An ongoing list of Spring 2023 accolades and research awards received by Baskin Engineering faculty, students, and staff.
“Establishing Servingness in Computing through Baskin Engineering Excellence Scholars Program,” a joint project between eight community colleges and Baskin Engineering Professor Seshadhri Comandur, UC Santa Cruz Education Professor Kip Téllez, UCSC staff member Carmen Robinson, and former Baskin Engineering Assistant Professor Narges Norouzi, who is now an assistant teaching professor at UC Berkeley, has received a ~$2M NSF award.
Mark Akeson and David Deamer, emeriti research professors of biomolecular engineering, have received the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor’s Lifetime Achievement in Innovation Award for their work in revolutionizing DNA sequencing through nanopore sequencing technology, which was first developed over 25 years ago and licensed to Oxford Nanopore Technologies. Thanks to their pioneering work that led to the development of a fast, portable, and affordable sequencing tool, known as the MinION, researchers around the world have been able to make some of the most significant genomics advances of our time, including the completion of the first-ever gapless sequence of a human genome.
Russell Corbett-Detig, associate professor of biomolecular engineering, has received the UC Santa Cruz Chancellor’s Innovator of the Year Award for his software tool UShER, which is now the primary method used by health officials across the globe to track the spread of COVD-19 variants.
Jason Eshraghian, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has been awarded the German Association for Applied Mathematics and Mechanics (GAMM) 2023 Sustainability Award for his publication, “Spiking neural networks for nonlinear regression.” This award recognizes outstanding contribution to the field of applied mathematics and mechanics with a focus on sustainability.
Colleen Josephson, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research’s (FFAR) 2022 New Innovator in Food & Agriculture Research Award. The $450K in funding will support Josephson’s research in developing efficient, low-cost agricultural soil sensor systems that are powered by mud batteries—microbial fuel cells that harness the energy of bacteria in soil.
Steve Kang, distinguished professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering, his former students, and Jason Eshraghian, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, received the 2023 IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems Darlington Best Paper Award for their paper, “How to build a memristive integrate-and-fire model for spiking neuronal signal generation.”
Reese Levine, a computer science and engineering Ph.D. student, and Assistant Professors of Computer Science and Engineering Tyler Sorensen and Andrew Quinn received both a Distinguished Paper Award and Distinguished Artifact Award at the ASPLOS 2023 Conference for their publication titled, “MC Mutants: Evaluating and Improving Testing for Memory Consistency Specifications.”
Karen Miga, assistant professor of biomolecular engineering, has been named a 2023 Searle Scholar. This prestigious award will support her research in studying regions of the genome that have been previously unexplored due to their complexity.
A Baskin Engineering student team won the Small Farm Prize at the 2023 Farm Robotics Challenge, an inaugural competition that tasked student teams to develop robotic farming solutions for on-farm challenges.
A team of six UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering undergraduate students, mentored by Assistant Professor Scott Beamer and graduate student Nilesh Negi, placed second in the third annual Winter Classic Invitational, a virtual cluster (supercomputing) competition for students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). This is the second time UCSC competed in the Winter Classic Invitational, having placed third in the 2021 inaugural event.
Another UCSC supercomputing team, mentored by Assistant Professor Scott Beamer and Ph.D. student Yiwei Yang, placed second in the ISC 2023 Student Cluster Competition, an international supercomputing competition geared toward students with prior supercomputing experience. Team UCSC was one of only two American teams selected to compete in this year’s ISC
A team of 10 Baskin School of Engineering students, who are a part of the UCSC Slug Security Club, placed second out of 80 teams in the MITRE Embedded Capture the Flag (eCTF) Competition, a unique two-part cybersecurity challenge that involves participants designing a secure embedded system and then analyzing and attacking the designs of competitors to earn points. This was the first time UC Santa Cruz competed in the competition.
Two UC Santa Cruz teams, Redwood Bio and WakoAI, have been selected into CITRIS Foundry’s spring 2023 cohort. The 12-month program offers entrepreneurs time, resources, and space to develop their innovative ideas into startups ready to seek venture capital funding.
