Ariane Jong is a Ph.D. student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UCI.  She was inspired to pursue a career that addressed climate change when she saw the film “An Inconvenient Truth” in high school.  After graduating from Chapman University with a B.S. in Environmental Science and Policy, she spent two years as a Staff Scientist at a nonprofit in LA, the Council for Watershed Health, working on issues of urban flooding and stormwater quality. While at the Council for Watershed Health, she learned about the benefits of a nature-based approach to urban flood risk management as opposed to the traditional, structure-based approach, which led her to pursue environmental engineering in graduate school.  Ariane’s current research focuses on modeling the impact of wildfires on flooding to support the emergency planning needs of regional flood control districts and increase the awareness and resiliency of SoCal communities.

Jose has been in the medical device and healthcare industry for 5 years as a BioEngineer and Product Development Engineer. He grew up in Mexico for part of his childhood where he complete K-4^th grade. His family was able to migrate back to the United States and relocated to Hawthorne, CA, where he started his education as a first-generation student. Jose’s curiosity for biology and mechanical design led him to explore the S.T.E.M field throughout his education in the South Bay. He has always loved the idea of solving complex problems that can benefit people. Jose was able to lead a multidisciplinary team to first place at UC Merced’s annual Innovate to Grow Showcase where he presented an automated Point-of-Care (POC) device centered around Density Linked Immunosorbent Assays (DeLISAs) that meet the engineering goal of having a portable, low cost, and low energy diagnostics device that could help unrepresented communities. This work allowed him to be recruited by CUE, a healthcare start up focusing on a health monitoring system that provides a rapid, lab-quality molecular testing at home. His work at Cue consisted of developing a microfluidic system that was easy to manufacture, reliable, able to diagnose multiple health conditions, and most importantly affordable to underprivileged communities. Jose is very proud of his three years at CUE as his work helped build the foundation to CUE’s current COVID-19 test, which was used during the 2020 NBA Bubble, and is currently deployed in multiple states/counties to help diagnose COVID-19 cases.

Jose’s drive and passion for accessible healthcare got him recruited by OncoSec Immunotherapies in late 2019 to help design a therapeutical device that allows the immune system to fight cancer. He currently holds a Sr. Biomedical Engineer role and is focusing on product development of a Visceral Lesion Applicator (VLA). This technology is designed to treat non-cutaneous, internal tumors though direct delivery of OncoSec’s lead pharmaceutical drug, TAVO. His worked is aimed at providing a solution to cancerous lesions located within organs in the gastrointestinal tract, lung, liver, pancreas, and bone which are often difficult to treat successfully with conventional therapies. Although the Visceral Lesion Applicator is still in the development phase, it has shown very positive results in the preliminary safety and efficiency studies, sparking interest within the Oncology field. Jose is very excited for the future of this technology and the impact it can have on people’s lives.

Hi all! I am a graduate student, a teaching assistant, and a researcher at UCI in the Civil Engineering department, specifically structural engineering. When I was younger my favorite subjects were math and science and when I started college those classes became more challenging but my passion for them remained! I continued to take classes that both challenged and excited me until the path became more narrow and I landed in structural engineering. Once I received my bachelors I decided to stay at UCI for graduate school. Along with taking classes, I work as a teaching assistant teaching structural design courses and a researcher creating online interactive tools for teachers and students. Mixing engineering and education has become my favorite part about what I do!

My name is Brad and I am a graduate student at UCI’s Civil and Environmental Engineering department. I completed my Bachelor’s in Structural engineering at UCSD. I grew up in Antelope Valley in the Mojave Desert and I was inspired at a young age to pursue engineering by all the cool looking skyscrapers when my family would travel to Downtown LA. Although I was not good at math at a young age, I was lucky enough to have a select number of great teachers during middle and high school years who encouraged me to continue to pursue engineering. The help and inspiration from my teachers alleviated my doubts and convolutions about my abilities to pursue engineering, and is essentially the foundation on why I am an engineer today. I currently work with structures and I am doing research in developing ‘smart structures’ that can sense and react to the outside environment. Similar to how humans can feel and react to pain.