Medical Devices Speaker Series 2023: Welcome Note and Opening Remarks

Hello, everybody, and welcome. So I think now we can get started. Thank you again for showing up today, for our exciting event-- MathWorks Speaker Series. We've got all the presenters over here. And unfortunately, because of the rain, I think a lot of us could not make it. But still, it's a good audience. So thanks again for coming out.

So I'll just get directly started right now. So the opening remarks, we have Professor Javier Garay. He's a Associate Dean of Research at UC San Diego, in the Jacobs School of Engineering. So I just invited Professor Garay, if you don't mind just coming up and kick things off for us. Thank you.

Thank you, my friend.

Thanks, everyone. I think, if we had a lot of folks from the East Coast, I'd start off by complaining about the weather and apologizing for it. But we all know that this is not quite normal in San Diego, or Southern California. Yes, we're happy to help MathWorks, a proud member of our CAP board-- Corporate Affiliate Programs-- that I'll tell you a little bit about. And I hope this works out well for everyone.

So, yes, I'm Associate Dean for Research. I'm a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and I do research in material science. But right now, my role is as Associate Dean for Research is to help the Jacobs School write larger proposals, with larger groups of people, so we can go after bigger projects. And often, these are very industrially related, as you'll see.

So for those of you that aren't familiar with UCSD, I think we're-- people know us as a good school, as a great school. But really, I think the spotlight hasn't been on us as long as-- because we're a relatively new university, right? Founded in 1965. But we're already-- we're very well ranked.

We're number 10 overall school in the country, number 6 public. We're very large and you'll see how we've grown over the years. Different rankings have us as number 21 in the world, and so on, by the various metrics. We'll dive a little bit into this.

What makes us special? Well, one of the things is that we do a lot of research. We're at about 1 and 1/2 billion in sponsored research. And that's number seven in the whole country, not for public, but just bar none, number seven in R&D research expenditures. We feel that makes it very relevant. We're creating the knowledge for tomorrow.

I already mentioned the number 10 school-- the Jacobs School-- overall by US News. That's one metric. And then we are very large. And we'll dive down into this, but we're about 10,000 students in just engineering. We'll look at how that breaks up.

So there are about 40,000 students total enrolled at UCSD. And with about 10,000 engineers, we have a quarter of the students on this campus are engineers, which is the highest ratio in the UC system, from engineering to total population. UCSD is also the highest STEM to non-STEM ratio in the UC system. So we tend to be more science, technology focused than our sister campuses.

Every year we have 3,000 engineering degrees awarded. These are at all levels-- bachelor's, master's, and PhD. So with this size, one thing-- size is important. We have this number 10 ranking. But with that comes a lot of responsibility. We're now graduating more engineers than any other school on the West Coast. So with that comes the responsibility to keep them very relevant because they're making a difference.

We're very proud of our students. They're extremely bright. They're motivated. And we want to make sure that they're on the cutting edge of the research and technological fronts, which is why we love to engage with our research, with our corporate partners, like we're doing today.

So we have-- of those 3,000 engineering degrees-- of course, we have a faculty of about 280, closing in on 300. We've grown a lot and I also have a slide on that. But the goal is really to plateau at about just over 300-- so 300 faculty.

And that goal is really well chosen to graduate and train the number of engineers that we want to train, and keep the research engine relevant, to keep it as a world class research institution. Beyond that, we don't think we can-- it's about as big as we want to be. And smaller than that, we don't think we can train as many students as we feel we have the capacity to do.

So again, the number six public school in the country. And this the a growth part I was saying. We've grown. We've hired about 150 new faculty in the last nine years. And this has allowed us to really climb in the rankings and the research part.

It's also a good time, if you think about it, to engage with us because many of these research professors, many of these people, are starting their careers. They're looking for new projects. They haven't been working in the field for 20, 30 years, and already picked their pet projects, and diving in super deep.

It's really an opportunity to help shape the research. And we've been able to do that with-- many of our Corporate Affiliate Partners have been able to really engage with us, and help shape the research that we're doing. And we think that's an opportunity that exists here, that doesn't exist-- definitely at a place with the scale-- anywhere in the country.

So breaking down the research expenditures. So typically, universities are funded mostly with federal research. If you ask-- I just talked to a colleague that does-- my counterpart for Associate Dean for research for a big engineering school in the Midwest, and he was saying that their Federal-- their non-Federal is only about 7%, which is more typical.

People get grants, and people go-- and that's fantastic. We want-- we have every-- Federal research is extremely important and we have every ease for the professors, our faculty, to go out and get that. But in addition to that, a lot of our faculty is supported, and our students are supported, by industry and private research. And we believe that--

I was speaking to the relevance of things. We feel that we've been able to have this secret sauce, where we're able to engage with industry better than our counterparts. People often say, well, the research that goes on in universities might not be relevant to the so-called real world. This is showing that people really are interested in what we're up to, what we're doing. Our students really make a difference, and go from being funded by industry and private research, and being extremely relevant.

So this is a relatively busy chart, but it's really meant to show you that we-- this is the Jacobs School, here, in the center, the way we like to think of ourselves. And these are all the other schools on campus. And we have ties for all of these schools.

So we have, of course, it makes sense that we would have ties to the Rady School of Management. We have this Institute for Global Engineering that is-- excuse me, global Entrepreneur, that's co-run between the business school and engineering. Of course, we have strong ties with Scripps from the beginning-- Scripps Institute of Oceanography. We have a strong supercomputer center here. So things that would make sense from an engineering school.

But we've been able to, over the years, really stay relevant and engaged there. But even with things that, maybe, are not quite as traditional as engaging with the arts and humanities, global policy, and social sciences. So those are the things that, really, I think make us stand out-- the connectivity across campus.

So very relevant thing for, I think, for you folks in the industry is our research centers. We have had very strong existing centers, on the right bar there in gold, that are very well known places for years. And what we've done in the last 10 years has made this new innovation of having these agile research centers. And these were specifically stood up to not only go for the federal funding that's traditional to universities, but to help engage the faculty and students quickly with industry.

So many of these-- I know many of you are in the biomedical center and bioengineering ideas of things like nano-immunoengineering, or the microbiome innovation, the CHO systems biology are really relevant for the type of activities that you might be interested in considering. The idea here is that the faculty self-assemble around not just what they're doing individually, but in larger problems that they can attack together as a group.

So these centers are what we call agile centers. We've been able to stand them up quickly, get them going. And if after a while, if things were to not be going in the direction the faculty wants it, it would be relatively easy to spin them down, too. Because we want them to stay relevant, to continue making an impact.

So the last slide I'd like to share with you is, if you are interested in being a part of our Corporate Affiliate Program, like MathWorks is-- this is just a list here of some company logos that are already engaged with us. So if you'd like any more information on the benefits of being on campus, we think that there are many-- engaging with students, faculty, with each other, so you can see what your counterparts are doing across the region and across the country. Please let us know. You can contact Will or me, and we'd be happy to tell you more about that.

So with that, I'd like to thank you for your time, and welcome you again to UCSD, and to the Jacobs School of Engineering. Hope you have a great--