Engineering Progress, Spring 2020

SPRING 2020

Advancing Cancer Research in the College of Engineering

UC Davis Medal Winner Bruce West The Power Of Nighttime Solar Strategies for Securing and Succeeding in an Engineering Job

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CONTENTS Engineering Progress is published twice a year by the College of Engineering at UC Davis.

Jennifer Sinclair Curtis Dean, College of Engineering Alyssa Panitch Executive Associate Dean, Academic Personnel and Planning Jessie Catacutan Executive Assistant Dean, Administration and Finance Ralph Aldredge Associate Dean, Undergraduate Studies Aditi Risbud Bartl Executive Director, Communications and Strategic Priorities Roland Faller Associate Dean, Facilities and Capital Planning Ricardo Castro Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies Leigh Ann Hartman Assistant Dean, Development and External Relations Cindy Rubio Gonzรกlez Faculty Assistant to the Dean for Diversity and Inclusion DEPARTMENT CHAIRS Bryan Jenkins Biological and Agricultural Engineering Steven George Biomedical Engineering Tonya Kuhl Chemical Engineering Amit Kanvinde Civil and Environmental Engineering Matthew Farrens Computer Science M. Saif Islam Electrical and Computer Engineering Jeff Gibeling Materials Science and Engineering Cristina Davis Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering ENGINEERING PROGRESS Rachel Steere Communications Specialist Kristina Batchelor Contributor Noah Pflueger-Peters Contributor Rob Riedel, ATS Design

College of Engineering University of California, Davis One Shields Avenue, Kemper Hall 1042 Davis, CA 95616

https://engineering.ucdavis.edu/

UC Davis Engineering Progress โ ข Spring 2020

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4 Message from the Dean 5 Alumni Involvement Opportunities

6 Going Viral 8 Meet Our New Faculty 10 EXPLORER Scans Cancer Patients

12 Securing and Succeeding in an Engineering Job

14 Fruit Harvesting Bots 16 Bruce West Wins UC Davis Medal

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COVER: Advancing Cancer Research

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20 Mohamed Hafez 22 Solar Panels at Night 24 Coffee Center Update 26 Cindy Rubio Gonzรกlez 27 Points of Pride

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Message from the Dean Spring quarter is underway, and I’m pleased to report our efforts to prepare for online instruction have come to fruition. In an unbelievably short amount of time, our faculty and students have transitioned to virtual learning in this new environment, and we are getting closer to steady state each day. Our students are fast learners online—after all, it’s a habitat they’ve grown up in. Our faculty are taking the opportunity to deliver engaging lectures via Zoom or video capture and using chat and live polls during class to increase participation.

In a first for the College of Engineering, our first-year Introduction to Engineering Design course, taught by biological and agricultural engineering professor Jennifer Mullin, moved its end-of-quarter design showcase and evaluation completely online. Typically, students learn to solve real-world design problems for clients like the UC Davis Student Farm, or the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing. Example projects include controlling pests at the farm, or easing communication between patients and caretakers at the nursing school’s Family Caregiving Institute.

The culminating event of this class is a design showcase during which student teams demonstrated their design projects for evaluators at the end of the quarter. The students are evaluated not only on the function of their design but how well they communicate their solution. Within a matter of days, our staff worked with Professor Mullin to create an interactive website for students to present their work and for evaluators to judge these design projects and provide real-time comments and feedback remotely. The event was held on March 19, 2020 and was a success, with 66 evaluations and 19 evaluators (including six alumni) all giving thoughtful feedback to our budding engineers.

While we’ve had to ramp down many on-campus research activities, we’ve maintained critical efforts on research related to COVID-19.

Our faculty are investigating innovative technology to 3-D print masks, ventilator parts and other critical equipment in partnership with UC Davis Health, among many new projects. These promising early efforts show how engineers, scientists and medical professionals work together to create innovative solutions in a time of need.

Lastly, Lodi, CA-based Diede Construction, Inc. was selected in April through a competitive bidding process to serve as the contractor for the Engineering Student Design Center renovation. We will begin demolition in fall quarter to prepare for building in Winter 2021 with a targeted completion of Fall 2022. The new ESDC will have new space to accommodate instruction, student-client collaboration, rapid prototyping and more. Groundbreaking for this landmark new facility will be on October 9, 2020 and we welcome your participation.

Go Ags!

Jennifer Sinclair Curtis Dean, UC Davis College of Engineering

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COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Alumni Involvement Opportunities

UC DAVIS COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

APPAREL AND MORE!

Alumni can get involved with the College of Engineering virtually through the online opportunities listed below. To learn more or sign up to participate, visit engineering.ucdavis.edu/alumni/get-involved/.

Messages of Encouragement Engineering alumni are invited to share messages of support with current students navigating the COVID-19 emergency. As students adjust to online instruction and cope with being separated from friends and classmates, the alumni perspective is as important as ever.

Share your kind words, guidance and advice with current students via video or text message.

All UC Davis Stores profits go back to student programs and services.

Engineering Design Showcase June 4-5, 2020 The Engineering Design Showcase is the culminating experience for graduating seniors. Our virtual showcase, hosted in the UC Davis Now app, features student teams and design projects from all eight departments. Show your support by reviewing projects and sharing feedback.

Shop UC Davis Stores for all your College of Engineering gear, from T-shirts and sweaters to caps and messenger bags.

ENG 3 Intro to Engineering Design Spring Showcase June 9, 2020 ENG 3 - Introduction to Engineering Design is a four-unit communication elective offered to College of Engineering undergraduates.

Student teams apply their engineering design, technology and communications skills to address “problems looking for a solution� at the Family Caregiving Institute at the Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing.

Serve as an evaluator and provide valuable feedback to our students.

Visit our co-branded online store with Promoversity, where you can get specialized gear at competitive prices.

bit.ly/UCDavisRetail

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Going Viral

Chemical engineering assistant professor Priya Shah

By Noah Pflueger-Peters

Though viruses are known for causing diseases like COVID-19, UC Davis chemical engineers UC Davis’ Karen McDonald and Priya Shah think they can be as beneficial as they are destructive. From producing and purifying drugs for humans in space to inspiring new tools for biotechnology, viruses are being re-engineered to help humans who are suffering from injuries or diseases.

“Viruses can be nasty pathogens, but they can also be incredibly useful tools,” said Shah. “We can’t forget about them when they’re no longer causing a major disease, because there are extremely valuable things we can learn from them.”

Viruses are simply a string of genes protected by a protein coating that replicates when they interact with living host cells. Though they’re known for causing disease, viruses are best at using their host to replicate themselves, making them ideal models for researchers who want to quickly make a lot of a product using biology.

“Viruses are really good at controlling cells and making them do what they want to do, which is produce more virus,” said McDonald. “We use their replication machinery because they’ve evolved to be really efficient protein factories in hosts.”

Chemical engineering assistant professor Priya Shah

MAKING DRUGS IN PLANTS McDonald’s team uses this capability to produce human drugs in plants using plant viruses. Plants inherently have all the parts to make these therapeutic proteins, but they’re essentially missing the instructions. The team takes plant viruses—which don’t cause disease in humans—and replace the plant disease-causing viral proteins with their own gene sequence of instructions. The modified virus then quickly infects their plants, which receive the instructions to produce human drugs.

“We use the ability of a plant virus to make many copies of its genome to quickly amplify the amount of the therapeutic protein that we’re trying to make,” said McDonald. “The plant cells do all of the heavy lifting. They’re going to be doing transcription and translation of those instructions to make the protein.”

Next, the therapeutic protein must be extracted from the plant matrix and purified—an important step in preparing the drug for use. That’s where the lab’s Ph.D. student and NASA Space Technology Research Fellow Matt McNulty comes in. He is developing plant viruses as not only protein factories, but also functional nanomaterials that can purify the protein. He introduces a small genetic insertion to a second plant virus to get it to selectively bind to the therapeutic protein that’s being made in the plant. This new complex is easier to filter out from the rest of the plant matter in a centrifuge.

He’s also engineering the virus to uncouple from the protein in a different liquid, giving the team both a usable, purified drug and leftover plant virus that can be reused after a second round in the centrifuge. It’s a fast and inexpensive process that makes it easy to modify or multiply the virus.

“If you need more of these plant viruses, you can go rub them on a plant, wait a week and grind that plant up and you have a very simply regenerable source of purification tools,” said McNulty. “And if you need a different set of tools, you make a little genetic change to that virus, rub it on a plant again and in 24 hours, you’ve generated a whole new set of tools.”

CONTROLLING CELL PROCESSES Assistant professor Priya Shah’s group looks at mammalian flaviviruses to understand how they control cell processes and imitate that with their own tools for biotechnology production.

The group’s focus is autophagy, a multi-step cellular process that recycles unused proteins and organelles into new proteins, organelles and energy, as well as breaks down viruses during an infection. Flaviviruses, like dengue and Zika virus, are unique because they not only resist this process, but also hijack it.

“These viruses have found a way to flip the system on its head,” said Shah. “Instead of inhibiting this antimicrobial and antiviral pathway, the virus uses it to promote virus replication.”

Shah and her lab study the different stages of autophagy and measure material flow to see how exactly the virus affects the process. Their goal is to figure out what changes the virus makes to which parts of the pathway to take over the system and use or imitate that for their own purposes.

“This is a fundamental biology question, but we are looking at it from a chemical engineering perspective of quantifying the rates of chemical reactions that occur and how they change under different conditions,” she said. “If we understand how exactly the virus manipulates the system, we would be able to potentially precisely disrupt it.”

Disrupting or controlling autophagy is important for biotechnology, where large reactors contain millions of cells that are used to make proteins and antibodies to treat and diagnose diseases like cancer. If researchers can regulate the process like flaviviruses, they can make the entire system more efficient.

VIRUSES AS A SOLUTION Both labs aim to take their virus research in new directions to help humanity face the challenges of the 21st century.

McDonald’s lab is focused on human health in space. A new project funded by the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) aims to use plant viruses in lettuce to produce and purify three therapeutics in 24 hours for astronauts on deep space missions. With success of several FDA-approved drugs made in plants, they see this as both a challenge and an extension of the work that’s already been done.

“We’re really excited about this project,” said McDonald.

“There’s a lot of fundamental breakthroughs that can come out of it and these platform technologies will be valuable here on earth, as well as in space.”

For Shah’s lab, the impact is more immediate, as bioreactors will be vital to producing COVID-19 proteins that are needed to refine serological tests to test the population for immunity.

Their studies on flaviviruses will shed light on new ways to produce enough proteins to properly test these new tools to, ironically, combat a virus.

“Viruses have had millions of years and millions of chances to evolve and try out different solutions, essentially, so if we look at how they are able to evolve these mechanisms, then I think we’ll be more successful,” said Shah.

Chemical engineering professor Karen McDonald

Meet our new

FACULTY Mason Earles

Assistant Professor and Assistant Agricultural Engineer, Biological and Agricultural Engineering Earles brings expertise in artificial intelligence (AI) to agriculture by developing algorithms to help farmers better and more efficiently grow, treat and harvest their crops. His goal is to create agriculturespecific AI systems that can be easily and cheaply deployed in the field. An alumnus of UC Davis, he received his Ph.D. from the Department of Plant Sciences and has an appointment in the Department of Viticulture and Enology.

Seung Sae Hong

Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering Hong’s research focuses on low-dimensional materials, with the goal of creating new materials that allow extreme straining and shape deformation in 3-D. He received his Ph.D. and completed his postdoctoral work in applied physics at Stanford University before joining UC Davis. He received the Graduate Student Award Gold Medal from the Materials Research Society in 2012.

Marina Leite

Matthew Ellis

Associate Professor, Materials Science and Engineering

Ellis is a systems engineer who specializes in model predictive control for applications in industry. He joined UC Davis after four years at an energy systems company.

He received his Ph.D. in chemical and biomolecular engineering at UCLA, where he won the Outstanding Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering Award in 2016.

Leite looks at materials for harvesting and storing energy, imaging materials at the nanoscale and photonics. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the University of Campinas in Brazil and had been part of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics at the University of Maryland before joining UC Davis.

Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering

Houman Homayoun

Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Homayoun is an expert in hardware security, data-intensive computing and heterogeneous computing and has conducted research in big data computing and hardware accelerator design. He previously worked at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in computer science and engineering at UC Irvine and did two years of postdoctoral work at UC San Diego.

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Harishankar Manikantan Assistant Professor, Chemical Engineering

Manikantan studies fluid mechanics, soft matter and complex fluids with a multidisciplinary background. He received his Ph.D. in applied mechanics from UC San Diego and was a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara before joining UC Davis. He received the James O. Smith Award for outstanding teaching as a teaching assistant while earning his master’s degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

The College of Engineering welcomed 11 new faculty members this academic year.

Our new faculty have expertise ranging from hardware security to assistive robotics to materials under extreme conditions.

Scott McCormack

Assistant Professor, Materials Science and Engineering McCormack studies materials under extreme conditions for use in space exploration using calorimetry, crystallography and computation. He received his Ph.D. in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign just a few weeks before joining UC Davis.

Jeremy Munday

Associate Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Munday studies the optics of alternative energy, focusing on nanoscale and quantum phenomena.

He joins UC Davis after eight years with the University of Maryland. He received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University in 2008 and received the NASA Early Career Faculty Space Technology Research Award in 2012.

Jasquelin Peña

Randy O’Reilly

Professor, Computer Science O’Reilly, who has a dual appointment with the Center for Neuroscience in the Department of Psychology, uses computers to model the brain and understand how it works. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University and had been a faculty member at the University of Colorado, Boulder since 1997. He received CU Boulder’s College Scholar Award in 2009 and is a Society of Experimental Psychologists Fellow.

Jonathon Schofield

Assistant Professor, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Schofield works at the interface between humans and robotics to enhance cooperation between humans and advanced assistive devices, such as prosthetics. He received his Ph.D. in biomedical/mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta and was working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute before coming to UC Davis.

Associate Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering Peña studies the interactions between metals, microbes and minerals, which are critical to the functioning of earth and environmental systems.

She received her Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from UC Berkeley and had been a faculty member at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland since 2011.

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EX

By Kristina Batchelor

Top photo: Biomedical engineering distinguished professor Simon Cherry Bottom photo: Biomedical engineering radiology professor Ramsey Badawi ­10 U C D AV I S C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

XPLORER SCANS CANCER PATIENTS EXPLORER – the world’s first total-body PET scanner

– has now been used to scan about 200 patients and 65 research subjects. Developed by Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi, professors in the biomedical engineering department, EXPLORER can scan up to 40 times faster than current PET scanners along with a much lower dose of radiation – up to 40 times less – making it safer for patients. With the ability to scan the whole body in as little as 20 to 30 seconds, “We can now interrogate the whole body at the same time and get information on the body operating as a system, and not just a single organ,” said Badawi.

Of the 200 patients scanned so far using EXPLORER, dozens have been cancer patients. Among them are Magdalena Gonzalez, who has large B-cell lymphoma, and Ebony Brown, who has breast cancer.

Gonzalez was treated for thyroid cancer nine years ago. During a recent tonsillectomy, surgeons discovered another cancer, which turned out to be advanced B-cell lymphoma. The tumors were so large that they obstructed her airway and esophagus. Her UC Davis Health oncology team thought she could be a good candidate for EXPLORER to better stage her lymphoma and determine the best course of treatment.

Gonzalez, a 49-year-old mother of seven, became the first clinical patient in the world to be scanned on EXPLORER at the new EXPLORER Molecular Imaging Center on Folsom Boulevard in Sacramento. Badawi was there to meet her. “I hope this will help find out what is going on with me,” Gonzalez told him before the start of the scan. “I am happy I was selected for this experience.”

Brown, 44, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2016. The mother of four had a lumpectomy and surgery to remove 20 lymph nodes, plus chemotherapy and radiation treatment.

But during chemotherapy treatment doctors found something new under her arm. A biopsy suggested it was more cancer, and her doctors recommended more surgery.

She rejected the idea, afraid of the potential side effects.

Instead, she decided to go with radiation treatment.

In February 2019, a PET scan appeared to show that the radiation treatment had worked, but was not definitive.

In September, it was time for another PET scan. Her oncologist thought she’d be a good candidate for EXPLORER. While her 13-year-old son played video games in the lobby, she was led into the EXPLORER imaging room. She laid on the scanner bed quietly for 20 minutes while it worked to find signals of potential tumors in her body. The scan was then repeated later in the hour. Within two days, she had her results. “This is a much clearer image,” said UC Davis Health radiologist Lorenzo Nardo. “We can say with 99% certainty that this is negative for cancer.”

What’s next for EXPLORER? While the research program is currently on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EXPLORER team continues to scan cancer patients who are in need. There are currently ten research protocols that are active or had started enrollment prior to COVID-19 – all designed to increase understanding about how to maximize the potential of EXPLORER to refine a diagnosis, track a disease course and monitor treatment effects.

“We already have a wide range of research projects approved or under way,” said Cherry. “These cover a diverse number of disease areas including cancer, cardiovascular disease, liver disease and multi-organ inflammation, as well as studies in healthy, normal subjects that establish important baseline data on this new technology.”

They are also working on a collaborative study with Dr. Timothy Henrich, University of California, San Francisco, to use a new imaging agent they developed that binds to the HIV virus.

“I don’t think it will be long before we see a number of EXPLORER systems around the world. But that depends on demonstrating the benefits of the system, both clinically and for research.”

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By Rachel Steere

Securing and Succeeding in an Engineering Job

Photos left to right: College of Engineering Dean Jennifer Sinclair Curtis, Cynthia Murphy Ortega ’91, Michael Hurlston ’88, ‘90, ‘91

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING DEAN JENNIFER SINCLAIR CURTIS developed a new course, Securing and Succeeding in an Engineering Job, when she realized that there was a need for a holistic, consistent career development course across all of the majors in engineering.

This course, ENG 98, is is geared toward the development first-year engineering students, so they can start preparing for a successful engineering career early on in their academic studies. She began teaching the class in spring of 2018 and has continued to lead this course every other quarter.

Many engineering students who are first-generation, low-income, or from underserved groups do not have a network of individuals that can assist them in their career development or in their job search. Many of these students lack first-hand knowledge of the creative and diverse types of work in which engineers are engaged.

This course helps all students understand the career options available to them as an engineering graduate.

Students gain information on how to successfully land an internship or job in engineering and how to thrive in ­12 U C D AV I S C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

that role. This course also helps students develop valuable professional, leadership and life skills.

“Some students don’t understand the importance of career development early on. In this course, they spend their time progressively developing these skills in addition to their regular coursework, so that all together they will be prepared to get a job after graduation,” said Curtis.

This teaching opportunity also gives Curtis, whose daily schedule is dominated by meetings with faculty and staff, a chance to hear directly from the students and affirm to the students the college’s commitment to student success.

“When I first started in my role as dean, I realized I hardly ever got to see any undergraduate students in my job. I really wanted to get connected with these students in a direct way,” said Curtis.

The first class in the course begins with Dean Curtis and graduated seniors, who discuss the lessons they learned while they were undergraduate students. They also discuss the benefits of graduate school versus industrial employment after graduation. The following class is focused on building a

resume and is taught by the Internship and Career Center.

The remainder of the classes are taught by College of Engineering alumni.

“I initially developed this course to get students involved in career development right away, so they could spend four years building their resume and their career skills to be ready for the work world when they finish their degrees,” said Curtis. “I do end up getting students up to their senior year because there is also value in the industry connections that are made between students and our guest speakers.”

The alumni instructors are highly successful practicing engineers who are well known to Curtis, possess outstanding presentation and communication skills and employ engineering undergraduates. Each alumni instructor presents on a topic while touching on their career path throughout the lecture. Many of the students reach out and make connections with the industry guest speakers after they present.

“I offer a lot of very practical ideas for how to go about proactively finding the exact right job by building and utilizing their professional network as well as some mental tools to help provide focus and energy,” said Scott Maxwell, B.S. ‘84, M.S. ‘86, mechanical engineering, founder and partner of OpenView Investments. “It is a critical course for undergraduates and I am really happy that the dean has taken this on. It shows a lot of leadership and the importance of the subject to the students, which is great.”

Having multiple alumni speak to class introduces students to a wide variety of practicing engineers who are very passionate about and fulfilled in their work. This gives the students more reasons why they should stick it out early on in the engineering major when the time commitment to their studies is significant and the first year curriculum contains fewer engineering courses and more foundational and general education courses.

Alumni Speakers in ENG 98

“There are a lot of job options for any undergraduate, particularly those in engineering. Getting a jump on these options and thinking through how one should put together classes and internships to respond to those options is extremely important. The earlier this can be done, the better,” said Michael Hurlston, ’88, M.B.A. ’90, M.S. ’91, electrical engineering, president and chief executive officer of Synaptics Incorporated. “A piece of advice I like to give students is to do what you enjoy. If you enjoy a job, the chances are that you will be successful. Passion and success almost go hand-in-hand.”

Cynthia Murphy-Ortega, B.S. ’91 chemical engineering, Manager, University Partnerships and Association Relations, Chevron Corporation, touches on professionalism when she speaks to the ENG 98 students. She focuses on how to communicate in a professional manner in their interpersonal interactions with others, in the college space and as they transition into the work space.

“It is easy to say the word professionalism as though it’s one entity, but it’s really a multitude of things. You are representing your personal brand. How will people think of you in the work environment? We want the students to think about that early on,” said Ortega. “It’s who you are 365 days of the year, not just in the middle of an interview. Your defining principles shouldn’t change.”

Many students have emailed, messaged on LinkedIn and conveyed in person to Curtis their deep appreciation for the course, its content and how they now feel better prepared and more confident in their search for engineering employment. Students indicate that the new skills they learn and their interactions with the speakers are extremely valuable in their job search process.

“I feel fulfilled knowing that we are providing this critical knowledge to our students when they might not have known this information otherwise,” said Curtis.

Joseph Moore, B.S. ‘91, civil engineering Scott Maxwell, B.S. ‘84, M.S. ‘86, mechanical engineering, engineering Rob Tobias, B.S. ‘86, electrical engineering Jeff Hoopes, B.S. ‘80, civil engineering Cynthia Murphy-Ortega, B.S. ‘91, chemical engineering Margie Evashenk, B.S. ‘89, electrical engineering Alfred Chuang, M.S. ‘86, computer science Prem Jain, M.S. ‘77, engineering Tim Bucher, B.S. ‘86, electrical engineering Rose McCallen, B.S. ‘84, Ph.D. ‘93, engineering Francis Lee, B.S. ‘74, electrical engineering Bruce Raabe, B.S. ‘88, civil engineering Suzy Taherian, B.S. ‘90, mechanical engineering/materials science and engineering Brian Underwood, M.S. ‘91, materials science and engineering Michael Hurlston, B.S. ‘88, M.B.A. ‘90, M.S. ‘91, electrical engineering, engineering E N G I N E E R I N G P R O G R E S S / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 13

Solving agricultural challenges with

By Rachel Steere

engineering and robotics FROM CREATING FRAGILE CROP HARVEST-AIDING MOBILE ROBOTS (FRAIL-BOTS) for strawberry harvesting to developing an automated robotic orchard platform designed to optimize fruit pickers’ performance, Stavros Vougioukas is addressing agricultural challenges and making an impact on California agriculture.

In fresh market fruit production, harvesting is one of the most labor-intensive operations, incurring high cost and dependence on a large seasonal semi-skilled workforce, which is becoming less available.

Vougioukas’ work in agricultural robotics, mechanization and automation for specialty crops has resulted in improved systems through the design, development and testing of actuators, sensors and control systems for optimal management of inputs and products.

“There are so many things that are cool about working with robotics and engineering. The feeling of seeing a complicated system actually work in the field years after writing a proposal and putting ideas together is extremely satisfying,” said Vougioukas, associate professor in the UC Davis Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering (BAE).

In 2012, Vougioukas received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as part of the National Robotics Initiative to help fund a fouryear project devoted to the development of FRAIL-bots to increase harvesting efficiency by reducing the time to transport fruit-filled containers. Vougioukas and his team were successful in building the strawberry harvesting bots, which remain on campus awaiting extended testing.

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In 2016, he received an additional NSF grant from the USDA as a part of the National Robotics Initiative to develop a robotic orchard platform to increase harvest efficiency by optimizing a fruit picker’s speed and performance.

Standard orchard platforms are already commercialized and have replaced ladders to increase efficiency. Using ladders adds time for pickers when they need to change positions or empty their bag of fruit. Although eliminating ladders improved harvesting efficiency by reducing the amount of travel and climbing, there was still non-uniform fruit distribution and fruit picking at varying speeds.

“The idea was if we knew in advance the distribution of fruit on the trees and if we measured the individual picking speed of each person, then we would know how much demand there is for fruit-picking labor,” said Vougioukas. “From there, we could measure how much supply of labor there is and create a computer program that reads this information to maximize the overall efficiency and picking speed.”

pickers independently. They also installed a speed control system to regulate the speed and height of each individual hydraulic cylinder. BAE Ph.D. student Zhenghao Fei was also on the team and developed electronics and software to control the cylinders and speed of the platforms. He also developed special bags with sensors that measured in real time how fast the picker collected fruit.

“With camera-based sensing to estimate the distribution of fruits in front of the machine, instrument conventional picking bags to measure the harvesting speed of each picker and the use of an intelligent algorithm to control the platform’s speed and height of the lift, we were able to maximize performance,” said Vougioukas.

After running multiple experiments, the team was successful in creating a functional robotic orchard platform and found that they achieved up to 25 percent faster harvesting speeds compared to the standard non-automated platform.

“When your product actually achieves what you were hoping to achieve – it’s faster, it’s better, it’s safer – it is very satisfying because it has a real impact,” said Vougioukas. “In engineering, I want to develop things that are practical and that will work in the field. All of the brainstorming and interaction with students and colleagues is really fun. It is all very exciting and is what I enjoy most.”

Vougioukas is currently working on a new project from the National Robotics Initiative to develop a multi-arm fruit harvesting robot. The plan is to use the robotic orchard platform as a mobile unit to carry the new system that his team will develop in the next few years.

Vougioukas and his team at UC Davis led this initiative and collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University. The Carnegie Mellon team, led by Dr. George Kantor, developed a 3-D camera and software to detect and localize fruits. The UC Davis team developed all the platform-related hardware and control software, the picking bag instrumentation and the integration.

Vougioukas’ colleague Dennis Sadowski, a research and development engineer in the BAE department, was the lead design engineer on the team. He repurposed a standard platform by retrofitting it with hydraulic cylinders to lift the

Photo Page 14: Vougioukas and Fei on the robotic orchard platform with two harvesters.

(Stavros Vougioukas/UC Davis)

Photo above: Vougioukas with lab members and the strawberry harvest-aid FRAIL-bot.

(Stavros Vougioukas/UC Davis)

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UC Davis Medal Will Go to

Bruce West

By UC Davis News and Media Relations

Bruce West speaking at the 2016/17 Distinguished Engineering Alumni Medal ceremony.

(Reeta Asmai/UC Davis)

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ON FEBRUARY 7, CHANCELLOR GARY S. MAY ANNOUNCED that he will award the UC Davis Medal to

alumnus Bruce West, chair of the UC Davis Foundation Board and a member of the Chancellor’s Board of Advisors.

The chancellor made the surprise announcement at a foundation board meeting on February 7. “I’m pleased to say that the 2020 recipient of the UC Davis Medal is right here in the room,” May said as he turned to West.

The university accords individuals no higher honor than the UC Davis Medal in recognition of extraordinary contributions that embody the campus’s Vision of Excellence. Medalists inspire and support the success and engagement of students, faculty, staff and alumni, and foster a bold and innovative spirit in teaching, research and public service.

West also received the College of Engineering’s Alumni Medal in 2000 and Distinguished Service Medal in 2012. The Cal Aggie Alumni Association presented its Jerry W. Fielder Memorial Award to West in 2016, in recognition of his longstanding dedication to UC Davis.

ENHANCING EXCELLENCE West first served on the UC Davis Foundation’s board of trustees from 1991 to 2001, and came back on in 2013. He has been the chair since 2018 and is credited with spearheading the foundation’s strategic plan.

The nonprofit foundation plays an essential role in sustaining and enhancing the excellence of UC Davis by highlighting the impacts of philanthropy and stewarding private donations to the university.

West, who holds two degrees in civil engineering — Bachelor of Science (1971) and Master of Science (1973) — has He is a past chair of the Davis been fostering excellence at his Chancellor’s Club, the university’s alma mater for decades. “I am oldest donor recognition society, “BRUCE EMBRACES AGGIE thrilled that Bruce joins a long list for people who give $1,000 or PRIDE IN ALL HE DOES” of UC Davis friends and alumni more annually to any area of that have been recognized for campus. The Wests are members – DEAN JENNIFER SINCLAIR CURTIS their paramount contributions to of the Leadership Giving Society, the success of our college and have donated to the College of university. He is most deserving Engineering and Intercollegiate of this honor,” said Jennifer Sinclair Curtis, dean of the Athletics, as well as the Annual Fund; colleges of Agricultural College of Engineering. and Environmental Sciences, and Letters and Science; Graduate School of Management; Mondavi Center for the West is a longtime member of both the Dean’s Executive Performing Arts; UC Davis Health; and CAAA. Committee and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering Advisory Board. Recently, he represented the Bruce West is a former member of the CAAA board and a past perspective of alumni and donors in shaping the College of chair of the Cal Aggie Engineering Alumni Association board.

Engineering’s strategic plan.

AGGIE PRIDE He has also been a loyal donor. West along with his “As my service continues, it is my pride in how UC Davis fulfills wife, Marie, have generously funded renovations and its commitment to students, faculty and staff that drives me and improvements to Kemper, Bainer and Ghausi Halls. West and my wife, Marie, to be deeply involved with the university and in his business partner also funded the West Yost Teaching Lab this community,” he wrote in an online message as chair of the for environmental engineering students in Ghausi Hall and UC Davis Foundation. the Kemper Hall lobby is named after the Wests.

Additionally, the Wests have recorded the largest planned gift to the College of Engineering in support of student fellowships and scholarships, as well as two fully endowed department chairs. West’s volunteerism and generosity have touched thousands of engineering students and will continue to do so in perpetuity.

After completing his graduate degree, he worked in the public sector for two years, in Los Angeles County, before becoming a consulting engineer in the private sector. He and his UC Davis classmate Jim Yost started the West Yost Associates engineering firm in Davis in 1990, focusing exclusively on water projects, including water supply, wastewater, recycled water, groundwater and storm water.

“Bruce embraces Aggie pride in all he does,” said Curtis.

“What makes Bruce so great is that he doesn’t volunteer or give because he seeks the spotlight. He does it because he feels it’s the right thing to do and has the best interests of the university at heart.”

A retired founding principal, West has been responsible for project or program management of numerous large, complex projects, including facilities planning and design of water and wastewater facilities throughout California and Oregon.

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Cover Story

BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING FACULTY JULIE SUTCLIFFE AND RANDY CARNEY are making big strides in cancer research. With a combined $6.5 million in new grants from Stand Up to Cancer and the National Institute of Health’s National Cancer Institute, Sutcliffe and Carney are pioneering new technology that will help treat and diagnose cancer earlier and more effectively, saving more lives.

“It’s feasible that in our lifetimes, cancer will be a manageable disease, but we need these new technologies to figure out how to do that,” said Carney.

ADVANCING

Cancer Research at UC Davis

By Noah Pflueger-Peters

Photo above: Professor Julie Sutcliffe (left) and UC Davis School of Medicine collaborator Rick Bold, M.D. at the UC Davis Comprehensive Center in Sacramento.

(Julie Sutcliffe/UC Davis) Photo below: The Carney Lab in 2019.

(Randy Carney/UC Davis)

IMAGING TOOLS TO TREAT PANCREATIC CANCER Professor Julie Sutcliffe is using her expertise in cancer imaging and diagnosis to develop a new, effective treatment for pancreatic cancer. After developing a therapeutic from a radioactive imaging tool, her team received $4 million from Stand Up to Cancer to bring their UC Davis-made drug to clinical trials to help patients suffering from the disease.

Pancreatic cancer is often asymptomatic until very late stages and the pancreas itself is very dense, making it impossible to deliver drugs directly to the source. The only true treatment is surgically removing part or all of the pancreas, but the surgery can’t be done if the cancer has spread—or metastasized—to other parts of the body. The goal, then, is to find and eradicate the metastasized tumors to make the surgery an option for more patients.

“If you can’t have surgery because you have metastatic disease, then we’re going to use this therapy to treat that metastatic disease first so they can operate,” she said.

To do this, Sutcliffe and her long-time collaborators at the

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UC Davis School of Medicine developed radioactive isotopes in their lab that bind to receptors that only exist on metastasized pancreatic cancer cells. These isotopes allow them to accurately image the disease using a PET scanner— something some experts didn’t think was possible.

When, in 2018, Stand Up to Cancer and the Lustgarten Foundation called for proposals that fast-tracked therapeutics for pancreatic cancer, the team took the challenge in stride to turn their diagnostic tool into a treatment.

“When they said to us ‘you have a year to develop a therapeutic,’ we said, ‘ok, game on,’” she said. “If I change the one radioactive isotope on my diagnostic, I now have a radionuclide therapy [tool] that I can use to treat.”

The team received $1 million in 2018 to develop the tool and conduct initial tests. After finding success, the team submitted an Investigational New Drug (IND) application to the Food and Drug Administration for the therapeutic that is currently under review. The additional $4 million will allow them to conduct clinical trials.

“We’ve got all the preclinical data, we have the toxicology package and we make the drug in my lab,” she said.

“So now not only does UC Davis have this first-in-human diagnostic, but they will also have a first-in-human therapy that was homegrown out of our lab.”

Sutcliffe stresses the importance of her team, both in her lab and at the UC Davis School of Medicine. The team brings together chemists and biologists in her lab with surgeons, pathologists, radiation oncologist and nuclear medicine physicians who all contribute expertise and experience to all aspects of developing this new treatment.

“It’s team science,” she said. “Imagine the people power it took to get from an idea through to preclinical modeling to enough data to get an IND application in a year. My team is so diverse and I need all of them.”

A NEW GOLD STANDARD FOR EARLY-STAGE CANCER DIAGNOSIS Assistant professor Randy Carney and his lab are on a mission to find new tools to diagnose very early-stage cancer.

His new five-year, $2.5 million project funded by the NIH National Cancer Institute seeks to develop next-generation nanotechnology to identify traces of cancer in blood, saliva or sweat samples to find the disease earlier and save more lives.

To do this, Carney and his team study exosomes, also known

as extracellular vesicles. Exosomes are tiny nanoparticles in bodily fluids that were once thought to be cellular waste, but actually carry genes, proteins and lipids from their cell of origin, including cancer cells. However, there may be one cancer vesicle out of trillions in a given sample, so the team needs to both find and highlight them.

“When the cancer cell spits it out, it’s like a needle in a haystack,” said Carney. “So the core of our project is to try to distinguish those tumor vesicles from the healthy ones.”

To do this, the team plans to engineer gold nanoparticles with targeting molecules to literally light up the cancer exosomes.

The team has identified five cancer-associated proteins to focus on for their initial tests and made five corresponding types of gold nanoparticles that bind to each of these proteins. Each nanoparticle lights up differently when the team shines a light or weak laser on them.

The nanoparticles also allow them to sense these exosomes with high chemical sensitivity—the more nanoparticles they have bonded to a cancer exosome, the more they know about its chemical makeup. This could lead to new insights not only about cancer, but also about exosomes’ composition and distribution in different samples.

“A really realistic secondary goal is to start to be able to get answers to questions that we didn’t even know to ask,” he said. “It’ll be kind of an enabling technology in that way.”

The team will begin by collecting data from advanced-stage cancer patients to learn which markers and patterns correspond to different types and stages of cancer. Because this type of work is new, Carney expects that tests will reveal new insights about how cancer progresses that can be used to find and diagnose the disease earlier on, which is key to saving more lives.

“The technology is hard to translate to real patient outcomes, but it has great promise and it’s super exciting to try to use it successfully,” he said. “It’s super inspiring for a whole group to be working on something that’s so directed and has a great potential outcome.”

Top Photo: Biomedical engineering professor Julie Sutcliffe.

Bottom Photo: Biomedical engineering assistant professor Randy Carney. (Reeta Asmai/UC Davis) E N G I N E E R I N G P R O G R E S S / S P R I N G 2 0 2 0 19

MOHAMED

By Noah Pflueger-Peters

As he approaches his 35th year on campus, mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Mohamed Hafez continues to leave an indelible mark on the department and his students. He has taught and mentored undergraduate, graduate and high school students and postdoctoral scholars alike while introducing several courses and being a driving force behind aerospace engineering at UC Davis.

Hafez is a firm believer that you get out what you put in. He meticulously plans lessons for his classes and expects a high level of commitment from his students in return. Though his classes are difficult, he regularly receives emails from former students thanking him for the impact he had on their careers.

“Teaching is a responsibility and as the instructor, you are in charge,” he said, “But success depends on both the instructor and the students. Both must be genuinely interested in education and you must devote time and put in sincere effort to get good results. It’s a good job, but very demanding if you want to do it right.”

He has the same philosophy with research. Though he maintains a small research group, he dedicates himself to the students he does have. He spends hours with each student every week, working in-depth both on his own and with them on the problem they’re trying to solve to give them the best guidance possible.

“Teaching enthusiastic students is a renewal for me,” he said. “I meet these new students and I get excited and they give me hope. They remind me of my youth and when I started my education.”

A CAREER IN AERODYNAMICS Hafez was inspired by the space race in the late ‘50s and became curious about how and why airplanes fly. This led him to aerospace engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Cairo, Egypt, where he was introduced to fluid dynamics and aerodynamics.

He has worked in this area since and his research has focused on high-speed aircraft. He has coauthored 200 publications and two books, co-edited 11 more books and has had work funded by both NASA and Boeing. He has been an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) fellow since 1994. He has also seen the aerospace engineering program at UC Davis grow from a small group to fully-fledged program while graduating 18 Ph.D. and 18 M.S. students.

“They [Hafez and professor emeritus Jean-Jacques Chattot] are internationally well known, computational fluid dynamists who’ve seen [the field] from its beginnings to the revolution and transition from analytical solutions to computing,” said French Academy of Sciences member Olivier Pironneau in a review of their book, Theoretical and Applied Aerodynamics. “Their contribution has been essential to aerodynamics for airplanes, and more recently, turbines and windmills.

Consequently, the book is a masterpiece for aerodynamics of analytical and numerical techniques.”

PAYING IT FORWARD Hafez earned a M.S. and Ph.D. in aerospace engineering and a M.S. in mathematics at the University of Southern California. He was fortunate enough to be able to learn from international experts of the time in hypersonic and transonic flows, such as his advisor, H.K. Chang. He also feels incredibly grateful for the mentorship he received at USC from Professors Laufer, Antosiewicz and Bellman and ­20 U C D AV I S C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

HAFEZ tries to pay that forward at UC Davis.

“The most important thing to me is when I get an email from a young student saying, ‘you changed my life.’

That is enough for me.”

“I was really lucky to have these teachers and feel I owe it to them to pay it back somehow,” he said.

His signature course is “Engineering Analysis,” which covers numerical methods for undergraduate students. He introduced it in when he joined UC Davis in 1985 and has taught it every year since. He has also taught “Theoretical and Applied Aerodynamics” and “Rocket Propulsion” to several generations of undergraduates, along with “Advanced Aerodynamics,” “Computational Fluid Dynamics” and “Linear and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations in Engineering” for graduate students. He has also taught First-Year Seminars and California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) for the past 20 years.

His approach has clearly paid off, as he has received four teaching awards at UC Davis. He received the UC Davis Prize for scholarly achievements and undergraduate teaching in 1998, campus’ highest honor for undergraduate instructors, along with the distinguished teaching award from the campus Academic Senate, an award from engineering students and another from engineering alumni—the one he is most proud of.

This is because it’s clear that his students are his pride and joy. When asked, he quickly recalls his students who have gone on to successful careers as professors and NASA scientists.

“My students are my contribution,” he said. “The most important thing to me is when I get an email from a student saying, ‘you changed my life.’ That is enough for me.”

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THE POWER OF

NIGHTTIME SOLAR

By Kristina Batchelor

Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Jeremy Munday

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Thermoradiative photovoltaics involve heating up the solar cell, which then becomes the hot object, and pointing it at a cool object – the night sky.

When you think of solar power one of the first images that comes to your mind is most likely a bright sun shining down on a group of black cells on your neighbors’ rooftops.

You think of the power of the sun saving you money during the day, but probably not saving you much once it sets. What if there was a way to run your house on solar power all day long, even at night? Electrical and computer engineering professor, Jeremy Munday, and his team are working to develop photovoltaic cells that can do just that.

More than 100 U.S. cities have committed to using 100% clean, renewable electricity by 2050, and solar energy is expected to help supply the needed additional power.

Current conventional photovoltaic cells only generate electricity during daylight, which leads to the need for costly batteries and fossil fuels to provide power at night. So, what’s the secret to the Munday Lab’s nighttime photovoltaic cells? Two words: deep space.

An object that is hot compared to its surroundings will radiate heat as infrared light. A conventional solar cell is cool compared to the sun, so it absorbs light. Conventional photovoltaic cells are powered by the hot-cold dynamic of a hot sun reacting to a comparatively cool cell.

Thermoradiative photovoltaics involve heating up the solar cell, which then becomes the hot object, and pointing it at a cool object – the night sky. Space has an average temperature of 3 Kelvin (roughly minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit), so if you point a warm object at the night sky, it will radiate heat toward it.

In order to have effective radiative cooling, three key factors must be present: The ability to transmit or reflect solar illumination to avoid heating; thermal isolation from the environment to limit additional conductive and convective heat exchanges with the surroundings; and the ability to emit wavelengths that fall within the atmospheric transparency window to enable radiative heat transfer to deep space.

“A regular solar cell generates power by absorbing sunlight, which causes a voltage to appear across the device and for current to flow. In these new devices, light is instead emitted and the current and voltage go in the opposite direction, but you still generate power,” Munday said. “You have to use different materials, but the physics is the same.”

Radiative Cooling and Climate Change Just as the radiative cooling process can be used in solar cells to regulate the temperature of your home at night, these same hot-cold dynamics can also be used to help regulate the temperature of the earth and possibly mitigate climate change.

With the earth warming faster than expected, it’s become clear that a reduction in CO2 emission is needed through an increase in energy efficiency and cleaner power production. Currently, the earth is absorbing more heat than it is emitting, which leads to an overall warming of the climate. Munday believes that increasing the radiative heat emission from the earth can help to counteract this process.

“By covering the earth with a small fraction of thermally emitting materials, the heat flow away from the earth can be increased, and the net radiative flux can be reduced to zero (or even made negative), thus stabilizing (or cooling) the earth.”

If only 1-2% of the earth’s surface were covered by radiatively emitting surfaces, the total global heat flux could be reduced by nearly 1 W/m2, potentially enough to stop the increase of global temperatures.

With this research in the early stages, the Munday Lab is looking into planning a small scale demonstration locally. Mitigating climate change is a tall task and Munday believes that “all options should be on the table.”

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Coffee Center

receives $1 million

to support research, education and building renovation The UC Davis Coffee Center is pleased to announce two $500,000 gifts

from Toddy and John and Gina Wasson, respectively, to support renovating the Coffee Center building and name two spaces that will be used for coffee education and research.

Toddy’s gift will go toward the Toddy Innovation Lab, a flexible, multipurpose lab space in the Coffee Center building that will be used to test coffee technology. It will be used for experiments involving cold brew, espresso, or anything else that’s needed to meet the demands of the coffee industry. A pioneer in cold brewed coffee, Toddy offers innovative coffee brewing solutions to both home and commercial users worldwide.

Toddy president Julia Leach is a long-time supporter and advocate of the Coffee Center and sits on its advisory board. Since she visited for the first time a few years ago, she has been impressed by its unique environment and hopes the gift will allow the center to continue building renovation and launch new programming.

“We at Toddy love that the UC Davis Coffee Center was imagined as a place to bring together coffee professionals, students, industry leaders and academics for teaching, learning, research and collaboration,” she said. “We want to take part in the activities and research at the center and felt that sponsoring was the right thing to do as an industry leader.”

John Wasson ’84 and his wife Gina are long-time supporters of the College of Engineering and the Coffee Center. Wasson, who gave his first gift in support of the undergraduate coffee lab in 2015, sits on the advisory board for the Department of Chemical Engineering and chairs the College of Engineering’s Dean’s Executive Committee, which assists the college with advocacy, fundraising, strategic plans and programs. He received his B.S. in chemical engineering from UC Davis and has led a successful career at global consulting firm ICF—most recently being named CEO in fall 2019.

The Wassons describe their gift as a “challenge” to encourage others to support the renovation of the Coffee Center building into a 6,000 square foot research and teaching hub for coffee science. Their gift also names the John and Gina Wasson classroom, which will be used for classes in coffee science for both students and industry professionals.

“The facility brings together UC Davis’s world-class expertise in engineering and food science to facilitate cutting-edge research and advanced teaching on coffee in a rigorous, collaborative and hands-on way,” he said. “I’m impressed at how its courses and labs engage such a diverse population of students at the intersection of engineering and one of their favorite beverages.”

The Coffee Center thanks Toddy and the Wassons for their generous support and looks forward to using their gifts to trailblaze as a leader in academic coffee research across disciplines. ­24 U C D AV I S C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

John Wasson ’84

Update on Engineering Student Design Center

To meet the rapid growth demands of our engineering and computer science programs, the new Engineering Student Design Center (ESDC) will include areas to accommodate instruction, student-client collaboration, rapid prototyping and more. This expansion of the current space from 9,000 sq. ft. to 23,000 sq. ft. will allow many more of our outstanding students to learn engineering design and entrepreneurship in a revitalized space. The new ESDC will also house the Student Startup Center, which is accessible to student entrepreneurs throughout campus. When complete, the center will strengthen UC Davis’ position as a world leader in engineering design education.

The new Engineering Student Design Center will be completed in Fall 2022, with new space to accommodate instruction, student-client collaboration, rapid prototyping and more.

Groundbreaking for this landmark new facility will be on October 9, 2020.

For more information on naming opportunities and ways to partner, contact Leigh Ann Hartman, lahartman@ucdavis.edu.

In April, Lodi, CA-based Diede Construction, Inc. was selected through a competitive bidding process to serve as the contractor for the ESDC renovation. In collaboration with campus’ Design Construction Management unit and college faculty and staff, Diede will finalize the design and construction documents this summer and begin demolition in fall quarter to prepare for building in winter 2021.

To oversee existing operations while guiding the ESDC into its next chapter, the college recently hired Jose Mojica as the new ESDC manager. An alumnus of the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Mojica worked for the Air Quality Group at Crocker Nuclear Lab, where he managed a group of engineers and student assistants that were responsible for maintaining a nationwide network of aerosol samplers for the Environmental Protection Agency. After his time at the Air Quality Group, he worked for DMG MORI Manufacturing USA Inc. in Davis, where he supported the design of automation cells, horizontal machining centers and general machine production lines.

Mojica manages and coordinates the operations of the center, maintains a safe work environment for students to hone their manufacturing skills and supports staff, faculty and competition teams with their design and manufacturing needs. In addition, he will also provide support for the ESDC during the expansion and construction process by advising faculty and staff on the logistics of how to manage the same number of users and classes with less space during this transition period.

“Despite the disruptions we’re seeing elsewhere, we’ve lost no time on this project,” said Roland Faller, associate dean for facilities and capital planning and professor of chemical engineering. “With an increased need for our 3-D printers and laser cutters to produce masks and other personal protection equipment needed in the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve prioritized our move into temporary swing spaces and kept critical projects moving forward.”

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Cindy Rubio González: Faculty Assistant to the Dean for Diversity and Inclusion

By Aditi Risbud Bartl

In March, computer science professor Cindy Rubio González was appointed the College of Engineering’s first faculty assistant to the dean for diversity and inclusion.

In her new role, Rubio González will help Dean Jennifer Sinclair Curtis attract, retain, serve and recognize diversity in students and faculty populations in the college.

“In engineering, we are working on complex problems that require many people to solve. There have been studies that show having diversity in the group brings multiple perspectives that lead to better solutions to complex problems,” said Rubio González. “Being an underrepresented minority myself, I know how many of these groups struggle in science and engineering fields and I have always been interested in contributing to increasing diversity since I was a student and through all of my different professional roles.”

Rubio González joined the college in November 2014 after completing her postdoctoral work in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 2012. Her research areas of interest are programming languages and software engineering, with a focus on developing and applying program-analysis techniques to make software more reliable and efficient. Rubio González has received several recognitions for her research, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2018 and the Department of Energy Early Career Award in 2019.

Growing up in México, Rubio González focused on music through high school and college as a pianist, but also wanted to explore her love of math in college. After some encouragement from her father, an electrical engineer, she began her education in computer science, ultimately graduating summa cum laude with degrees in computer science and piano performance from the Saltillo Institute of Technology, and the Autonomous University of Coahuila, both in México.

Rubio González will guide the college’s efforts in the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Deans Diversity Initiative by chairing a faculty advisory committee charged with guiding and monitoring efforts and progress toward achieving the objectives of the college’s diversity and inclusion plan and regularly reviewing data reflecting diversity among college students, faculty and administration. She will also develop a plan to achieve Silver-level ASEE Deans Diversity Initiative Recognition within two years after the Bronze-level recognition received by the college in July 2019.

In addition, Rubio González will identify internal and external funding opportunities for improving retention of diverse engineering-undergraduate student populations. In particular, she will seek opportunities to improve retention of these populations through residential first-year bridge programs that incorporate academic instruction. She will also work closely with the college’s Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies to increase enrollment of diverse student populations in graduate programs and with the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs to increase the diversity of college faculty through innovative hiring practices that promote greater equity and inclusion in faculty searches.

Recently, Rubio González had the opportunity to represent UC Davis at the Congressional Hispanic Conference in Washington, DC as a Center for the Advancement of Multicultural Perspectives on Science (CAMPOS) scholar. The CAMPOS mission is to “support the discovery of knowledge by promoting women in science, starting with Latina STEM scholars and expanding to all underrepresented groups in STEM through building an inclusive environment that is diversity-driven, mentorship-grounded and career-success focused.”

“We went to visit different members of Congress from California to tell them about everything that UC Davis is doing for diversity and inclusion and to establish a strong relationship,” said Rubio González. “We wanted to tell them, ‘This really matters to us and it should matter to you, too.’”

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#

1

Student Organizations • American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) • Black Engineers Association (BEA) • Chicano and Latino Engineers and Scientists Society (CALESS) • Pilipinx Americans in Science and Engineering (PASE) • Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (OSTEM) • Society of Women Engineers (SWE)

Percent of Women Faculty Among Top 50 Engineering Programs

– American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE)

Students

Faculty

4,651

223

30% women 25.3% underrepresented groups 4.12 years—mean time to degree LEADR Student Support Center Engineering Design & Startup Centers

14

Departments • Biological & Agricultural • Biomedical • Chemical • Civil & Environmental • Computer Science • Electrical & Computer • Materials Science • Mechanical & Aerospace

Total Faculty

Undergraduate Students

Members of the National Academies

1,200

$90.3 million

Graduate Students

in research expenditures (2018-19) (ASEE)

466 M.S. 723 Ph.D.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS #

3

#

Doing the Most for the American Dream – NY Times College Access Index

#

5

Best Public U.S. University – Times Higher Education

3

#

8

#

Campus Sustainability

Chancellor Gary S. May

– UI GreenMetric World Ranking

Electrical Engineer

Most transformative college in the country – Money

1

Best Value College for Women in STEM (U.S.) –E Forbes NGINEERING

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UC Davis College of Engineering One Shields Avenue Davis, CA 95616

Greenest University in the United States – 2019 UI GreenMetric World University Rankings

engineering.ucdavis.edu twitter.com/UCDavisCoE facebook.com/UCDavisEngineering instagram.com/ucdavisengineering linkedin.com/showcase/uc-davis-college-of-engineering