Women in STEM

One new trick a dog can learn is how to smell COVID-19. But although studies show they can accurately detect coronavirus infections, training enough canines to recognize the scent will take a long time to scale up. Cristina Davis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and associate dean of research for the UC Davis College of Engineering, has a faster tool set to enter the industry by the end of 2022: a breathalyzer-like device to detect COVID-19 and its severity in individuals.

Second-year Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering M.S. student Morgan Harris wants to be on the front lines of building a healthier community. Through her research on prosthetic devices and her dream of opening her own prosthetics and orthotics clinic, she wants to improve people’s lives while offering the same type of mentorship and outreach experiences that inspired her.

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) associate professor Barbara Linke was named a 2022 UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow. The fellowship program, now in its 22nd year, recognizes and supports outstanding early-career faculty members at UC Davis. Chancellor’s Fellows receive a one-time award to support research, teaching and service and hold the title for five years.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) assistant professor of teaching Zahra Sadeghizadeh makes a point to be an approachable, patient and inspiring teacher by connecting with her students.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) M.S. student Emily Jonsson won the Organizing Committee Best Poster award this summer at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference (MSEC). Her winning poster, “Wafer Experiments to Assess Machining Distortion in Aluminum,” outlined her research on understanding and predicting stresses in aluminum with her advisors, Barbara Linke and Mike Hill.

The best piece of advice M.S. student Daniela Barajas Ivey received as she earned her B.S. in chemical engineering at UC Davis was, “chemical engineering can be found in all disciplines.” She took this to heart and after joining the aerospace industry, she returned to UC Davis as a master’s student to study environmental control and life support systems (ECLSS) for human habitats in deep space.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and chair Cristina Davis’ research was recently featured in the New York Times article, “A Covid Test as Easy as Breathing.” The article featured her lab’s groundbreaking work developing portable breathalyzer-like devices that rapidly diagnose COVID-19 and tell doctors how severe the case is going to be.

When NASA's Perseverence rover approached Mars on February 18, 2021, UC Davis mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) alumna Jessica Samuels ’99 and Sara Langberg ’16 watched particularly closely to see their hard work pay off. Perseverance, the largest and most advanced Mars rover to date, will explore the existence of water, launch history’s first extraterrestrial helicopter and serve as the first leg of a mission to collect Martian rock and soil samples and bring them to Earth.

Sara Langberg ’16 used the curiosity and passion for learning things she developed at UC Davis to help NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, part of the Perseverance mission, come to life.

Langberg is an aeromechanical engineer at AeroVironment, a global leader in unmanned aircraft systems with a long history of breakthrough innovation. Since joining the company in 2016, her team has been working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on the small robotic helicopter that will attempt the first powered flight on another planet.

Second-year mechanical and aerospace engineering Ph.D. student Leslie Allyn Simms was selected to attend the 70th annual Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting from June 27 – July 2, 2021 in Lindau, Germany.