Soft Focus: A Flexible Future for Robots
UCLA engineers lay the groundwork for machines with astounding abilities. Picture a robot. In your mind’s eye, do you see a shiny protocol droid from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Perhaps a large, moving steel arm from our industrial present? Or even an...
Veronica Santos Part of Avatar Team Advancing to $10M XPRIZE Semifinals
A multidisciplinary team developing an immersive avatar system that enables remote human connection has advanced to the semifinals for the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition. XPRIZE announced on April 5 that 38 teams from 16 countries were selected out of 77...
Khalid Jawed Receives NSF CAREER Award to Create Soft Robot Simulation
M. Khalid Jawed, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the agency’s highest honor for faculty members in the early stages of their teaching and...
UCLA Engineering Alumna Recounts Journey of Perseverance on Mars and Planet Earth
A perfect blend of nervousness, excitement and fulfillment ran through her as UCLA mechanical engineering alumna Ny Sou Okon ’02 watched NASA’s Perseverance rover land on Mars on February 18. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, Okon and her colleagues couldn’t attend...
Laurent Pilon part of UCLA CarbonBuilt team that wins $7.5 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE
UCLA MAE Professor Laurent Pilon is part of the UCLA CarbonBuilt team that won the $7.5 million NRG COSIA Carbon XPRIZE. Please read the article at UCLA Newsroom: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/ucla-nrg-cosia-carbon-xprize-concrete
NASA Selects Artur Davoyan’s Solar Sail Concept
Space agency NASA has announced selection of seven concepts for future space exploration—and they include some exceptionally creative ideas. Among these is Artur Davoyan’s concept of breakthrough space exploration with CubeSat solar sails. Space missions take decades...
UCLA Samueli Alumna Shares Experience Landing Mars Rover Amid Pandemic
UCLA mechanical engineering alumna Anais Zarifian ’16 has had an amazing career “win” with the recent Mars Perseverance rover landing. Zarifian is a NASA system testbed engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and helped test the rover’s mobility systems prior to its...
UCLA Researchers Develop New, Noninvasive AI Method to Inspect Live Cells and Gain Critical Data
Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have discovered a new artificial intelligence-based method to discern the properties of live biological cells without destroying them. The advance could enable laboratories to conduct drug-safety screening faster...
UCLA Aerospace Engineering Alumna to Pilot SpaceX Dragon on Return to Space
UCLA aerospace engineering alumna and NASA astronaut Megan McArthur ’93 will pilot the SpaceX Crew-2 Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) this spring. Portrait of NASA astronaut and SpaceX Crew-2 Pilot Megan McArthur (Credit: NASA) Set to launch...