Research

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!

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 massive flooding and rapid widespread devastation in coastal areas, as happened in Southeast Asia in 2004 and in Japan in 2011.

A paper published June 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and co-authored by Beth Pruitt, UC Santa Barbara professor of mechanical engineering and director of the UCSB Institute for BioEngineering, describes the results of a complex long-term collaboration that has included researchers at Stanford University, the University of Washington, and the University of Kentucky. The study has led to new understanding of how genetic mutations play out at the cellular level to cause HCM, and new perspectives on how to prevent it

Three projects that take innovative approaches to solving critical energy-efficiency challenges have been awarded seed funding from UC Santa Barbara’s Institute for Energy Efficiency (IEE), an interdisciplinary research institute committed to improving energy efficiency. The selected projects align with at least one of the institute’s three key interdisciplinary thrusts: smart societal infrastructure, computing and communications, and the food-energy-water nexus. Each proposal will receive up to $50,000 in critical seed funding, which is intended to produce preliminary results that the scientists can use to apply for major external funding to expand their research.

Megan Valentine, 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 physicists, biologists and engineers, four of whom are women

A postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Alban Sauret, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has won the prestigious Milton van Dyke award for best video in the Annual Gallery of Fluid Motion, presented by the Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) at the 74th annual meeting of the American Physical Society.

A Granular Understanding Engineers describe how fluid suspensions exhibit different behaviors at different scales

A mechanical jumper developed by UC Santa Barbara engineering professor Elliot Hawkes and collaborators is capable of achieving the tallest height — roughly 100 feet (30 meters) — of any jumper to date, engineered or biological. The feat represents a fresh approach to the design of jumping devices and advances the understanding of jumping as a form of locomotion.

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 semiconductor (CMOS) transistors.