by James Badham For decades now, field-effect transistors enabled by silicon-based semiconductors have powered the electronics revolution. But in recent years, manufacturers have come up against hard physical limits to further size reductions and efficiency gains of silicon chips. That has scientists and engineers looking for alternatives to conventional metal-oxide... read more »

Graduating seniors in the Mechanical Engineering Department selected Tyler Susko for the 2022 Outstanding Faculty of the Year Award. An assistant teaching professor, he has received the honor five times in the past seven years.  “It is such an honor to be selected by my students,” said Susko, who is the capstone instructor for mechanical engineering. “Personally, it means... read more »

A Granular Understanding Engineers describe how fluid suspensions exhibit different behaviors at different scales By Harrison Tasoff Thursday, April 7, 2022 - 05:00 Santa Barbara, CA Manuka-honey.jpg The fine sugar crystals suspended in manuka honey lend it a thicker quality than a more filtered honey. Photo Credit:  ISTOCK... read more »

Megan Valentine(link is external), a professor of mechanical engineering and co-director of the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara, has been awarded a $1.8 million collaborative grant by the National Science Foundation to design and create next-generation materials inspired and empowered by biological cells. Valentine will be working alongside a team of... read more »

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is the most common of all genetic heart diseases and is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death. HCM is characterized by an abnormal thickening of the heart muscle, which, over time, can lead to cardiac dysfunction and, ultimately, heart failure.  A paper published June 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)... read more »

  When we hear the word “tsunami,” we think immediately of the widespread devastation that can result from these uniquely powerful waves. The tsunamis we hear about most often are caused by undersea earthquakes, and the waves they generate can travel at speeds of up to 250 miles per hour and reach heights of tens of meters when they make landfall and break, causing... read more »

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!  Check it out:     

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”.  The SIAM... read more »