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On February 18th the White House announced that the ICB’s Michelle O’Malley was among 105 recipients of the 2016 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.

In a new study conducted at UCSB and published in The Optical Society’s journal Optica, ICB Founding Director Emeritus Daniel Morse and ICB postdoctoral fellow and lead autor Amitabh Ghoshal, discovered that some species of giant clams produce their white coloration much like the displays used in televisions and smartphones—by combining red, green and blue light.

Professor of the Materials and also Chemistry and Biochemistry departments, Craig Hawker along with three other UCSB faculty members has been elected to the 2015 National Academy of Inventors (NAI) for his research in the design and synthesis of macromolecular structures and polymeric thin films, and the controlled assembly of nanoparticles. Work that is applicable in a wide variety of fields, from more efficient energy and data storage to improved semiconductor technology and advanced biotechnology.

Is the human brain theoretically controllable?. Looking for the mechanisms behind cognitive control of thought, a research team featuring ICB co-Director Scott Grafton, ICB Task Order Leader Michael Miller, former ICB Postdoctoral Researcher Danielle Bassett (now assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania) and Jean Vettel of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory–HRED,  used brain scans to shed new light on this question.

Michelle O’Malley, ICB Systems and Synthetic Biology Task Order Leader, was named by MIT Technology Review as one of its 2015 top Innovators Under 35 for her work in nanotechnology and materials. The prestigious annual list honors exceptionally talented young technologists whose work has great potential to transform the world.

ICB co-director and director of UCSB’s Brain Imaging Center Scott Grafton and his team were named as one of six final winners of the $10 million Head Health Challenge I, receiving an additional $500,000 grant to pursue their work in developing methods of diagnosis and prognosis of mild traumatic brain injury. Their initial award of $300,000 was announced in January of last year as one of 16 first-round winners who were chosen from more than 400 entries from 27 countries.

Former ICB co-director Frank Doyle has been selected to receive the 2015 American Automatic Control Council (AACC) Control Engineering Practice Award for pioneering the enabling technology of automatic control for systems biology and biomedical devices, specifically the foundational accomplishments for development of the artificial pancreas.

New research conducted in the UCSB lab of Daniel Morse, professor emeritus in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology (MCDB), demonstrates that the squid’s ability to “tune” its colors is correlated with the presence of specific sequences of reflectins, proteins unique to the light-sensing tissue of cephalopods. 

Katie Byl’s UCSB robotics team in collaboration with researchers from Caltech and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech came in fifth out of 23 teams from across the country and around the globe in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Robotics Challenge Finals on June 5th and 6th in Pomona, California.

For the fourth year in a row UCSB has placed in the prestigious top 10 in Leiden University’s annual rankings of the 750 best major universities in the world, in terms of scientific impact and collaboration. This year UCSB ranked #7 on the list.