it,” Petzold says. “The same math applies to many, many different circumstances.”

By the numbers (clockwise from top left): Glenn Fredrickson, Igor Mezic, Linda Petzold, Scott Shell, Chris Van de Walle.

33 Spring 2018

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