SE 207 Timber Design Competition Brings Students and Industry Together at UC San Diego
Some days in academia transcend the classroom. March 13, 2026 was one of them. The SE 207 Advanced Timber Design Conference and Competition brought together students, faculty, and industry leaders for a full day of innovation, passion, and human connection — culminating in what Professor Alessandro Palermo called the defining moment of his career at UC San Diego.

Making Mechanics Click: Ali Zare Hosseinzadeh Earns Outstanding TA Award
Ali Zare Hosseinzadeh, a PhD candidate in Structural Engineering at UC San Diego working with Distinguished Professor Francesco Lanza di Scalea, has received the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Department of Structural Engineering. The award recognizes Ali's sustained contributions to teaching across multiple undergraduate and graduate courses — supporting large classes and diverse groups of students while helping deliver core material in structural engineering and mechanics.

A Scholar Invested in the Profession: Charlie Zhang Wins SEAOSD Scholarship
Jiachen (Charlie) Zhang, a PhD candidate in Structural Engineering at UC San Diego, has been awarded the 2026 SEAOSD Scholarship by the Structural Engineers Association of San Diego — a recognition granted annually to students at UCSD and SDSU who demonstrate academic achievement, professional engagement, and a commitment to careers in structural engineering.

Breaking the Six-Story Barrier: The CFS10 Landmark Shake Table Experiment
Professor Tara Hutchinson led a first-of-its-kind full-scale test of a 10-story cold-formed steel building — pushing U.S. building codes to their limit and beyond, in pursuit of lighter, stronger, more resilient cities.

Watching for Wildfire: ALERTCalifornia Recognized as a UC San Diego High-Impact Project
ALERTCalifornia — the state-scale wildfire detection and hazard monitoring program based at UC San Diego — has been selected as one of the university's high-impact projects, featured alongside work in cancer detection, air quality monitoring, and wearable health tools as examples of research that delivers real-world outcomes.

Structures That Last: Professor Tsampras Elected SEI Fellow
Spanning seismic resilience, nuclear infrastructure, and aerospace systems, Professor Georgios Tsampras brings a career defined by rigorous fundamentals — and a new recognition to match.

Elected to the Highest Grade: Professor Tehrani Becomes an ASME Fellow
From a first-year graduate student joining in 2008, to one of the most selective grades in engineering — a conversation about research, service, and what it means to contribute to a profession.

Smarter Batteries for Safer Skies: UCSD's Award-winning Approach to Electric Aircraft Thermal Management
A new computational framework uses topology optimization to arrange heat-absorbing and heat-conducting materials inside battery packs — a breakthrough with major implications for electric aviation safety.

Enrique Simbort Zeballos Wins Best Paper Award at ICOSSAR 2025
The IASSAR Awards Committee has honored Enrique Simbort Zeballos with the Best Paper Award at the 14th International Conference on Structural Safety and Reliability (ICOSSAR 2025), held June 1–6, 2025 on the campus of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Saeed Khaleghi Honored with SYENSQO Best Student Paper Award at ASC 2025
Saeed Khaleghi, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Structural Engineering, recently received the SYENSQO Award for Best Student Paper in Composites at the American Society for Composites 2025 Conference for his groundbreaking paper titled “Engineered Gaps in Thermoplastic Composite AFP Layups for Enhanced VBO Consolidation.”