convergence issue 18
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Summer 2014 issue (no. 18) of Convergence: the magazine of engineering and the sciences at UC Santa Barbara. #UCSBTRANSCRIPT
1SUMMER 2014 | UCSBConverg
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Feature
Powerful imaging sheds light on the subtle but debilitating neuron damage accompanying traumatic brain injury
A DelicateMystery
2 Convergence
Briefs
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Drought AdaptationsEcological resilience when the global dry and hot trend hits home
Live Feed into the BodyGame-changing device monitors a patient’s drug metabolism in real time
In Cryptography We TrustScientists explore the future of bitcoin and computer security
ConvergenceThe Magazine of Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa BarbaraIssue Eighteen, Summer 2014convergence.ucsb.edu
Editor-in-Chief: Melissa Van De WerfhorstCreative Director: Peter AllenDesign & Layout: Ian BarinWriters: Julie Cohen, K.M. Kelchner, Sonia Fernandez, Shelly Leachman, Rachelle OldmixonArtwork & Photography: Peter Allen, Ian Barin, Spencer Bruttig, Sonia Fernandez, Melissa Van De Werfhorst
Editorial Board: Rod Alferness, Dean, College of Engineering; Pierre Wiltzius, Dean, Division of Mathematical, Life and Physical Sciences, College of Letters and Science; Frank Doyle, Associate Dean of Research, College of Engineering
Special Thanks: Allena Baker, George Foulsham, UCSB Office of Public Affairs
Cellular Cascade of ColorSquid cells use a dance of water and proteins to control color change
The Birds and the BeesPhysicists demonstrate the science of flocking and swarming
Convergence
3SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
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Q & A: Luke TheogarajanConvergence interviews electrical engineering professor Luke Theogarajan about bionic eyeballs and stealthy drug delivery
Goodbye to DroopSolid-state lighting researchers elucidate the cause of LED efficiency droop, opening doors to the LED lighting revolution
The Free Electron MovementPlasmonics researchers are using nanostructures to harness ultraviolet and infrared light to power new technology
The Delicate Mystery of Brain TraumaPowerful imaging sheds light on the subtle but debilitating neuron damage that leads to traumatic brain injury
Cover ImageArtwork by Peter AllenConcept illustration of research by psychological and brain sciences doctoral student Matt Cieslak, who reconstructs white matter connections in the brain using diffusion spectrum MRI. Page 30
Living Story of Social GraphsGeometry could be the key to visualize and mine massive amounts of real time data from social media networks
An Entrepreneurial EducationUCSB’s Technology Management Program prepares students for the business of technology through education and good old-fashioned competition
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4 Convergence
On the following page of this issue of Convergence magazine,
there is a quote by one of our research leaders on campus, Professor
Craig Hawker. When asked in a discussion, “Why do you think
UC Santa Barbara’s research partners renew their investments
year after year?” he replied: “Sometimes it is the question that’s
the most important aspect of a research project.”
We asked him to elaborate. “Having that question defined is
absolutely critical and worth its weight in gold. To frame the prob-
lem in the best possible way and, in a way, working backward from
the product while engaging our research partners,” said Hawker.
“That’s where we at UCSB excel as researchers.”
In the past year, engineering and the sciences has celebrated
the renewal of several successful interdisciplinary partnerships,
and the results speak for themselves. Renewing their $6 million
investment for an additional four years, the Mitsubishi Chemical
Center for Advanced Materials at UCSB has produced more than
100 patent applications, with an average patent cost that is two-
thirds that of a technology company. The relationship is both
effective and beneficial for the students, post-docs and faculty
engaged in groundbreaking materials research.
At the start of 2014, an announcement was made by President
Obama and the US Department of Energy that UCSB research-
ers, including professor Umesh Mishra, are partners in the Next
Generation Power Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute,
a $140 million investment in 25 partners with the goal of boosting
research in wide bandgap semiconductor-based power electronics.
This past winter, the US Army Research Office renewed their
$48 million investment with the UCSB Institute for Collaborative
Biotechnologies, extending a decade of highly successful, unclas-
sified basic research. Deemed “20 years ahead of their time,” ICB
researchers examine complex biological systems and engineer
synthetic materials inspired by natural models. The partnership
has produced more than 500 publications and supported hundreds
of graduate students.
What does it mean for a university dedicated to both research
and academics? We think it means opportunity – for all our stu-
dents, faculty, and researchers alike. Science and engineering
breatkthroughs at UCSB are made possible by our investors and
partners. Great things are happening the lab, the field, and the
classroom every day by the people who have chosen to study at
UCSB because of our dedication to opportunity.
Letter from the Top
◀ ROD ALFERNESSDean of the College of Engineering
◀ PIERRE WILTZIUSDean of Science, College of Letters & Science
5SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
6 Convergence
Briefs
Live Feed into the Bodyby Sonia Fernandez
Doctors and pharmaceutical companies can
generally determine reasonable drug doses
for most patients through testing and trials.
However, the efficacy of a treatment relies on
maintaining therapeutic levels of the drug in
the body, a feat not easily accomplished.
“Current dosing regimens are really quite
primitive,” said Plaxco, professor of chemistry
and of biomolecular science and engineering
at UC Santa Barbara. They rely on a patient’s
age or weight and are unable to account for
specific responses over time. Drug levels may
be influenced by patients’ metabolisms, foods
they eat or other drugs. When coupled with the
primitive state of current dosing algorithms,
this variability can become dangerous for drugs
with narrow therapeutic ranges.
However, a device developed by UCSB
researchers Tom Soh and Scott Ferguson from
the Department of Chemical Engineering;
Plaxco; and Tod Kippin from the Department
of Psychological & Brain Sciences, could take
the guesswork out of drug dosing and allow
physicians to individually tailor prescriptions.
Called MEDIC (Microfluidic Electrochemical
Detector for In vivo Continuous monitoring),
the palm-top instrument can determine — con-
tinuously and in real time — concentrations
of specific molecules in tiny amounts of whole
blood.
MEDIC is a microfluidic chamber lined
with gold electrodes from which artificial DNA
strands called aptamers — extend. When target
molecule comes in contact with a drug-recog-
nizing aptamer, the strand wraps around it,
delivering electrons from its tip to the electrode
at the aptamer’s base. The tiny jolt of current
signals the presence of the molecule.
“The device worked incredibly well,” said
Kippin, whose lab tested MEDIC. The test
results were “remarkable,” he said, considering
the complexity of the samples tested. “The mea-
surements were highly sensitive to doses that are
clinically relevant and could be maintained for
several hours,” Kippin continued. “Further, we
demonstrated exquisite selectivity and flexibility
in that the device is only sensitive to the target
even when administered a cocktail of drugs.”
“For the first time, we can see how the body
processes specific molecules,” said Ferguson.
MEDIC is still in early clinical stages. But it
is opening doors of opportunity that Soh can
already see. In the short term, the device can
not only provide the kind of data necessary for
critical advances in drug therapy, he said, but
also help new drugs clear rigorous clinical trials,
thanks to data that will enable individual dosage
adjustments. More sophisticated diagnostics are
possible with sensors that can target disease
indicating molecules. Several types of sensors
can be stacked for multiple target monitoring.
The continuous feedback loop would prove
invaluable for diseases that could use contin-
uous, automatic infusions of drugs, such as
diabetes or cancer.
“In the long term, we could use this feedback
to control broken biological systems,” Soh said.
Concept illustration of MEDIC’s microfluidic chamber. ▶
7SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
Drought Adaptations by Shelly Leachman
California being in the clutches of drought is
nothing new. There were droughts in prehistoric
times, so-called “megadroughts” that strangled
the state some 1,000 years ago, and more recent
extreme dry periods in the late ’70s and early ’90s.
This time around, however, California has
more than 38 million residents and is grappling
with a troubling trend that’s in play around the
world: global warming.
“It’s not just that there is low precipitation
but low precipitation in a warming climate,” said
Frank Davis, director of the UC Santa Barbara-
based National Center for Ecological Analysis
and Synthesis. “The combination of warm and
dry has a lot of ecological impactions. It puts
greater physiological stress on, for example,
forest trees. Also, when it’s dry and warm, we
start to see really strong impacts on fresh-water
systems, like those that spawn salmon. Being
really dry plus warm is a one-two punch.”
And it’s not just California, or the western
U.S. In fact, it’s not just North America. Parts of
South America, South Africa and Australia are
all in the midst of droughts of their own, seeing
essential crops decimated, pastures drying up
and livestock dying.
“The issue has been raised: Could this be
linked to global warming?” said Leila Carvalho,
an associate professor of geography and co-prin-
cipal investigator of UCSB’s Climate Variations
and Change research group. “You can’t say one
event is related to global warming; that doesn’t
make sense. What does make sense is to say that
because the planet is warming, we are seeing
more conditions for this type of event to occur.
And these events may become more frequent.”
As stores of water in the West are reduced
— whether by usage in drought, evapotranspi-
ration in heat or both — warming temperatures
also see the snowpack on the wane. The two
phenomena together could put extreme strain
on water supplies, which holds implications for
ecosystems, industries and people alike.
Even at their most severe, the droughts of
decades and centuries past did not occur in
tandem with today’s degree of temperature
change or have to contend with the demands
of a population that in California alone now
numbers above 38 million residents. As needs
for water grow ever greater, so too do the poten-
tial threats to its supply.
“This is something that we just have to con-
front increasingly,” said Davis, who is also a
professor of ecology and conservation plan-
ning at UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental
Science & Management. “I’m not ready to say it’s
the new normal, but I am ready to say we really
need to be thinking about risk management
— and we need to do so in an aggressive and
systematic way in order to build more resilience
into all these systems.”
8 Convergence
The Birds and the Beesby Julie Cohen
Birds flock. Bees swarm. These are just two of the
many remarkable examples of collective behav-
ior found in nature. Both were explored at UC
Santa Barbara’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical
Physics (KITP) in “The Physics of Flocking:
From Cells to Crowds,” a one-
day workshop for high school
science educators.
Physicists have been able to
capture flocking behavior by
modeling birds as tiny flying
magnetic spins that align with
their neighbors according to
simple rules. Thanks to these
successes, flocking has become
a paradigm for the behavior of
living and non-living systems
where a large number of indi-
vidually driven units exhibit
coherent organization at larger
scales.
Such systems include sus-
pensions of swimming bacteria,
layers of migrating cells, long
biopolymers driven by proteins
in the cell cytoskeleton and collections of syn-
thetic microswimmers. Physicists, biologists
and mathematicians are using statistical physics
to model the complex behavior of these varied
systems and to identify unifying principles.
The KITP workshop introduced teachers to
the rapidly developing field of active matter.
Speakers used examples of dynamic organiza-
tion at various scales — from the coordinated
patterns of behavior of groups of animals to the
complex hierarchical structures found inside
cells.
“Instead of thinking of atoms and molecules,
think about units that are able to generate their
own motion, such as bacteria,” said conference
coordinator Cristina Marchetti, the William
R. Kenan Professor of Physics at Syracuse
University. “If you have a very dense suspension
of bacteria swimming in fluid, they can exhibit
all kinds of collective behavior.”
Andrew Bernoff, mathematics department
chair at Harvey Mudd College, talked about
the collective behavior of insects such as aphids
and locusts. He also led a hands-on demonstra-
tion of collective animal movement, getting two
audience groups to emulate a milling pattern
used by both fish and ants.
Jeffrey Guasto, assistant professor of mechan-
ical engineering at Tufts University, revealed
how marine bacteria with single tails are able
to change the direction of their
movement by buckling the hook
that attaches the tail to the body.
He also demonstrated how the
shapes of waves moving along
sperm tails allow those cells to
turn while swimming.
Xavier Trepat, a group
leader at the Institute for
Bioengineering of Catalonia in
Barcelona, Spain, demonstrated
how his work is beginning to
inform scientists’ understanding
of important biological func-
tions, such as wound healing,
morphogenesis and collective
cell invasion in cancer.
“We want to expose physics
or science teachers to physicists
on the cutting edge of research,”
says Greg Huber, deputy director of KITP and
a professor in UCSB’s Department of Physics.
“We want to give them an opportunity to learn
from top physics researchers in an intense envi-
ronment, and that’s what we provide in this
one-day workshop.”
Briefs
9SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
Cellular Cascade of Colorby Julie Cohen
Two years ago, an interdisciplinary team from UC Santa Barbara discovered the mechanism by which a neurotransmitter dramatically changes color in the common market squid (Doryteuthis opalescens). That neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, sets in motion a cascade of events that culminate in the addition of phosphate groups to a family of unique proteins called reflectins. This process allows the proteins to condense, driving the animal’s color-changing process.
Now the researchers have delved deeper to
uncover the mechanism responsible for the
dramatic changes in color used by such crea-
tures as squids and octopuses. The latest
research shows that specialized cells
in the squid skin called iridocytes
contain deep pleats or invaginations of the cell
membrane extending deep into the body of the
cell. This creates layers or lamellae that operate
as a tunable Bragg reflector. Bragg reflectors are
named after the British father and son team
who more than a century ago discovered how
periodic structures reflect light in a very regular
and predicable manner.
The researchers created antibodies to bind
specifically to the reflectin proteins, which
revealed that the reflectins are located exclu-
sively inside the lamellae formed by the folds
in the cell membrane. They showed that the
cascade of events culminating in the condensa-
tion of the reflectins causes the osmotic pressure
inside the lamellae to change drastically due
to the expulsion of water, which shrinks and
dehydrates the lamellae and reduces their thick-
ness and spacing. The movement of water was
demonstrated directly using deuterium-labeled
heavy water.
When the acetylcholine neurotransmitter
is washed away and the cell can recover, the
lamellae imbibe water, rehydrating and allowing
them to swell to their original thickness. This
reversible dehydration and rehydration, shrink-
ing and swelling, changes the thickness and
spacing, which, in turn, changes the wavelength
of the light that is reflected, thus “tuning” the
color change over the entire visible spectrum.
“Initially, before the proteins are consoli-
dated, the refractive index — you can think of it
as the density — inside the lamellae and outside,
which is really the outside water environment,
is the same,” said Daniel E. Morse, a professor
in UCSB’s Department of Molecular, Cellular
and Developmental Biology and director of the
campus’s Marine Biotechnology
Center/Marine Science
“There’s no optical difference so there’s no
reflection. But when the proteins consoli-
date, this increases the refractive index so the
contrast between the inside and outside sud-
denly increases, causing the stack of lamellae
to become reflective, while at the same time
they dehydrate and shrink, which causes color
changes. The animal can control the extent to
which this happens — it can pick the color —
and it’s also reversible. The precision of this
tuning by regulating the nanoscale dimensions
of the lamellae is amazing.”
Institute.
10 Convergence
Briefs
In Cryptography We Trustby Shelly Leachman
With implications for computer security, busi-
ness, the economy and our culture, predicting
the future of bitcoin, the so-called “crypto-cur-
rency,” is practically a cottage industry all its
own. Pervasive media coverage and public
debates about its worth (both literally and fig-
uratively) have become de rigueur for today’s
prevailing digital tender, which is alternately
characterized as a revolutionary innovation on
par with the Internet or a flash in the pan that
can’t possibly survive.
“You can find other algorithms, different
versions that work on the same mathemat-
ical principles as bitcoin,” said Ben Zhao, an
associate professor of computer science at
UCSB. “Bitcoin is unique in that it was the first
to prove it could be done. It’s likely going to be
the first to be regulated and widely accepted
— and it will probably dominate the market.
“Bitcoin has a lot of technological benefits
that fundamentally change how people use
money, and that’s what’s interesting to me,”
Zhao added. “It is a potentially world-changing
disruptive technology.
Based and built on cryptography, bitcoin is
as troubling as it is intriguing. Can it survive
long-term in the face of cyberattacks and rap-
idly changing technology?
Only time will tell, assert cryptographers
Huijia “Rachel” Lin and Stefano Tessaro,
assistant professors of computer science and
founding faculty of the UCSB’s inaugural cryp-
tography research group.
“Bitcoin is a very intriguing idea in the sense
that cryptography is trying to replace trust,” said
Lin. “It is using mathematics to replace trust,
which is kind of a radical idea, but it makes
sense from a high level. A bank is not a magic
fortress. It also uses databases, has doors, is
connected with the Internet.”
“If there were a metric to compare it to the
banking system, I think bitcoin would win,”
added Tessaro. “I suspect it’s probably easier to
break into the local bank. The general problem
with electronic cash is making sure that you
don’t spend the same money twice. And the
Bitcoin network is designed to prevent that.”
Cou
rtes
y Bi
tcoi
n
11SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
Julie Cohen has written for decades about science, engineering,
technology and medicine for a variety of international
publications and websites from the perspective of journalism
and public relations. This experience helped her land her
dream job as science writer for UCSB’s Office of Public Affairs
and Communications.
Sonia Fernandez is a writer who has written for several newspapers, magazines
and websites for the last decade on a wide range of topics,
from government issues, water politics, business and medicine
to arts, history, travel and culture. Science and technology are
among her favorites.
K. M. Kelchner received her PhD from UCSB’s Electrical and Computer
Engineering Department in 2012 and worked as a
postdoctoral researcher in the UCSB Materials Department
until 2013 investigating growth of nonpolar GaN-based
materials. She currently lives in Portland, Oregon where she
works in the semiconductor industry.
@KK_PhD
Shelly Leachman is a senior writer in UCSB’s Office of Public Affairs &
Communications. She is an award-winning former
newspaper journalist who has covered education, crime,
culture, social issues, media and technology and more.
Rachelle Oldmixon is a self-professed science nerd who often wonders why
she had to choose just one area of science to study. With
her MA from UCSB’s own Psychological & Brain Sciences,
Rachelle has begun a career in science communications.
She is currently working as a science co-host on Al Jazeera
America’s TechKNOW.
@RachelleIsHere
Melissa Van De Werfhorst is the Marketing Manager for UCSB College of Engineering
and the editor of Convergence magazine. She has an
education in and a strong affinity for science,
both real and fictional.
The University of California, in accordance with applicable Federal and State law and University policy, does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender, gender expression, gender identity, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, medical condition (cancer relatead or genetic characteristics), ancestry, marital status, age, sexual orientation, citizenship, or ser-vice in the uniformed service. The University also prohibits sexual harassment. This nondiscrimination policy covers admission, access, and treatment in University programs and activities. Inquiries
regarding the University’s student-related nondiscrimination policies may be directed to the Office of Equal Opportunity & Sexual Harassment/Title IX Compliance, Telephone: (805) 893-2701.
About our ContributorsConnect with UCSB College of Engineering and Division of Mathematics, Life and Physical Sciences on social media
@ucsbengineering @ucsbnews
Visit The UCSB Current at news.ucsb.edu for daily headline news in science, engineering, and technology at UC Santa Barbara
12 Convergence
Before joining the faculty at UC Santa
Barbara’s College of Engineering, Luke
Theogarajan lent his circuit designing
expertise to Intel for five years as part of the
Pentium 4 design team. An electrical engi-
neer by training, Theogarajan has a Ph.D. in
electrical engineering and computer science
from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
However, his talents aren’t limited to the
world of computers. Theogarajan’s research
interests have applications in fields as diverse
as biomedicine and energy efficiency, thanks
to collaborations with various researchers on
campus. His work has earned him four pat-
ents and prestigious recognition, including
the 2010 NIH New Innovator Award and a
2011 NSF Career Award.
Theogarajan, who heads the Biomimetic
and Nanosystems Group, is a found-
ing faculty member for UCSB’s Center
for Bioengineering, and designed the
undergraduate curriculum for a new
Bioengineering emphasis for College of
Creative Studies biology majors. He has also
received a Northrup Grumman Excellence
in Teaching Award in 2011 and was named
outstanding faculty member in the electri-
cal engineering department for four years
straight.
Convergence interviewed Theogarajan
about his work and the many applications
that have come from it.
Q&Awith Professor
Luke TheogarajanInterview by Sonia Fernandez
13SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
C: What are the main areas of research in
which you’re concentrating right now?
LT: I can broadly classify my work in two areas.
One is in biomedical engineering, and the other
one is in high-speed communications, which
actually grew out of some research I was doing
in biomedical engineering, but fundamentally,
neural interfaces is the one thing that I’ve ded-
icated my life to.
C: You started your work with neural inter-
faces before you came to UCSB; tell us what
kind of work you’ve done.
As a graduate student at MIT, the main work I
did there was to develop an electrical implant
that goes inside the eye and stimulates the retina,
eventually sending information to the brain.
In the middle of my Ph.D., I changed direc-
tion. I realized that if a visual prosthesis of any
significance is going to be developed at some
point there has to be a different interface to the
nervous system. It cannot be electrical, because
the power required for the distance the cur-
rent needed to travel would generate too much
heat eventually leading to cell death. Current
implants have limited number of electrodes to
around 64-100, which pales in comparison to
the 140 million photoreceptors in the eye. So
if you are using a limited number of electrodes
then it is imperative that you know the precise
relationship between electrical stimulation and
the neural code sent to the brain, which has not
been deciphered yet.
What we’ve been trying to concentrate on
is a chemical interface, because if you deliver
a sufficient amount of potassium ions local to
the neuron, it will actually make the neuron fire,
because it upsets the chemical balance. So the
question then was: How do you actually make a
device that can uptake potassium from the body
and release it on command? You have to make
a system that almost mimics a real living cell.
What is fundamentally needed for a chemical
prosthesis is a scaffold by which you can mimic
neurons. You want to make artificial channels
and membranes. We developed a system where
we take a very thin inorganic membrane about
30 nanometers thick and drilled very tiny
holes using a focused electron beam, creating
a structural ion channel scaffold. Once we had
the structural motif, we needed to enable the
functionality of recognition. What we’re doing
now is to attach a recognition molecule in the
interior of the pore so it selectively moves things
across.
14 Convergence
C: Your research into biomimetic materials
has had other applications as well.
Originally, when I was doing my Ph.D, I had to
figure out a way to make a synthetic molecule
that behaved like a lipid, so I made a polymer
system based on previous research that was
done by others, and I modified it to the purposes
that I needed. That ended up having interest-
ing properties that are useful for drug delivery.
We just published a paper about making very
modular blocks using “click” chemistry, which
is a popular way of coupling polymers together.
We are also studying how these polymers
interact with the innate immune system.
Anytime a drug delivery system is introduced
into your body, the first thing your body’s going
to do is recognize whatever you put in and take
it out of circulation. You have to impart a stealth
property to anything you do in drug delivery so
it avoids detection. Using a complement activa-
tion assay, we proved that yes, if you use these
materials, you’re going to get stealth behavior,
provided you don’t use certain types of copper
coupling chemistry. Craig Hawker [UCSB pro-
fessor of materials and chemistry] was a real
source of inspiration. I was completely brought
up in a different field; I’m a formally trained
circuit designer.
The ion channel work can also be applied to
the field of single molecule detection, especially
DNA sequencing. We have married the world
of electronics (i.e. CMOS) with the nanopore
(a tiny hole in an insulating membrane) and by
monitoring the ion current flowing through this
membrane one can perform single molecule
detection. We try to thread the DNA through
these holes and look at the amount of current
that they can block. You can also tell other char-
acteristics like protein folding and misfolded
Alzheimer’s proteins using the same technique.
One key issue in these detection platforms
is the baseline background current can dwarf
the change in ionic current due to the biomol-
ecule. Because we have a strong expertise in
electronics, we built a new electronic platform
that can distinguish very small changes on very
large backgrounds.
Finally, if a useful system is to be designed,
a way of coupling the sensor, the electronics
and the microfluidics are necessary. Each of
these domains operate in a different length
scale: the nanoscale, microscale and macro-
scale, respectively. However, if you make an
electronic chip larger just for interfacing the
cost goes up exponentially and the yield drops
dramatically. So to circumvent this we take a
very small chip and make it look very large at
a reduced cost, enabling the coupling to the
microfluidics. The same technology can be used
for integrating electronics and photonics, which
is how I started working with John Bowers, who
is known around the world for his expertise in
optics and photonics.
C: Your work in biotechnology actually bene-
fitted John Bowers’ work in energy efficiency?
Tell us more about that.
Yes, I realized that if you use a photonic wafer
rather than a dummy silicon wafer like we
did with our bio-related work, then very inti-
mate connections can be made between the
photonics and electronics. This enables very
short electrical interconnects and thus lowers
the power of the system, which is essential for
energy efficient communications. We also have
a grant with DARPA on electronic/photonic
integration to implement advanced communi-
cation systems using electronics coupled with
photonics. John has been a great mentor to me,
he’s a fantastic guy.
C: You mentioned that you were essentially
dedicated to creating neural interfaces. Aside
from the visual prosthesis work and bio-
mimetic cell membrane, what else are you
working on?
We’re also working neural recording arrays for
brain implants, to help paraplegics or people
Q&A with Professor Luke Theogarajan
15SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
with neurological damage. For example if the
connection between the brain and motor func-
tion is damaged one can record from the brain
and then stimulate the muscle or control a
robotic arm, partially replacing lost function.
One of the big problems in this area is that
these implants are made of silicon or stainless
steel. However, the modulus of the electrode is
so stiff, because it has to withstand the pressure
of implantation, that micro shearing happens on
the brain, so it develops inflammation. One of
the things we’re trying to do is make some arrays
that do not have this shearing, using materials
that are soft and flexible. We have developed a
flexible polymer array with soft electrodes, and
are starting a collaboration with the Department
of Bioengineering at UC San Diego to test them.
The last question we ask is: how do you mimic
brain function? How do you make circuits
behave like a brain? How do you make them
learn? We have a multiuniversity collaboration
(MURI), funded by the Air Force headed by Tim
Cheng and Dimitri Strukov, who is an expert
in memristor technology (memory resistor – a
resistor that remembers). We want to use the
memristor as a learning synapse and use that
synapse to create artificial circuits that behave
like neural system and does tasks of recognition.
mimetic.ece.ucsb.edu
16 Convergence
17SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
UCSB engineering researchers turn to geometry in their quest to map social networking data in real time
By Sonia Fernandez
Living Story of Social Graphs
17
From flash mobs at the local mall to trending
activist hashtags, social networks have quickly
integrated themselves into modern human life
and become a tool for instantaneous global
communication. Every day, an estimated 700
million people (out of billions of registered
users) worldwide are weighing in on the top
social networking sites, swaying others, making
decisions and forming relationships in a con-
stant torrent of information.
While it’s true that we can analyze the com-
plexity of networks, given time, the deluge
of data is too massive, too complex and too
time-consuming for current technology to sort
in real time.
Which is why UC Santa Barbara professors
of computer science Ben Zhao, Subhash Suri
and Heather Zheng, along with electrical and
computer engineering professor Upamanyu
Madhow, have teamed up for an ambitious proj-
ect that not only aims to further understand
social networks but also creates a means for
analyzing them as they happen. It will provide a
deeper comprehension of an increasingly “real”
virtual world, as well as ways to monitor or pre-
vent viral outbreaks, both in the real world and
online, or track systems like transportation or
biological protein networks.
Their project, titled Social Network Analysis:
Geometry, Dynamics and Inference for Very
Large Data Sets (SNAG-IT), was awarded a
$6.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of
Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA). SNAG-IT’s obvious chal-
lenge – considering the sheer size of the network
and the enormous amount of information – is
unraveling data in real time,.
To help Zhao and colleagues in this task, they
have partnered with information technology
giant Hewlett-Packard, the project’s primary
contractor, which is researching and building
scalable graph processing systems.
18 Convergence
“When you look at Facebook, or LinkedIn or
Twitter, you’re talking about networks of more
than a billion people,” said Zhao, who leads the
four-year project. Traditional algorithms devel-
oped and proved near-optimal decades ago no
longer apply, he said. Developed for smaller sets
of data, current algorithms scale poorly when
the amount of data skyrockets.
To compound the problem, social networks
are based on constantly changing relationships,
which affects what kind and how much profile
information can be seen by others. Meanwhile,
some people gain popularity, others lose clout,
and events have immediate impact on topics of
cyberspace discussions and real-life decisions.
For example, a LinkedIn profile page could
tip a company toward hiring a certain individual
if his or her list of connections was popu-
lated with influential people in the industry.
Conversely, an offhand comment, a change
of profile picture, even a “like” could lose a
user friends, connections or followers — and
therefore influence in the social network, and
opportunities in real life.
The power of geometry
To understand this modern kind of dataset,
the researchers are using an ancient system:
geometry.
“Geometry is a powerful way of visualizing
complex relationships,” said Suri, who special-
izes in computational geometry.
User profiles can be plotted as points —
nodes — on a coordinate space, with distance
and dimension representing relationships, for
instance. Other information deemed relevant
can also dictate the node’s positioning or inter-
action with other nodes around it.
The group is also interested in teasing out
data that is not explicitly mentioned from the
flow of information: inferred associations from
professional affiliations or shared skill sets, for
instance, or implicit relationships from timing
of events — not just the presence of a connec-
tion, but also its quality.
“Geometry is a powerful way of visualizing complex relationships.” - Subhash Suri
“We seek to develop a systematic framework
for teasing out information from spatiotem-
poral patterns of activity on social networks,”
Madhow said. “As one example, by correlat-
ing the timing and volume of activity with the
timing of a class of external events, for exam-
ple baseball games, it may be feasible to make
inferences about a user’s interests, such as, is
he or she a baseball fan? Furthermore, such
inferences can be strengthened and extended by
examining the patterns of activities for groups
of linked users. As another example, by look-
ing at the spatiotemporal spread of a rumor,
can one make systematic statistical inferences
about its source?”
But dealing with massive — and rapidly
growing — amounts of sometimes seemingly
disparate information is no small feat, and
current technology does not have the power
necessary to analyze such vast amounts of data
at a meaningful speed. Even now, queries for
profiles on current social media websites like
LinkedIn, for instance, return precomputed,
sometimes days-old information, which may
or may not reflect up-to-the-moment devel-
opments, the scientists say.
As an example, Suri said, take GPS naviga-
tion systems, with main roads and side roads all
plotted out in relationship to the driver’s coor-
dinates, and measurements taken and relayed
continuously via satellite as directions are sent
to the driver while he moves from one location
to the next.
“Road networks are large graphs that people
are just now getting comfortable with in terms
of real-time response,” he said.
But road information relayed via GPS is
minuscule and simple compared to the quan-
tities that flow through networks like Facebook
18
19SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
and LinkedIn, with profile views, public and
private interactions, status updates, evolving
relationships, responses to external events,
timing of communication and constant changes
over time.
“Current systems simply limit the power of
the queries you can execute. LinkedIn for exam-
ple does not let you query more than three hops
away from yourself,” Zhao said. “Others simply
limit functionality. For example, you cannot yet
search for all users on Facebook while sorting
by social distance away from you. Enabling that
would significantly improve your chances of
finding friends you already know, especially
those with common names.”
Breaking down complex data structures
Enter modeling and algorithms, meant to
efficiently and elegantly describe and approxi-
mate behaviors; reveal elements like influential
thought leaders and communities; and poten-
tially even predict events, whether it’s the next
Internet meme or the next Arab Spring.
At the same time, these complex data
structures have to be condensed into as small
a dimensional space as possible to allow for
rapid computations while sacrificing the least
amount of accuracy.
“We are going to have errors,” Zhao said,
explaining that capturing a data structure with
up to 100 dimensions or more — depending on
how comprehensive the social network is trying
to be with its users — into a small number of
dimensions that can be visualized in a graph
“fundamentally just cannot be done perfectly.”
Some nodes in the data may just be out of place,
he said.
The intensity of information will also make
it more difficult for people to lie about their
cyberselves, Zhao said, because even if a person
changes his or her information in one sense, the
other dimensions, relationships and inferences
drawn from those associations still exist.
“In a practical sense, it’s very difficult to
mislead the data in a meaningful way,” he
said. “Unless you move your location, change
your job and change your circle of friends, that
closeness with certain people or things will still
remain.”
To evaluate and validate these algorithms
and models, the group will be using preexist-
ing datasets from previous projects, the largest
of which is a 40 million-node graph of ano-
nymized user profiles from a Chinese online
network.
“It becomes a mathematical problem,” said
Zhao, who specializes in modeling and mining
massive graphs as well as analysis of social net-
works and Internet communities.
It also becomes a laborious process in which
they take a “brute force” approach to get to the
ground truth: Run lengthy computations with
the preexisting data and see how close they get
with their algorithms. Computations for even a
small, 20,000-node network can run for weeks.
Ultimately, however, the result will be pow-
erful programs, applications and systems that
can run fast, compute enormous amounts of
data and do it with today’s machines, with all
the physical constraints they face.
“The intensity of information will also make it more difficult for people to lie about their cyberselves.” - Ben Zhao
The research could also lead to uses in other
fields. For instance, the high-speed computing
and real-time capacity could be used to observe
transportation systems and biological protein
interaction networks. The algorithms would
prove useful in the monitoring and possible
prevention of viral outbreaks, both biological
and online.
Such research into the complex dance of
social media networks can provide a founda-
tion from which social scientists might study
a variety of behavior patterns and interactions
in an increasingly “real” virtual world.
19
Once elusive, solar-to-fuel conversion is looking like gold in a UCSB lab. By Sonia Fernandez
THE FREE ELECTRON MOVEMENT
21SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
LIGHT: Without it, life would be nothing like it is now.
Modern technology’s ability to generate, manip-
ulate, sense, and convert light has resulted in
man’s capacity to do everything from stay up
past sundown to communicate across vast dis-
tances, even to see into the distant past of the
universe or deep into our bodies.
At UC Santa Barbara, researchers continue
to find novel ways of using light — in both
the visible and invisible spectra — to address
man’s growing need for energy and hunger for
information. Through the combination of plas-
monics and nanotechnology, researchers have
been able to capture a storable form of energy
from visible and invisible parts of the spectrum.
Manipulating this electromagnetic energy could
allow researchers to develop new technology
for power generation and imaging.
A new way of harvesting the sun’s energy
In a little water-filled vial in UC Santa
Barbara chemistry professor Martin Moskovits’
laboratory, a tiny disc may hold the key to our
pressing present and future fuel needs. When
illuminated by the sun, this disc — no bigger
than one’s fingertip — is capable of breaking the
chemical bonds of water, producing hydrogen
and oxygen, thus directly storing sunlight as
usable fuel.
“This pursuit has been growing for more
than 100 years,” said postdoctoral researcher
Syed Mubeen, of the ongoing search for a more
robust and efficient way to harvest solar energy
and turn it into fuel. Unlike solar-to-electricity
applications, where conventional photovolta-
ics have made great strides in efficiency and
affordability in the decades since their inception,
developing a technology for sustainable solar-
to-fuel conversion processes has been elusive,
until now.
“Such devices have been made by many
researchers in the past, using conventional
semiconductor materials,” said Mubeen. “The
problem is, when highly efficient semiconduc-
tors, such as silicon or gallium arsenide, are in
an aqueous environment, they photocorrode,
and stop working after a few minutes.”
There have been some inroads made in the
solar-to-fuel quest using semiconductors based
on metal oxides, like titanium, for instance.
These semiconductors don’t fail as readily the
silicon-based types, but the tradeoff is that they
absorb only the ultraviolet portion of sunlight —
about four percent of the spectrum — so their
efficiencies are highly limited. Meanwhile, the
search for a viable means of converting the Sun’s
energy into fuel intensifies, as concerns over
the environmental drawbacks of using fossil
fuel mount.
Enter gold, one of the Earth’s most stable and
conductive metals. Resistant to corrosion, it can
be placed in many aqueous solutions without
disintegrating, or otherwise reacting. Enter also
an entirely new application for plasmonics.
“We have been working on plasmonic mate-
rials for many years in other contexts,” said
Moskovits, whose research emphasis is in
physical chemistry and materials. For decades,
plasmons — the collective oscillation of con-
duction electrons — have been studied and used
in applications such as enhanced spectroscopy,
for instance, or to detect molecules adhering
to surfaces. However, it was the specific social
context, which in this instance is the urgent
concern to develop alternative energy resources,
that spurred the group into considering plas-
monics as a source of non-fossil fuel energy.
Harnessing excited electrons
In conventional photovoltaics, sunlight hits
semiconductor material, one side of which is
electron-rich, while the other side is not. The
photon, or light particle, excites the electrons,
causing them to leave their positions, and create
positively-charged “holes.” The result is a cur-
rent of charged particles that can be captured
and delivered for various uses, including power-
ing lightbulbs, charging batteries, or facilitating
chemical reactions.
In the technology developed by Moskovits
and his team, it is not semiconductor materials
that provide the electrons and venue for the
conversion of solar energy, but the surface of
one of the world’s most well known and pre-
cious metals.
“When certain metals are exposed to visible
light, the conduction electrons of the metal can
be caused to oscillate collectively, absorbing a
great deal of the light,” said Moskovits. “This
excitation is called a surface plasmon.”
However, these excited, “hot” electrons
are very short-lived, lasting only about ~ 10
22 Convergence
femtoseconds (~ 1014 seconds) before
they relax.
To get an idea of just how briefly
these electrons stay hot, imagine a
stretch of beach that’s 20 feet long by
20 feet wide by five feet deep. That’s one
second. Ten grains of sand would be
comparable to 10 femtoseconds.
“The question was, can you capture
these electrons effectively and put
them to useful work?” said Mubeen. To
do this, the Moskovits team — which
also included chemistry postdoctoral
researcher Joun Lee, chemical engi-
neering graduate researcher Nirala
Singh, materials engineer Stephen
Kraemer, and chemistry professor
Galen Stucky — turned to the very
tiny world of nanostructures.
“These hot electrons tend to travel
~106 meters per second, which means
they could travel at least a few tenths
of a nanometer before decaying as heat.
The challenge was to come up with an
appropriate nanostructured design so
that before these electrons decay as
heat you use them to do useful chem-
ical reactions,” Mubeen said.
The result is an array of gold
nanorods, each rod measuring 80 to
100 nm in diameter and 500 nm in
length. Ten billion of these nanoreac-
tors can occupy one square centimeter.
Six hundred of them lined up side by
side would span the diameter of an
average (clean) human hair.
Left to right: Syed Mubeen and Joun Lee, postdoctoral researchers in chemistry; Nirala Singh, chemical engineering graduate student; Professor Martin Moskovits.
Plasmonic Technology
▶
23SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
Each nanorod is capped with a layer of
crystalline titanium dioxide decorated with
platinum nanoparticles. A cobalt-based oxida-
tion catalyst was deposited on the lower portion
of the array, and the entire arrangement is sub-
merged in water.
When the negatively charged hot electrons,
excited by sunlight, oscillate, they travel up the
rod, through the titanium dioxide layer and are
captured by the platinum nanoparticles, caus-
ing the reaction that splits water molecules.
Meanwhile, the positively charged “holes” left
behind by the excited electrons head down-
ward to the oxidation catalyst to form oxygen.
According to their study, hydrogen production
was clearly observable after two hours, and
the nanorod array proved to be the durable
visible light-harvesting device sought by the
researchers.
“The device operated with no hint of failure
for many weeks,” Moskovits said. Additionally,
according to Mubeen, the use of nanostructures
provides the opportunity to scale up for rela-
tively little cost, even with an expensive metal
like gold.
Quest for efficiency
Currently, efficiencies for this plasmonic
technology are at about .25 percent, which is
comparable to silicon semiconductor-based
photoprocesses almost a century ago. And,
plasmonic technology is still more costly than
that for conventional semiconductors.
“We still have a lot of work to do,” said Mubeen,
ticking off a list of ideal qualities that would
make nanostructured plasmonic materials
competitive with conventional semiconduc-
tors. “We need to test cost-effective plasmonic
metals, so we can make fuels cheap enough.
We need to re-engineer the system design to
be more efficient.”
Copper and silver are being eyed as alterna-
tives to gold, and an efficiency of 5 percent or
more is one of the early targets for the research.
“If the last century of photovoltaic technol-
ogy has shown anything, it is that continued
research will improve on the cost and efficiency
of this new method - and likely in far less time
than it took for the semiconductor-based tech-
nology,” said Moskovits.
“In view of the recentness of the discovery,
we consider .25 percent to be a ‘respectable’
efficiency,” he said. “More importantly, we can
imagine achievable strategies for improving the
efficiencies radically.”
Catching the (invisible) wave
Meanwhile, in another lab on the UCSB
campus, researchers Hong Lu, Art Gossard
and Mark Sherwin have performed a feat that
may provide a wide array of applications, from
more efficient solar cells to higher-performance
telecommunications to enhanced imaging and
sensing technologies.
It comes in the form of a compound semicon-
ductor of nearly perfect quality with embedded
▶ Artist’s concept of nanometer-size metallic wires and metallic particles embedded in semiconductors, as grown by Dr. Hong Lu.
24 Convergence
semimetallic nanostructures, and it capitalizes
on the manipulation of the infrared (IR) and
terahertz (THz) range of the electromagnetic
spectrum. These invisible areas of the spectrum
— with longer wavelengths and lower frequen-
cies than the naked eye can sense — offer much
in the way of information they can provide.
However, the development of instruments that
can take advantage of their range of frequencies
is still an emerging field.
Bridging optics and electronics
To cope with the demands of today’s
information technology — more data, faster
transmission, better energy efficiency —
researchers have been turning to optics, using
IR light to transmit information.
However the transition between optics and
electronics is a difficult one because they operate
at vastly different scales, with electron confine-
ment possible in spaces far smaller than light
waves. The size gap between the technologies
have been a hurdle for scientists and engineers
trying to integrate the two with a circuit that
can take advantage of the speed, capacity and
energy efficiency of optics with the compact-
ness of electronics for information processing.
Here plasmonics plays a vital role, by pro-
viding the highly sought bridge between the
two technologies. Key to this technology is the
use of erbium (Er), a rare earth metal that has
the ability to absorb light in the visible as well
as infrared wavelength, and has been used for
years to enhance the performance of silicon in
the production of fiber optics. Pairing erbium
with the element antimony (Sb), the researchers
embedded the resulting compound — erbium
antimonide (ErSb) — as semimetallic nano-
structures within a semiconducting matrix of
gallium antimonide (GaSb).
When IR light hits the surface of this
semiconductor, electrons in the semimetallic
nanostructures begin to resonate — that is,
move away from their equilibrium positions
and oscillate at the same frequency as the infra-
red light — preserving the optical information,
but shrinking it to a scale that would be com-
patible with electronic devices.
“This is a new and exciting field,” said Hong
Lu, project scientist in materials and in elec-
trical and computer engineering. But the
ability to translate optical information into
electronic data is only one benefit of this unique
semiconductor.
‘A new kind of heterostructure’
In the world of semiconductors, structural
quality is of utmost importance: the more regu-
larly repeating and aligned — “flawless” — the
arrangement of atoms in the semiconductor’s
crystal lattice is, the more reliable and better
performing the device in which it will be used
will be.
Generating these perfect structures is no
minor feat. Any mismatch in size or alignment
becomes magnified and could result in cracking.
The difficulty becomes even greater when incor-
porating different atoms, which may be desired
for their properties, but not so for their poten-
tial to result in defects. While semiconductors
incorporating different materials have been
studied for years — a technology UCSB pro-
fessor and Nobel laureate Herbert Kroemer
pioneered — a single crystal heterostructured
semiconductor/metal is in a class of its own.
ErSb, according to Lu, is an ideal material
to match with GaSb because of its structural
compatibility with its surrounding material,
allowing the researchers to embed the nano-
structures without interrupting the atomic
lattice structure of the semiconducting matrix,
each atom aligned with the matrix around it.
“The nanostructures are coherently embed-
ded, without introducing noticeable defects,
through the growth process by molecular beam
epitaxy,” said Lu. “We can control the size, the
shape and the orientation of the nanostructures.”
The term “epitaxy” refers to a process by which
layers of material are deposited atom by atom,
or molecule by molecule, one on top of the
other with a specific orientation.
“It’s really a new kind of heterostructure,” said
Arthur Gossard, professor of materials and elec-
trical and computer engineering.
Seeing things in a new light
The semiconductor’s ability to capture and
manipulate IR and THz range light opens doors
into better imaging and sensing, as the embed-
ded nanostructures/nanowires offer a strong
broadband polarization effect, filtering and
defining images with IR and THz signatures.
In addition to the thermal signatures that are
captured by infrared cameras, traces of chemi-
cals found in explosives and illegal narcotics can
Plasmonic Technology
25SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
be sensed using the semiconductor. Terahertz
wavelengths, which occupy the space between
infrared and microwave frequencies, can pene-
trate a variety of materials, including the human
body, opening up the potential for high reso-
lution imaging without the danger posed by
higher energy x-rays.
The researchers have already applied for
a patent for these embedded nanowires as a
broadband light polarizer.
“For infrared imaging, if you can do it with
controllable polarizations, there’s a lot of infor-
mation there,” said Gossard.
The researchers credit the collaborative
nature between departments on the UCSB
campus for this multidimensional breakthrough.
“One of the most exciting things about this for
me is that this was a ‘grassroots’ collaboration,”
said Mark Sherwin, professor of physics, direc-
tor of the Institute for Terahertz Science and
Technology at UCSB. The idea for the direction
of the research actually came from the junior
researchers in the group, he said, grad students
and undergrads from different laboratories and
research groups working on different aspects
of the project, all of whom decided to combine
their efforts and their expertise into one study.
“I think what’s really special about UCSB is that
we can have an environment like that.”
Researchers on campus are also exploring
the possibilities of this technology in the field
of thermoelectrics, which studies how tempera-
ture differences of a material can create electric
voltage or how differences in electric voltages
in a material can create temperature differences.
Renowned UCSB professors John Bowers (solid
state photonics) and Christopher Palmstrom
(heteroepitaxial growth of novel materials)
are also investigating the potential of this new
semiconductor.
Materials researcher Hong Lu peers down one of the many chambers of a molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) instrument.▶
“For infrared imaging, if you can do it with controllable polarizations, there’s a lot of information there.” - Art Gossard
26 Convergence
27SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
The ordinary light bulb is an innovation so
extraordinary that a sudden brilliant idea is
called “a light bulb moment.”
Credit for inventing the first incandes-
cent-style light bulb often goes to Thomas
Edison, but even that wasn’t a light bulb moment.
In fact, his patent for an improved electric light
came after 75 years of hard work by several sci-
entists and engineers, all scrambling to find the
best way to run an electrical current through a
filament and get it to glow.
Luminaires based on light-emitting diode
(LED) technology already are 10 times
more energy-efficient and last 20 times
longer than old-fashioned Edison-
style bulbs. Today, researchers
in the Materials Department
at UC Santa Barbara are
working hard to get even
more bang for the
buck from these
high-tech light
sources.
A team led by professors James Speck and
Claude Weisbuch from the Center for Energy
Efficient Materials (CEEM), along with collab-
orators at École Polytechnique in Paris, have
developed a technique to tackle possibly the
most difficult technological mystery of LED
research: efficiency droop. Their recent discov-
ery could have exciting implications in terms
of how we understand and use this new way to
make light.
Just like Edison’s tricky filament, though, the
devil is in the details.
It is widely known that incandescent bulbs
are terribly inefficient light sources; 90 percent
of the electrical energy goes toward generating
heat and only 10 percent goes to making light.
An LED generates light a completely different
way, by passing electric current through layers
of semiconductor material called a diode. In
a perfect LED, every electron passing through
the diode would release its energy in the form
of light. It would generate no heat at all.
In a real LED, however, not every electron
does what it should. As you apply more and
more current, the LED doesn’t emit a propor-
tional, increasing amount of light. The LED
actually becomes less efficient the harder you
turn up the juice. The efficiency, for lack of a
better word, droops.
The challenge of LED droop
LED droop is a challenge for LED bulb
designers who want to squeeze the most light out
of each chip, especially if they want to replace
the incandescent light bulb, which despite being
really inefficient happens to be really bright and
really cheap.
“Efficiency droop has been the biggest prob-
lem for blue LEDs for a long time,” explained
Shuji Nakamura, a professor of materials and
co-director of the Solid State Lighting & Energy
Center at UCSB. While still a researcher in
Japan in the late 1990s, Nakamura was the first
to demonstrate a modern blue LED using an
electrically injected diode made from a semi-
conductor called gallium nitride (GaN).
GoodbyeTo Droop
Case Closed. Researchers discover the science
behind the mystery of efficiency droop.
By K.M.Kelchner
28 Convergence
The Paris connectionJustin Iveland, a materials graduate student
who worked on this project for the past two
years, joked that the most important piece of
lab equipment was the trans-Atlantic airliner
that let him travel to Paris to collaborate with
researchers in the Laboratoire de Physique de
la Matière Condensée at École Polytechnique.
“This kind of experiment takes experience,”
said Weisbuch, distinguished professor of mate-
rials at UCSB and a faculty member at École
Polytechnique.
Weisbuch enlisted his colleagues Lucio
Martinelli and Jacques Peretti to help because,
as he put it, they have more than 30 years of
experience taking the kind of careful electrical
measurements this experiment required.
Still, the experiment was quite complex. To
start, the samples had to be carefully prepared
and subjected to a very high vacuum. The equip-
ment had to be aligned just so to detect Auger
electrons, which have a unique high-energy
signature. The hardest part of all, according to
Weisbuch, was “getting everything right.”
Not only was the measurement successful in
detecting Auger electrons, but the more elec-
trons pumped through the LED sample, the
more Auger electrons they measured. The emer-
gence of Auger electrons directly corresponded
with the onset of LED efficiency droop. They
call this kind of discovery unambiguous, which
is perhaps a nicer way to say, “We told you so.”
“Based on our data and analysis, it offers direct
proof that Auger is the dominant mechanism
UCSB researchers Justin Iveland and Professor James Speck.▶
Since then, Nakamura has played an import-
ant role in seeing these tiny light emitters go
mainstream for white lighting. According to
Nakamura, solving the enduring efficiency
droop problem could have a huge impact on
reducing the cost of LED bulbs, which still sell
for more than $10 apiece.
For years, the exact cause of efficiency droop
has been hotly debated. LED manufacturers
have engineered workarounds for the droop
problem, but the answer to the mystery lies
in fundamental science. How a single electron
generates light at all involves some magic of
quantum physics. Albert Einstein won the
Nobel Prize in 1921 for explaining the so-called
photoelectric effect.
The concept comes down to this: If you want
to get as much light out of an LED as possible,
you must account for all the electrons.
UCSB professor Chris Van de Walle and
his research team theorized in 2011 that LED
droop can be blamed on misbehaving electrons.
Instead of releasing their energy as light as they
should, some electrons traveling through the
diode transfer all their energy to another elec-
tron. Think of billiard balls colliding in a game
of pool. These pesky energetic electrons are
called hot electrons or Auger electrons. The
more Auger electrons you have, the less light
you get. There have been several experiments
trying to prove the existence of Auger electrons
in LEDs, but measuring them directly has been
nearly impossible.
Very recently, professors Speck and Weisbuch,
along with their collaborators, have managed to
directly measure Auger electrons for the first time.
Goodbye to Droop
29SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
for GaN-based LED droop,” explained Professor
Speck, the Seoul Optodevice Chair in Solid State
Lighting at UCSB. “It’s the first direct measure-
ment of Auger electrons in any semiconductor.
The result provides a direct pathway to mitigate
droop and the Auger process.”
Materials Professor Steven DenBaars,
Mitsubishi Chemical Chair in Solid State
Lighting and Displays and co-director of
SSLEC, added: “Professor Speck and Professor
Weisbuch’s groundbreaking experimental ver-
ification solves one of the greatest mysteries of
light-emitting diodes. Now that we understand
the fundamental process, we can focus on ways
to solve it through novel LED device structures
and designs.”
The past 20 years have seen rapid develop-
ments in LED technology, but as Thomas Edison
himself said, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration,
99 percent perspiration.” This is a testament to
the hard work that scientific discoveries and
technological innovations often require.
In a few more years, the ordinary light bulb
will be a thing of the past, and our options will
be bigger, brighter and cheaper — all thanks
to contributions made in research labs around
the world and right here at UCSB.
LED emitting light under forward bias in an ultra high vacuum chamber allowing simultaneous electron emission energy. Photo credit: École Polytechnique, Ph. Lavialle
▶
30 Convergence
The Delicate Mystery of
Brain Trauma
31SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
At 29, John*, an active police officer and part-
time graduate student, was in a car accident.
Despite the impact to John’s head, a hospital CT
scan revealed no damage to his brain. He was
released from the hospital and told he should
recover fully.
After several months, however, John (not his
real name) still had not recovered. He sought
help for numbness in his toe and complained
of severe memory problems for the courses he
had taken since entering his master’s program.
He had difficulty making decisions, found it
hard to maintain attention, and noticed subtle
personality changes. He asked to be removed
from active patrol. Back at his desk, he found
that even the standard paperwork proved
difficult.
John’s case is among hundreds of thousands
like it — incidents of people who suffer mild
Traumatic Brain Injury (mTBI) after an auto
accident, during high-impact sports or on the
battlefield. Most people recover from an mTBI
incident within a few weeks.
But 10 percent do not recover and, for those
people, the symptoms worsen to the point of
chronic, life-debilitating cognitive deficits. The
problem is that cognitive symptoms of mTBI are
vague and offer little tangible evidence for common
imaging techniques to detect neural damage.
“If a patient with a concussion and lingering
cognitive trouble goes in for a conventional brain
scan, there’s less than a 3 percent chance of seeing
something on the MRI,” said Dr. Scott Grafton,
co-director of the Institute for Collaborative
Biotechnologies and a professor of psychological
and brain sciences at UC Santa Barbara.
Grafton hypothesizes that mTBI-related
brain damage evades common hospital imaging
techniques because the damage is occurring at
The Delicate Mystery of
Brain TraumaTo detect the subtle but debilitating damage from mild traumatic brain injury,
scientists at UC Santa Barbara are peering into neuron networks with high-powered imaging and analysis. By Rachelle Oldmixon
*Name changed to protect privacy.
32 Convergence
the level of individual neural connections rather
than in larger brain areas.
He believes the long-term symptoms associ-
ated with mTBIs may be the result of “shearing”
of the neurons. In order to investigate this pos-
sibility, Grafton and his team are developing a
new brain-imaging technique that will allow
doctors to see neural connections with greater
clarity.
The problems of misdiagnosis
The complaints associated with chronic
mTBI are similar to those surrounding Post-
Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is
misdiagnosed often, and particularly among
veterans who have seen active combat.
Between January 2000 and March 2011,
more than 163,000 mTBIs reportedly were
incurred by U.S. military personnel on active
duty, usually the result of blows or jolts to the
head. About 10 percent of those people — more
than 16,000 — were reported to have developed
cognitive deficits from mTBI.
Despite how common it is, a PTSD diagnosis
is seen by many soldiers as a sign of weakness,
and many will deny experiencing symptoms
related to the triggering event. Because of this,
medical experts must rely on the symptoms
that soldiers will admit, such as memory loss
surrounding their time in combat, irritability,
difficulty concentrating, and a loss of interest
in previously enjoyable activities.
While PTSD is technically a psychological
disorder that can improve with time and ther-
apy, mTBI is physiological in nature. An early,
accurate diagnosis of mTBI may be the only
way to help doctors provide optimal therapies
from an early point.
“The U.S. military is interested in screening
for mTBIs, but this would require a full cog-
nitive baseline examination of every soldier
before each deployment and when they return,
which is prohibitively expensive,” Grafton said.
This has left our military in a quandary:
Requiring cognitive exams for every soldier
would be too costly, but, without pre-injury
measures, minor dips in cognitive function or
minute abnormalities on a brain scan could be
explained away as low-average cognitive ability
or artifacts from the machine.
Grafton is addressing the intricate mTBI
diagnosis problem by investigating the
possibility that mTBI is an issue of connectivity
tissue in the brain. Currently, the magnetic res-
onance imaging (MRI) technology commonly
found in hospitals and clinics is most useful for
finding lesions or the sources of strokes. Some
techniques available in hospitals have been cal-
ibrated to find small hemorrhages, down to a
few millimeters in size.
The detection of mTBI may, however, lie in
the finer — and more complicated — details
of neural connection.
Visualizing white matter
Essentially, when the brain experiences a
trauma in the form of a blow to the head, the
thinner neural connections are damaged. These
thinner connections exist where the projections
from a distant area of the brain reach their
target and fan out to connect to many other
areas of the brain.
“Think of a cable with a lot of wires. In the
middle it’s nice and tight, all packed together.
But at the ends, the cables splay out in different
directions and hook back together again. That
is where the tearing probably occurs,” Grafton
explained.
“The white matter is like train tracks connecting many different cities. But for brains, the connections are between different modules of the cerebral cortex. And there can be lots of tracks connecting any pair of modules. No matter where we are in the white matter we can test if the normal connections are present or not.”- Dr. Scott Grafton
33SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
Fewer or damaged synaptic connections to
certain brain regions would result in impaired
communication among areas of the brain.
With the use of Diffusion Tensor Imaging
(DTI), it is possible to visualize the brain’s white
matter, which consists of axon bundles. DTI,
also known as diffusion MRI, is an imaging
method that uses the diffusion of water through
the brain to map the white matter.
The problem with DTI is that each person
has a different pattern of connectivity, so it’s
almost impossible to know where to start ana-
lyzing the information. Additionally, DTI is not
quite sensitive enough to visualize the thinner
neural connections.
To address this, Grafton’s lab team, in collab-
oration with research teams at the University of
Pittsburgh and at Siemens, utilize a technique
called Diffusion Spectrum Imaging (DSI) that
was first invented at Massachusetts General
Hospital by Van Wedeen.
While it takes about five times longer to scan
than DTI, DSI more accurately maps where the
fibers of axons cross — the architecture of tissue
— based on where water is and how it moves.
Their research involved improving the way the
DSI scans were collected and more importantly,
in the way the information is analyzed.
Because there are billions of places in the
human brain where the axons of those neurons
cross, each DSI scan produces several gigabits
of data — requiring a new level of data com-
putation power.
Necessity breeds the reinvention of data
analysis
To meet the need, Grafton and graduate stu-
dent Matt Cieslak have completely reworked
how DSI data is analyzed.
34 Convergence
Currently in DSI, axon bundles are tracked
by starting with two different areas of gray
matter. The bundles, or white matter, found
between the two areas are then counted and
observed.
Grafton and Cieslak have found, however,
that axon bundles don’t cross neatly. Instead, the
bundles can pass through one another, dividing
into smaller axon cables and weaving through
one another before rejoining into the original
bundle. Rather than tracking axon bundles
indirectly, Grafton’s team decided a new ana-
lytical program was needed that could trace an
axon bundle along its pathways.
Grafton’s new statistical analysis allows
researchers to visualize the ends of the bun-
dles, where the axons splay out and shearing
is more likely to occur in patients with mTBI.
Once the theory behind the statistical program
was developed, Grafton saw a need for several
additional functions. They needed the ability
to view multiple scans at once, for starters, to
allow researchers and doctors to compare scans
from the same brain or among patients with
similar injuries.
Translating research into real help
Grafton and his team work with Dr. Philip
Delio, medical director of stroke services at
Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. Delio eval-
uates many of the patients who are brought
to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital, a level II
trauma center that sees thousands of brain-in-
jury patients every year. Delio is a neurologist
and the lead recruiter of patients for the mTBI
study with UCSB.
“This study has tremendous implications for
our population of mild traumatic brain injury
patients; there has been no way to characterize
or predict which patients will have more pro-
longed symptoms,” said Delio.
More than 15 patients suffering from cog-
nitive deficit related to mTBI have volunteered
to participate in Grafton’s ongoing study. Their
injuries have been the result of a range of events,
including skateboarding accidents, sports inju-
ries and car crashes.
“This study has tremendous implications for our population of mild traumatic brain injury patients; there has been no way to characterize or predict which patients will have more prolonged symptoms.” - Philip Delio
“Patients with seemingly severe injuries often
make remarkable recoveries, while some with
apparently mild injuries may have persistent
deficits for month or years, or permanently,”
Delio said, adding that this research will “be
imperative in helping to predict functional out-
comes and recovery.”
Lacking initially detectable brain damage,
the mTBI patients are ideal candidates to test
the sensitivity of the new analytical program.
Grafton has also begun distributing the
analysis tools to other laboratories across the
country in an effort to evaluate its potential
and to add functionality. It will take some time
and a carefully designed clinical trial to test
the final version of these tools. The utility of
diffusion spectrum imaging coupled with the
custom analysis tools for diagnosing mTBI will
require this larger-scale effort.
For mTBI patient John, an early diagnosis
could have made a huge difference. A year later
when he received a proper diagnosis, he was
able to develop coping mechanisms to make it
through graduate school. With significant help
from friends, family and his professors, John
was able to finish his graduate degree. But in
John’s case, he still finds cognitive tasks difficult
that were once simple.
If cognitive exercises started soon after an
mTBI incident can improve the brain’s ability
to recover lost function, then early diagnosis
could mean the difference between debilitation
and hope for recovery. Grafton’s new analytical
method could lead to a better outcome from
chronic brain injury and mental debilitation
for tens of thousands of people.
The Delicate Mystery of Brain Trauma
35SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
Can mTBI trigger a pathway for more serious disease?
Zooming in to the cellular and molecular levels, Dr. Megan Valentine of
the department of mechanical engineering is exploring whether force-
based neural damage can be attributed to molecular-level changes on
and within neurons.
Valentine is investigating possible changes to the individual neurons
after force-based damage. Her research team applies controlled stress
via magnetic fields to the neural cells to see how they react, identify and
repair the impact – and whether there are short-term and long-term
connections to neural health.
Their challenge is to develop new tools that work at smaller length
scales and higher force ranges — that is, tools sensitive enough to detect
molecular-level changes after a force is applied.
“We’re miniaturizing magnetic tweezer technology to apply forces
inside these cells,” Valentine said, “and at the same time introducing
high-resolution optical imaging to capture what happens in a split second.”
Valentine’s study keeps tabs on the neuron’s changes over time to see
how a single-force event — a traumatic brain impact, in theory — changes
a neuron’s behavior and properties over the long term. Her research
further addresses the question: Are young people who are exposed to
TBI in turn predisposed to early-onset dementia diseases?
“Neuron adhesion and cargo transport are important for healthy
nervous systems,” Valentine explained. “There are other diseases where
either loss of adhesion or loss of transport leads to neurological defects,
including Alzheimer’s and other types of dementia.”
Valentine wonders if impact-force injury can, in essence, trigger these
other disease pathways that are otherwise thought to be attributed to
genetic predisposition.
In 2013, Valentine was one of three UCSB engineering professors
to be awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Early Career
Award. The award keeps her research going for at least four years and
includes an outreach component that creates education and research
opportunities for students.
Aptly enough, Valentine’s program brings in and involves students
who are military veterans.
“The program is a nice intersection between outreach and research
because veterans in particular understand the seriousness of these types
of injuries,” she said.
Employing all the proper tools and modalities, Valentine sees great
promise in the research.
“There is a diversity of adhesion proteins on neurons, and they’re very
sensitive to mechanical signaling.” she said, adding that if cell adhe-
sion governs the ways in which axon bundles are formed and intersect,
understanding these molecular-level mechanics could be another key
to understanding why and how any traumatic brain injury takes its toll.
◀ From left: Mechanical engi-neering graduate student Nick Zacchia; mechanical engineer-ing associate professor Megan Valentine; and Tim Thomas, U.S. military veteran and VIBRANT program summer intern from Pasadena City College - working at a fluorescence microscope.
36 Convergence
37SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
When optoelectronics graduate student Jared
Hulme attended a Technology Management
Program lecture about UC Santa Barbara
technologies that were available to license, he
left inspired to explore how solid state lighting
research could be commercialized.
“After seeing last year’s New Venture
Competition finals, I decided I wanted to be
a part of the program,” commented Hulme.
TMP’s New Venture Competition is an annual
business competition for student teams to try
their hand at commercializing new or existing
technology, much of it stemming from campus
research efforts in science and engineering.
Hulme connected with materials graduate
student Kristin Denault, who was research-
ing high efficiency laser diode lighting in
the solid state lighting lab of Professor Ram
Seshadri, co-director of the Materials Research
Laboratory. Like Humle, Denault was interested
in taking the technology to market.
“My graduate research work with Professors
Ram Seshadri, Steve DenBaars, and Shuji
Nakamura led us to combine phosphor mate-
rials with laser excitation,” explained Denault.
This highly promising research formed “the
basis of our motivation,” she added, to enter
the competition with a company called Fluency
Lighting Technologies.
“I have found inspiration in this research
because of the far reaching impacts that light-
ing has on the world, and the associated global
energy reduction that can be made possible
through this type of research,” said Denault.
Denault and Hulme joined forces with eco-
nomics major Daniel Moncayo, and their team
went on to place second in the competition,
taking home seed money for a newly established
technology venture.
“We expect our technology to be well received
in a market estimated to be worth $3 billion,” com-
mented Moncayo.
AnEntrepreneurial EducationScience and engineering students suit up for the high tech business world through UCSB’s Technology Management Program.
by Sonia Fernandez
◀ Laura Johnson, graduate student at the UCSB Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, presents her team’s start-up, Salty Girl Seafood, at the 2014 New Venture Competition finals. Salty Girl Seafood, which took home second place in the Market Pull category and a People’s Choice Award, is a sustainable seafood distribution company that bypasses the traditional supply chain to ship seafood directly from fishermen to restaurants and markets.
38 Convergence
TMP has been the birthplace for many student-run startups,
several of which they can now showcase as multi-million dollar
success stories in a spectrum of technology industries. Fueled
by students fired up about their innovations, and guided by
mentors with experience in the marketplace, TMP has helped
spawn dozens of successful UCSB-founded businesses in its 14
years on campus.
Before considering the techpreneur world, the three co-found-
ers of Fluency Lighting Technologies took advantage of TMP’s
course offerings and lectures available to students. Denault
completed TMP’s Graduate Program in Management Practice
concurrently with her graduate education in materials.
“The three of us have also attended several of the TMP
Executive-At-the-Table round table discussions and
seminars,” Denault said. “We have really found TMP
to be a great source of help and guidance through
this whole process.”
TMP’s academic offerings and student business compe-
tition are led by UCSB professors and lecturers with business
acumen and experience under their belts who impart knowl-
edge to students over six months of courses and seminars. The
curriculum covers everything a “techpreneur” could dream
of: business ideas and models, intellectual property and pat-
ents, marketing, finance, operations, and how to find start-up
investors. The results for participants are a broader network,
concrete business plans, working prototypes, and polished
presentations.
Though not exclusive to tech majors, students in science
and engineering are drawn to the program, which aims to pre-
pare them to perform as business leaders in global technology
teams. Their curricula encourage cross-disciplinary teamwork
between the hard sciences, economics, marketing, and other
disciplines to bring balanced perspectives and talents.
An Entrepreneurial Education
◀ Kristin Denault, materials graduate student and co-founder of Fluency Lighting Technologies.
Advice from seasoned pros
For mentors, TMP is sometimes a way to watch the evolution of
technology, as students tackle old problems with new insights.
Morgan Pattison, whose consulting firm specializes in high-efficiency
lighting, mentored a team of engineering seniors, Taylor Umphreys,
Siddhant Bhargava, Arshad Haider, and Ben Chang. Their team, Brightblu,
proposed a Bluetooth-based home automation system that could be
controlled with a smartphone.
“I encouraged them to make it something cost-effective and easy to
use,” said Pattison. The problem with current automated lighting systems,
he said, is that they tend to be complicated and unwieldy, affordable
only to large buildings. Compatibility with legacy circuitry, such as in
a home, was a problem.
“The idea for me was to see where the concept would go and I wanted
these guys to spend time on the technical issues,” he said. His job was
to guide their creative power as someone who was familiar with the
practical realities of the market.
They ran with the concept and refined the technology, but they didn’t
stop with lighting solutions. In the process they demonstrated that the
device — a smartplug — could not only control lights, but could also
work with other appliances. In essence, they designed a smartplug that
turns any power outlet into an intelligent outlet that users can control
from a smartphone.
After taking home People’s Choice at the New Venture Competition,
the team landed a top spot at the 2012 Plug and Play Expo, scoring major
networking opportunities in the Silicon Valley. Today, their original
prototype has evolved into a product called Zuli. They used Kickstarter
to successfully fund their expansion.
To test themselves against the reality of a startup experience, stu-
dents can take courses like “Creating a Market-Tested Start-up Business
Model,” taught by Steve Zahm, president of Santa Barbara-based Procore
Technologies, Inc., a cloud-based construction management software
firm.
“Tech entrepreneurs often confuse a technology with a product, and a
product or service with a business,” said Zahm. “Conducting a thorough
39SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
and detailed market validation process — in
other words, getting out and talking to potential
customers and partners before launching the
product and company — is the one key step
for designing a successful business model.
Once that business model has been validated
by actual market and customer feedback, then
you can move forward.”
As the venture matures, like any company,
there will be growing pains. If the business is
successful, roles change and goals evolve.
“Start-ups have fewer formal rules, are nimble,
flexible and more organic in their organizational
structure – there are roles rather than formal-
ized jobs – people tend to do more than one
thing,” said Kathryn McKee, human resources
expert and TMP lecturer.
As the venture grows, so does the need for
the company’s leaders to keep the focus more
on long-term productivity and less on short-
term survival. For this eventual need, McKee
co-teaches “The Entrepreneurial Leadership of
Teams and Talent” with Deb Horne, who is also
in human resources.
“Experience has shown that entrepreneurs are
typically focused on the technology, product or
service and give little thought to the legal side of
a start- up, including hiring and compensating
employees,” said Horne. “The class is designed
to provide an awareness of the legal compliance
issues they face when starting up and running
a business.”
Entrepreneurship with a purpose
In the world of new technology ventures, the
waters can be a little choppier, the navigation
a little more uncertain. Not only are startups
inventing new things, they have to convince
investors to believe in them, and then persuade
the public to trust their products.
Which is why a strong purpose plays an
important role in the life of a tech entrepreneur.
For James Rogers, creator of aPEEL
Technologies, Inc., there were two purposes.
He wanted to own his own business and he
wanted to create something that could have a
positive impact on peoples’ lives. He found a
way to fulfill both purposes in the world’s first
organic preservative, a spray-on post-harvest
coating that preserves the freshness — and thus
extends the shelf life — of produce.
“In the U.S. we throw out up to 20 percent
of the produce that we harvest. And we use 80
percent of our fresh water in the United States
to irrigate,” said Rogers, who earned his PhD
in Materials at UCSB.
▶ Team Shadowmaps won over 2014 NVC judges with urban geolocation improvement technology that combines GPS data with algorithms that correct for building satellite shadows. Pictured: Andrew Irish (electrical engineering graduate student), Danny Iland (computer science graduate student), Dayton Horvath (chemistry graduate student), and Jason Isaacs (electrical and computer engineering postdoc).
40 Convergence
Through the development of a thin film
composed of molecules extracted from plants,
strawberries that go fuzzy the next day will be
good for several more, and in the future leafy
greens could stay leafy and green for far longer.
From growers to grocers, it means better sales
and less waste overall.
Much of this support he received from TMP,
starting with the first entrepreneurship classes
led by John Greathouse.
“I think TMP is like a series of lighthouses
that warn you where you’re going to crash. They
don’t tell you where to go; they tell you where
not to go,” he said. There might be ideas that
take too much time and energy, or it might be
the wrong time to take money from a certain
investor, he said.
aPEEL Technology and its organic edible
spray coating took home the top spot at the
2012 New Venture Competition.
Not satisfied with helping the agriculture
industry on the home soil, Rogers is actively
researching ways to bring the technology to
developing countries, where not only are shrink-
age and spoilage major issues in places with
hot weather and lack of refrigeration, but also
biotic stressors — infestations and infections
by bacteria, fungi and parasites. For this work
Rogers was awarded a $100,000 grant from the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation under its
Grand Challenges Explorations Initiative, for a
proposal that paved the way for a coating that
would not only prevent shrinkage but also act
as a camouflage, keeping the fruit or vegetable’s
surface from being recognized as a food source.
For the next crop of young innovators con-
sidering entrepreneurship, Rogers offers this
advice: Get started. Do anything.
Learning to innovate
Not all students who enter TMP are looking
to be the next big startup. A common thread
between the program curricula is encourag-
ing students to keep their minds in innovation
mode.
“Innovation-related skills are vital because
we’re frequently working with game-changing
research that requires new thought and practices
concerning industry and market applications,”
said Dave Seibold, UCSB professor and director
of the TMP Graduate Program in Management
Practice. “For example, technological or com-
ponent innovations that disrupt traditional
models to increase efficiency and production
or open new markets.”
Seminars such as “Thinking Out of the
Box” and “How Do Things Work?” are taught
by TMP lecturer Virgil Elings, a UCSB physics
professor turned wildly successful techpreneur,
even before tech entrepreneurship became the
vogue. Elings co-founded Santa Barbara-based
Digital Instruments in 1987, which brought the
first commercially-available scanning probe
microscopes to market — including the Atomic
Force Microscope and the Scanning Tunneling
Microscope.
“Virgil has a passion for helping students,”
said Rod Alferness, dean of the College of
Engineering. “His workshops are effective
because they’re hands-on, very cross-disci-
plinary, and the student-teacher model is wide
open.” Elings, a renowned entrepreneur and
lifelong advocate of learning by doing, is known
for eschewing traditional learning models for
the head-first approach.
An Entrepreneurial Education
◀ A $5,000 Elings Prize was awarded to a team by method of random drawing at the 2014 New Venture Competition, prefaced by words of experience by Virgil Elings that “success in business is fifty percent hard work and fifty percent dumb luck.”
“Innovation-related skills are vital because we’re frequently working with game-changing research that requires new thought and practices concerning industry and market applications.” - Dave Seibold
41SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
This approach, and the deceptively simple
questions Elings asks his students, engages
both student and teacher, giving participants
the kind of mental calisthenics needed to train
for the fast pace and often unpredictable envi-
ronment of a technology-based business career.
“TMP gave me a chance to teach a course
where the subject matter is just a medium
for thinking about things,” Elings said. “The
material was not constrained and could cover
everyday things and very technical things.
Two of my favorite simple problems for the
students to think about were ‘How does a play-
ground swing work?’ and ‘How does an ice
skater gain speed?’ We went from swings to
relativity in one course and I learned as much
as the students.”
“The class was much more focused on the
‘hows’ and ‘whys’ as opposed to the ‘whats’ that
we could be studying,” said Benji, a former TMP
student. “I learned not only a lot about how the
things we covered really work, but also some
better questions to ask when trying to learn
more about anything.”
Despite (or perhaps, because of) their
unconventionality, his seminars are a tremen-
dous hit with both engineering and College of
Creative Studies students at UCSB. Students
often cited Elings’ seminars as the best classes
they ever had.
Next-gen technology, next-gen leadership
Expanding their current offerings, TMP
will launch a new Master of Technology
Management program in 2015. This intensive
master’s degree program will be the first of its
kind at UCSB and is intended for exceptional
students in science, engineering, or quantitative
social science backgrounds with a “demon-
strated potential for leadership,” explained
Bob York, professor of electrical and computer
engineering and Chair of TMP.
“This program will propel students with
advanced technical qualifications to successful
careers as business leaders and entrepreneurs.”
said York. “We’re empowering UCSB scientists
and engineers to become leaders and innova-
tors. I think that’s a big step, and important one.”
Learn more at tmp.ucsb.edu.
▶ Inogen founders Brenton Taylor, Alison Perry, and Byron Myers
42 Convergence
43SUMMER 2014 | UCSB
Jae C. Hong/Associated Press
For the UC Santa Barbara community of students, faculty, and staff, the
tragic events of May 23, 2014 will never be forgotten. The death of six
UCSB students was devastating to the entire campus and to our alumni
and supporters who put their faith and pride in UCSB. The following
weeks were some of the most difficult we have experienced; the mourning
on campus was palpable.
Then, something quite amazing happened amidst sorrow. The commu-
nity at UCSB came together to support one another in a collective spirit
that was beyond moving. As official letters were promptly issued from
the Deans and the Chancellor addressing concerns and communicating
important details about safety and support, thousands of us gathered in
Isla Vista for a candlelight vigil. The student community mobilized to
build memorials and organize events. Counselors and academic advisors
opened their doors on weekends and after hours to support students
– in part because spring finals week, already a challenging time, was
fast approaching. Resources were made available to every person on
campus to process and heal, and to prepare ourselves for the aftershocks
of mourning.
There was an awareness among us that it didn’t matter how long we
worked into the night, or which classes were postponed, or what meetings
we had to cancel – we were going to get our UCSB community through
this heartbreaking time.
Perhaps the largest gathering of people in the history of UCSB took
place a few days later as more than 20,000 people attended a memorial
service at Harder Stadium for George Chen, Katherine Cooper, James
Hong, Christopher Ross Michaels-Martinez, David Wang and Veronika
Weiss. The news of the tragedy had traveled the world, and “We Stand
with UCSB” tributes were organized at every University of California
campus. Thousands of UCSB alumni broadcast their #GauchoStrong
support on social media and through the UCSB Alumni Association.
Hundreds of people gathered at an Isla Vista beach for a Paddle Out
Memorial, on surfboards and rafts, holding hands in a giant chain as
flowers drifted into the Pacific Ocean.
This June, we celebrate our graduating seniors who have worked
incredibly hard for their education and their careers. They leave UCSB
knowing grief, but also knowing solidarity. For students whose gradua-
tion is yet to come, UCSB is a stronger and more connected place today.
In response to requests by the UCSB community, alumni, and our
donors, a scholarship fund has been established in the names of the vic-
tims. The fund supports student scholarships, as well as counseling and
academic assistance resources at UCSB. To donate, visit bit.ly/victimfund.
This is our message of gratitude to everyone who has stood beside
UCSB after the tragedy, and has joined us in remembering six students
who had tremendous potential and embodied the wonderful qualities of
a Gaucho: hard work, community involvement, fun spirit, and positivity.
Thank you, UCSB.
From Deans Rod Alferness and Pierre Wiltzius, on behalf of the staff
and faculty of UCSB Engineering and the Sciences.
UCSB Heals United
Located just over 20 miles off the coast of Southern California, Santa Cruz Island is the largest of the chain known as the Channel Islands. Countless UCSB research-ers owe their careers, in part, to Santa Cruz Island.
“It’s like what Southern California looked like a hundred years or more ago,” said Lyndal Laughrin, director of the UCSB Santa Cruz Island Reserve.
Drought-resistant chaparral gives way to pine trees at eleva-tion, endemic manzanitas spread across the landscape and native grasses are returning after decades of ranching and wine making. The scenery is vast and breathtaking, virtually unchanged from what the native Chumash witnessed in their millennia of existence on the island. The island’s geography makes it a strategic place to study a diversity of sea-dwelling life forms. Meanwhile, endemic species, cut off from their mainland counter-parts for generations, have taken different evolutionary routes, earn-ing the island comparisons to the famed Galapagos.
Article and photography by Sonia Fernandez
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ConvergenceThe Magazine of Engineering and the Sciences at UC Santa Barbara
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