4 ECEs – COE Convergence "News Briefs"

From Convergence (Summer 2024): the magazine of engineering and the sciences at UC Santa Barbara
 

"Para-power: Rory Cooper Keeps Rolling"

Excerpt from Convergence Summer 2024 "News Briefs" (page 4)

UC Santa Barbara alumnus Rory Cooper, known globally for his pioneering work in researching, conceiving, designing, and building adaptive technology for those who, like him, navigate the world in a wheelchair, returned to the UCSB campus on April 19 for the first time since receiving his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1989. He delivered a wide-ranging talk about the seemingly limitless avenues of research and engineering underway at the University of Pittsburgh’s Human Engineering Research Labs (HERL), which Cooper directs. A longtime para athlete who has won medals in the Paraympics and the World Para Athletic Championships, Cooper has been instrumental in numerous breakthrough technologies, including adapting the lightweight, ergonomic, injury-reducing designs of racing wheelchairs for everyday use.

"ECE and Meta Alumna Named VP at NVIDIA"

Excerpt from Convergence Summer 2024 "News Briefs" (page 6)

Last November, Alexis Black Bjorlin (PhD ’00) was named vice president/general manager of DG/X cloud services at Nvidia. She joined Nvidia from Meta, where she served as VP, Infrastructure, leading the development of compute, network, and storage infrastructure for general compute and AI systems.

“I’m thrilled to be here and to have worked at two of the most impactful companies in the world,” she said. “I think it is the result of just focusing on where one can have an impact.” Bjorlin earned her PhD in the lab of electrical and computer engineering professor John Bowers, planning to become a professor, but the entrepreneurial activity in the department at the time,” she says, “changed the course of my career.” At UCSB, she says, “I learned that you find the most value not when one lab is pitted against another, but when you’re working together across disciplines or fields. UCSB had the most collaborative and interdisciplinary program. It’s something I’ve tried to find and foster ever since and have carried with me into building teams and in looking for environments where innovation can thrive.” Bjorlin has hired many Gaucho graduates during her career, and she keeps going back to that well, describing UCSB, and optoelectronics in particular, as “an innovation center where so much of the research is just world-class. It has really helped set an ambitious goal of striving for maximum impact.”
 

Entrepreneurial Faculty and Alum Receive Innovation Award

Excerpt from Convergence Summer 2024 "News Briefs" (page 7)

A company co-founded by an ECE faculty member from UCSB's College of Engineering received a 2024 Central Coast Innovation Award from the Pacific Coast Business Times. Transphorm, a global semiconductor company co-founded by COE dean and ECE Prof., Umesh Mishra, and Primit Parikh (’98), who earned his PhD in electrical and computer engineering from UCSB, received the University Partner Award

Convergence (Summer 2024): the magazine of engineering and the sciences at UC Santa Barbara