UCLA professors keep an eye toward critical workforce needs by giving students sneak-peeks into hot fields:

Teaching teens to build circuit boards? That’s how the Center for Scalable and Integrated Nanomanufacturing introduces students to engineering – a field left off traditional middle and high school science curricula. <more>
By “adopting” a South L.A. middle school, the […]

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Urban utopia or nightmarish sprawl? Dream city or hell town? What kind of world do you envision? UCLA researchers are creating new ways to explore, research and understand cities – and sharing their visions of the perfect place.

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Forget blueprints and hard-to-understand charts. The Urban Simulation Team at UCLA combines relatively simple 3-D models with aerial photographs and street-level video to create realistic models of neighborhoods. Maneuvering a computer mouse as in a video game, users can “drive” through or “fly” over animated landscapes. The team’s models have already:
Take a […]

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Imagine walking down L.A.’s Temple Street with a hand-held GPS device. As you cross Beaudry Avenue, a flag pops up on the device’s on-screen map. Turns out an earlier user of an online interactive guidebook has “attached” a digital image or a snippet of information to these GPS coordinates. Interested in L.A. […]

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Team UCLA engineering and art students with Disney Imagineers, then charge them with bringing together art, education, history, culture, community and technology in a very traditional venue – a state park. See what happened when Remapping L.A. gave it a shot. <more>

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Glass that doesn’t reduce to shards. Inclined tops on vending machines. A clear line of sight down the platform. When security experts get to do the planning, their “environmental design” upgrades make subway cars, trains and stations less tempting targets for terrorists. <more>

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Pouria Abbassi ’89, general manager of the Los Angeles Convention Center, dreams of enormous eco-friendly buildings in a vibrant urban environment. Can his ideas transform the city of the future? <more>

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New Orleans after Katrina. The economic decline of Buffalo, NY. UCLA’s Nicholas Entrikin studies how external factors can force us to re-imagine cities – and what that reveals about the importance of “place.” <more>

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Deep in the basement of Boelter Hall, on a 40-foot by 60-foot floor, five feet thick, UCLA scientists are simulating the effects of earthquakes on specific buildings – from low-level shaking all the way up to the “Big One.” Their goal? More effective and economical seismic retrofitting for our hospitals. <more>

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You really can prevent forest fires. “Fireproofing of homes is important not only for the houses, but also for the forest,” says UCLA professor Michael Ghil. “When you fireproof houses, not only do you help preserve those houses, but you also help limit the spread of fires to a much smaller area.” <more>

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Wildfires leave behind much more than ashes. Increased amounts of iron, aluminum and mercury accumulate in watershed systems after a fire. UCLA scientists, studying how this adversely affects downstream water supplies, have already put their research to practical use with the National Weather Service and the U.S. Geological Survey.

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