UCLA Engineering Postdoc Alexis Block Receives Otto Hahn Medal for “HuggieBot”
Alexis Block, a mechanical engineering postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has been awarded an Otto Hahn Medal from Germany’s Max Planck Society to support her research in human-robot interaction. Each year, the nonprofit premier...
How Spiders Fly: Untangling the Mystery of Arachnids’ Electrically Charged Ability to Soar
Discovery could aid in development of new devices for environmental science It was a Halloween mystery that baffled Charles Darwin to the end of his days. On Oct. 31, 1832, thousands of tiny red spiders suddenly started dropping from a clear sky onto Darwin’s ship,...
Jonathan Hopkins wins the 2021 JMR Best Paper Award
UCLA MAE Professor Jonathan Hopkins and three other researchers’ paper "Compliant Mechanisms That Use Static Balancing to Achieve Dramatically Different States of Stiffness” was chosen as the Winner of the 2021 Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics (JMR) Best Paper...
Amped Up: How smart technology is changing the face of the country’s infrastructure system
Whether you’re turning on a lamp in your house or plugging your electric vehicle into a designated charging outlet, you are interacting with one of the most significant developments of the 19th century: the power grid.
Concerns over Russian cyberattacks against U.S.
“After the defenses, you still have to have resilience. Let’s say we have two power plants and one goes down — can the other one take the load of this one, and what does it need to do?” said UCLA’s Rajit Gadh.
Low-Power Lasers Could Send Low Cost Probes to Far Reaches of Space
Space exploration can be very costly and slow, tacking years if not decades of flight time. Now in a study led by MAE PhD student Ho-Ting Tung and Professor Artur Davoyan a new concept for fast sailing with the use of lasers was developed. A paper by the team...
Wirz Research Group Highlighted in AIAA Aerospace America 2021 Year in Review
UCLA MAE Professor Richard Wirz's research group was highlighted in AIAA Aerospace America 2021 Year in Review. From the article: Electric propulsion: An expanding capability and community BY JOHN W. DANKANICH | DECEMBER 2021 The Electric Propulsion Technical...
Kai Fukami and Kunihiko Taira develop breakthrough machine learning technique which reconstructs physics from a limited number of sensor measurements
UCLA MAE Ph.D. student Kai Fukami and his advisor Professor Kunihiko “Sam” Taira have been working with collaborators at Argonne National Labs, and Keio University, on a very exciting novel machine learning technique to reconstruct physics from limited number of...
Elisa Franco Receives NSF Grants for Molecular Manufacturing and Computing
Elisa Franco, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received two research grants totaling $3.6 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support the development of microscopic...