COE Srs. & TA Awards 2020
The UCSB College of Engineering 2020’s Outstanding Senior, Lake Excellence Award recipient and Teaching Assistant honored
Class of 2020 Outstanding Senior
Motivated by his passion for inventing gadgets to improve people’s lives, Wei Jiang is headed to Stanford University in the fall to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering. After graduating with Highest Honors and a 3.99 GPA, Jiang said that UCSB has prepared him to make a difference in the world.
“The university provided me with invaluable research opportunities, starting my sophomore year,” said Jiang, who grew up in Suzhou, a city in eastern China. “In addition to gaining hands-on experience in a lab, I also developed time management skills and learned to work independently.”
COE News – "CoE Announces Outstanding Seniors in Class of 2020" (full article)
John and Sheila Lake Excellence Award
Electrical engineering student Jenna Bovaird is the recipient of the 2020 John and Sheila Lake Excellence Award, which is named for alumnus John Lake and his wife, Sheila, and recognizes outstanding service and academic scholarship.
As an EE major, Bovaird has been active with the university’s student branch of IEEE since her freshman year. At the time, the club had less than forty paying lab members. As a sophomore, she served as publicity chair and Smart Lamp Project Lead, teaching members how to make a Bluetooth-controlled color-changing LED board. She became internal vice president her junior year, helping launch IEEE’s inaugural hackathon. She took over as president as a senior. Bovaird said her dedication has been extremely rewarding in light of the fact that the club now has nearly two hundred members. She will return to UCSB in the fall as a graduate student in the electrical and computer engineering’s Bachelor of Science/Master of Science (BS/MS) Degree Program. Her emphasis will be in electronics and photonics.
COE News – "Student Awards & Recognitions for Class of 2020" (full article)
2020 Outstanding Teaching Assistant
Visiting from the Universidade Estadual do Rio Grande do Sul (UERGS) in Brazil, Raphael Ruschel dos Santos studied abroad at UCSB for the entire 2014-15 academic year. His visit was made possible through the Brazilian Scientific Mobility Program, a scholarship program reserved for some of the country’s most promising students pursuing degrees in engineering and the sciences. While at UCSB, he participated in the Center for Bio-Image Informatics (CBI) Summer Internship Program, training an autonomous unmanned air vehicle (AUV) system on human detection and facial recognition.
Four years later, Ruschel returned to UCSB as a PhD student in the computer engineering program. His current advisor, Professor B.S. Manjunath, was one of his co-advisors during the summer internship program. As a member of Manjunath’s research group, he performs research on computer vision and machine learning with a focus on activity recognition and medical-image analysis. His group’s newest research project includes using CT scans to detect signals of COVID-19.
COE News – "CoE Announces 2020 Outstanding Teaching Assistants" (full article)
