Ioana Patringenaru
Associate Director, Media Relations, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Phone: 619-253-4474
Email: ipatring@ucsd.edu
Marti LaChance
Communications Manager, NHERI NSF
Phone: 765-918-6517
Email: lachance@purdue.edu
Over the past seven years, more than 7,000 sixth-graders from 26 schools in San Diego County built their own structures and got to test them on small shake tables at the Jacobs School of Engineering. It’s all part of the Earthquake Engineering with K’NEX Outreach Program run by the UC San Diego chapter of the Society of Civil and Structural Engineers. Full Story
The biggest outdoor shake table in the world and a robot designed to move along utility lines have received Best of What’s New awards from Popular Science, the world’s largest science and technology magazine. The two projects are featured in the magazine’s December issue, now on newsstands. Full Story
On a hot Saturday afternoon in the Mojave Desert, a team of UC San Diego engineering students huddled in a small underground bunker and watched quietly as the rocket engine they had designed over the past eight months flared to life on a test platform. As a jet of rocket fuel sprang out of the engine at supersonic speed, the students cheered loudly.The test by the UC San Diego chapter of Students for the Exploration and Development of Space (SEDS) marked the first time that a university-led group had successfully designed, built and tested a 3-D-printed rocket engine, according to Space.com. Full Story
A team of researchers, led by Colorado State University engineering professor John van de Lindt, has spent the last month shaking a four-story building on the world’s largest outdoor shake table at the University of California, San Diego, to learn how to make structures with first-floor garages better withstand seismic shocks. Full Story
Located at the Jacobs School's Structural Engineering Department eight miles east of the main UC San Diego campus, this 25-foot x 40-foot open air shake table will be the largest such device in America and the single largest outdoor system on the planet--only the 40 x 60-foot E-Defense (Earth-Defense) indoor shake table in Miki City, Japan has a bigger footprint. UCSD's $5.9 million table is hydraulically driven with six degrees of freedom and enough power to vibrate at 6 feet per second Full Story
A 4-story building built to be destroyed came crashing down Saturday and a group of engineers working at UC San Diego is celebrating that collapse. The project was to test just how much shaking would bring a structure down Full Story
Have you ever wondered how safe your home is when it comes to being in an earthquake? Well researchers at UC San Diego, along with four other universities, have been working on an experiment to test just that. And the results, they say, could help save lives. There isn't a foolproof way to know when an earthquake will hit. But, that wasn't the case Saturday during a planned experiment at UC San Diego. Full Story