News | Department of Mechanical Engineering

This Unstoppable Robot Could Save Your Life

Monday, May 17, 2021

Recently, the Hawkes group was featured on the YouTube channel Veritasium with their a vine robot project and the video has over 7 million views so far!

Graduate Student Jayden Plumb is awarded DOE Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Fellowship

Thursday, May 6, 2021

The Mechanical Engineering Department is happy to announce that ME graduate student Jayden Plumb has been selected to receive one of 78 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) fellowships

Igor Mezić Receives J.D. Crawford Prize

Tuesday, May 4, 2021

Igor Mezić is the 2021 recipient of the J.D. Crawford Prize. The award will be presented virtually at the SIAM Conference on Application of Dynamical Systems (DS21), to be held in a virtual format May 23 – 27, 2021. The prize is awarded to Mezić for his paper, “Spectrum of the Koopman Operator, Spectral Expansions in Functional Spaces, and State-Space Geometry”.

Giving Fluid Drag the Slip

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

In 2017, UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineer Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz and colleagues published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explaining that they had solved a mystery in fluid flow. Now, he has been awarded a prestigious CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to develop a theory of the phenomenon. In addition, he and UCSB mechanical engineer Frederic Gibou, along with collaborators at the University of Manchester, have received a joint US-UK grant to extend their work to high-speed, turbulent flows.

Igor Mezić Earns Major SIAM Award for Development of Koopman Operator Theory

Monday, April 26, 2021

Igor Mezić, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Mathematics at UC Santa Barbara, has been named the recipient of the biennial Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Activity Group on Dynamical Systems (SIAG/DS) J. D. Crawford Prize, established in 2000.

Graduate Student Alexander Davydov is awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship

Thursday, April 15, 2021

The Mechanical Engineering Department is excited to announce that 1st year graduate student Alexander Davydov has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship!

UVB Radiation Alone May Not Explain Sunlight Inactivation of SARS-CoV-2

Monday, March 22, 2021

In work that has appeared in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, Paolo, Yangying and collaborators have shown that SARS-CoV-2 is inactivated by sunlight at a rate that is an order of magnitude faster than predicted by established theories.

Linda Petzold, Sumita Pennathur, Dennis Clegg, Megan Valentine collage

Four UCSB Professors Named AIMBE Fellows for 2021

Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Three professors from the UC Santa Barbara College of Engineering and one from the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB) have been named Fellows of the prestigious American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), recognizing their interdisciplinary achievements.

Professor Megan Valentine appointed CNSI Co-Director

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

We are delighted to announce that Professor Megan Valentine has agreed to serve as Co-Director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). Previously, Professor Valentine was Associate Director of CNSI at UC Santa Barbara.

Recognizing Innovation

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Mechanical Engineering assistant professor Yangying Zhu receives a National Science Foundation Early CAREER Award to pursue phase-change research