Education & Outreach

The Engineering Student Design Center (ESDC) hosted a well-attended Women in Engineering open house on Thursday, January 31. Student staff gave visitors a tour of the facility, showing off the lab’s nine 3D printers and demonstrating the laser cutter, which printed commemorative keychains before their eyes. The event also served an opportunity for female faculty, staff and graduate students from the UC Davis community to mingle and learn more about the facility.

Six UC Davis Ph.D. students from the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Group traveled to Jena, Germany this September for a weeklong summer school on clinical biophotonics. These students attended lectures, visited cutting-edge research labs and presented their research to their German peers and leading experts in the field while immersing themselves in German culture.

College of Engineering Dean Jennifer Sinclair Curtis and distinguished alumna and Dean’s Executive Committee member Cynthia Murphy-Ortega (’91) have been invited to speak at the annual meeting of chemical engineers (AIChE) on October 30 as part of a Women in Chemical Engineering symposium.

A group of about 20 high school girls sit in front of computer stations in Bainer Hall at the University of California, Davis for the first C-STEM GIRL+ Camp for girls interested in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). They split their attention between the lines of code on their screen, a circuit board connected to a small robot on the ground, called a Linkbot, and the energetic camp coach giving a presentation on programming.

Earlier this quarter, Katherine Faber, the Simon Ramo Professor of Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology, delivered the College of Engineering’s Winter Distinguished Lecture to students, staff and faculty in the Student Community Center.

Her talk, titled “Probing Pore Space: Crafting Porous Ceramics for Applications from Medicine to Sustainability,” focused on the role of porous materials in a wide range of applications from bone scaffolds to fuel cells and batteries.

by Bonnie Dickson

Last month, UC Davis alumnus Adam Steltzner, now a chief engineer for NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Mars 2020 Project, returned to Davis to tell students about his role in the 2012 landing of the Mars Curiosity rover and to share his insights on the power of human curiosity.

More than 130 people turned out for Steltzner’s Jan. 19 lecture, “The Right Kind of Crazy: Risk, Reason and Engineering Curiosity to the Surface of Mars.”

by Bonnie Dickson

The UC Davis College of Engineering is pleased to announce Emily A. Carter, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton University, as the college’s fall 2017 distinguished lecturer. Carter’s lecture, “Quantum Solutions for Sustainable Energy,” will take place on Tuesday, Dec. 5 at 10 a.m. in the Bruce and Marie West Lobby in Kemper Hall. All faculty, staff and students are encouraged the special lecture.