News Archive

February 5, 2025
UC San Diego Professor Honored by Sony and Nature for Bioengineering Research
Bioengineering Professor Kiana Aran is one of three inaugural winners of the Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature. She is recognized for her pioneering work fusing biology with electronics to enhance precision medicine—including the development of CRISPR-Chip, a CRISPR-powered electronic chip designed to detect genetic mutations in real time. The award is a collaboration between the Sony Group Corporation and Nature. Full Story

January 23, 2025
Scaling up Neuromorphic Computing for More Efficient and Effective AI Everywhere and Anytime
Neuromorphic computing—a field that applies principles of neuroscience to computing systems to mimic the brain’s function and structure—needs to scale up if it is to effectively compete with current computing methods. In a review published Jan. 22 in the journal Nature, 23 researchers, including two from the University of California San Diego, present a detailed roadmap of what needs to happen to reach that goal. The article offers a new and practical perspective toward approaching the cognitive capacity of the human brain with comparable form factor and power consumption. Full Story

January 21, 2025
Why Our Biological Clock Ticks: Research Reconciles Major Theories of Aging
Researchers at UC San Diego have published results that shed new light on an old question: what causes aging at the molecular level? Their findings, published in Nature Aging, describe a never-before-seen link between the two most accepted explanations: random genetic mutations and predictable epigenetic modifications. Full Story

January 16, 2025
Jacobs School Faculty Receive Awards to Accelerate Innovation to Market
Stephanie Fraley, Nicole Steinmetz, Kiana Aran and Sheng Xu all received Accelerating Innovation to Market awards from the Office of Innovation and Commercialization. In addition, Jacobs School affiliates Erin Walsh and Nadir Weibel also received awards. Full Story

January 14, 2025
Genetic Tweak Optimizes Drug-making Cells by Blocking Buildup of Toxic Byproduct
Scientists led by UC San Diego have developed a new strategy to enhance pharmaceutical production in Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cells, which are commonly used to manufacture protein-based drugs for treating cancer, autoimmune diseases and much more. By knocking out a gene circuit responsible for producing lactic acid—a metabolite that makes the cells’ environment toxic—researchers eliminate a primary hurdle in developing cells that can produce higher amounts of pharmaceuticals like Herceptin and Rituximab, without compromising their growth or energy production. Full Story

December 3, 2024
Nanoscale Bumps and Grooves Trigger Big Changes in Cell Behavior
The surfaces that cells come into contact with can influence how the cells grow, function, and communicate — shaping metabolism and even cellular health. Now, engineering researchers at the University of California San Diego have developed a platform for studying the ways that nanoscale growing surfaces can impact cellular behavior. Full Story

December 2, 2024
How Artificial Intelligence Could Automate Genomics Research
Researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, could help automate functional genomics research, which seeks to determine what genes do and how they interact. Full Story

November 1, 2024
UC San Diego Part of National Hub for Large-scale Neuromorphic Computing
Bioengineering professor Gert Cauwenberghs at the University of California San Diego is one of four researchers leading a new hub that will provide access to open and heterogeneous neuromorphic computing hardware systems. The Neuromorphic Commons Hub, also known as THOR, is based at the University of Texas San Antonio and funded by a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It aims to deploy and manage a large-scale community research infrastructure. Full Story

October 28, 2024
Digestive Enzyme Escaping from the Gut and into Many Organs May Cause Aging in Rats
The mucosal layer in the small intestine degrades with age in rats, allowing digestive enzymes to slowly escape and leak into organs outside the intestine, including the liver, lung, heart, kidney and brain. Full Story

October 3, 2024
Four UC San Diego Startups to Watch from Innovation Day 2024
They’re developing new therapeutics and treatments for cancer patients, building artificial intelligence personas to maximize employee efficiency and creating cutting-edge tools to reduce pesticide use—and they’re all powered by the University of California San Diego’s world-class innovation ecosystem. Full Story

September 24, 2024
UC San Diego Named Nation's 6th Best Public University by U.S. News & World Report
Four Jacobs School undergraduate engineering and computer science programs are ranked Top 10 in the country in the latest from U.S. News & World Report. Full Story

September 20, 2024
Engineering Graduate Students Awarded Siebel Scholarship
Five University of California San Diego graduate students applying engineering principles to solve medical challenges have been selected as 2025 Siebel Scholars. The Siebel Scholars program recognizes the most talented students in the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, bioengineering and energy science. The students are selected based on outstanding academic performance and leadership, and each receive a $35,000 award toward their final year of study. Full Story

September 16, 2024
Eleven new faculty join the Jacobs School faculty in fall 2024
The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is welcoming 11 incredible new faculty to its ranks in fall 2024. They join a group of nearly 300 faculty, 175 of whom have been hired in the last 11 years, dedicated to tackling humanity’s toughest challenges. Full Story

August 28, 2024
Borderzone Breakthrough: A New Source of Cardiac Inflammation
In the Aug. 28, 2024 issue of Nature, researchers from University of California San Diego in the laboratory of Dr. Kevin King, associate professor of bioengineering and medicine, and a cardiologist at the Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center, report the discovery of a novel mechanism of cardiac inflammation that may expand therapeutic opportunities to prevent heart attacks from becoming heart failure. Full Story

August 26, 2024
Closing the RNA Loop Holds Promise for More Stable, Effective RNA Therapies
New methods to shape RNA molecules into circles could lead to more effective and long-lasting therapies, shows a study by UC San Diego researchers. The advance holds promise for a range of diseases, offering a more enduring alternative to existing RNA therapies, which often suffer from short-lived effectiveness in the body. Full Story

August 19, 2024
Simulations from Atom to Organ Reveal Novel Treatment Mechanisms for Heart Failure
A team of researchers from UC San Diego has developed the first multiscale computational model to simulate the therapeutic mechanisms of a drug candidate for heart failure from the atomic level to the organ system scale. Full Story

August 6, 2024
18 New Endowed Chairs Created at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
The UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering has created 18 new endowed chairs, empowering a world-class cohort of faculty to explore new and innovative research directions. These endowed chairs have been made possible through the generous and visionary philanthropy of Irwin and Joan Jacobs. Full Story

July 31, 2024
Precision Oncology via Artificial Intelligence on Cancer Biopsies
A new AI tool developed by UC San Diego bioengineers, oncologists and medical researchers could get patients with breast & ovarian cancers started on the best treatment sooner—without spending thousands of dollars on genomic testing. Full Story

July 17, 2024
Diatom Surprise Could Rewrite the Global Carbon Cycle
When it comes to diatoms that live in the ocean, new research suggests that photosynthesis is not the only strategy for accumulating carbon. Instead, these single-celled plankton are also building biomass by feeding directly on organic carbon in wide swaths of the ocean. These new findings from a team led by UC San Diego researchers could lead to reduced estimates regarding how much carbon dioxide diatoms pull out of the air via photosynthesis, which in turn, could alter our understanding of the global carbon cycle, which is especially relevant given the changing climate. Full Story

June 20, 2024
How Your Sleep Patterns Change Can Tell You About Your Health
Your sleep tracker might give you information about more than just your sleep–specifically, it might give you information about chronic conditions such as diabetes and sleep apnea, and illnesses such as COVID-19. This is one of the findings of a study that analyzed data from 5 million nights of sleep across roughly 33,000 people. Full Story