Education & Outreach

It is an exciting time for our college’s future. Today, I am proud to announce our “Next Level” strategic vision, celebrating our engineering identity and highlighting our vision for growth in stature, impact and reputation.

Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies in the College of Engineering and Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UC Davis, Ralph Aldredge, received a Course & Program Grant from the VentureWell Foundation. The grant will support targeted outreach to introduce underrepresented undergraduate students to entrepreneurship at the Student Startup Center.

UC Davis' fifth annual give day was held this year on April 16-17. Give Day is a 29-hour online fundraising drive that brings the community together to celebrate the Aggie spirit by sharing, following or financially supporting UC Davis programs that have made an impact on the lives of people everywhere.

With a $2.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the UC Davis Center for Integrated Computing and STEM Education (C-STEM) will establish a new initiative to introduce Black/African American girls to engineering and robotics and provide them with resources to be leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in their schools, communities and careers.

As part of the UC Coro Systemwide Leadership Collaborative, I recently participated in a year-long project that focused on addressing the systemic racism within our campuses. Although we cannot solve these deeply-rooted challenges with one project alone, our cohort felt we could make an impact.

The Leadership in Engineering Advancement, Diversity and Retention (LEADR) program is a student support program within the College of Engineering.

LEADR’s mission is to recruit, retain and graduate a diverse population of students from the College of Engineering and to prepare students for post-graduation careers, whether it be in industry or graduate school.

Dr. Shafi Goldwasser, the Director of the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing and a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, discussed how cryptography and computational learning have shared a curious history at the College of Engineering’s virtual distinguished lecture on November 9, 2020.

Goldwasser’s talk was titled “Cryptography for Safe Machine Learning.” She explained how the goals of these two fields are aligned, but a scientific success for one has often provided an example of an impossible task for the other.