Six New Projects Are Empowering Early-Career Engineering and Computer Science Faculty

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Six teams from the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering have been awarded funding to accelerate interdisciplinary research collaborations that include an early-career faculty member. The big idea is to empower early-career faculty to build interdisciplinary research collaborations to the point that they are competitive for multi-year external funding. The effort is funded by Irwin Jacobs and his late wife, Joan.

"I am thrilled to announce our newest awardees into this powerful program. I like to call it our 'two-two-and-two program.' Two graduate students from two different faculty labs are funded for two quarters in order to get a cross-disciplinary research effort up and running," said Albert P. Pisano, Dean of the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and Special Adviser to the Chancellor. "This program allows us to accelerate the research efforts of early-career faculty while also strengthening the collaborative culture of the Jacobs School among both our faculty and our graduate students."

This year's cohort of six teams is made up of twelve faculty and twelve graduate students. Each team works together to build cross-discipline research collaborations aimed at generating early results that will make the team competitive for longer-term external funding.

"I am deeply grateful to Irwin and Joan Jacobs for their vision, wisdom and generosity," said Pisano. "Each year, it is wonderful to see what is possible with dedicated funding for building research bridges across labs at the Jacobs School."

The 2026 funded collaborations tackle a series of highly relevant challenges: enhancing the security of AI agents; developing more secure software systems; improving diagnosis of bacterial vaginosis in postmenopausal women; developing programmable and printable "living" materials; working toward new approaches for treating congenital heart disease; and increasing the safety of cislunar space operations.

"I am excited to see these interdisciplinary collaborations develop. For each team, I hope this funding opens new doors that ultimately lead to real-world positive impacts," said Bill Lin, Associate Dean for Research at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Summaries of the six newly funded projects are below.

Foundations of Sandboxing Computer-Use AI Agents

Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, computer science professor
Earlence Fernandes, computer science professor

AI-powered agents are poised to become a standard way that people interact with computer-based systems such as financial systems, healthcare portals, government services and workplace infrastructure. There is a big challenge, however: the AI models powering these agents remain vulnerable to being tricked by attackers. To address this challenge, computer scientists Prithviraj Ammanabrolu and Earlence Fernandes are leading a collaboration that aims to develop the science and engineering needed to better secure these kinds of AI agents. The team will develop systems-level sandboxing for AI agents with the goal of minimizing the risks from prompt injection attacks. This will involve creating an "AI agent mode" in web browsers, developing dynamic privilege control, and creating security-oriented benchmarking. The project is focused on advancing AI security while also contributing to workforce development at the increasingly important intersection of computer security and AI.

Assertive Trace: A Usable Security Policy Language for Detecting Security Violations Research Plan

Michael Coblenz, computer science and engineering professor
Deian Stefan, computer science and engineering professor

AI agents are finding vulnerabilities at an unprecedented scale in modern software systems, even in systems that are battle-tested and have seasoned security teams. To address this growing challenge, computer science professors Michael Coblenz and Deian Stefan are developing a security approach that aims to ensure that software systems are secure by design - and that they are able to adaptively defend against new waves of AI-assisted attacks. Their strategy builds on the team's insight that many software attacks, or exploits, can be observed by sequences of events in execution traces produced by systems as they execute. The team will distill this insight into usable tools by developing a security framework called Assertive Trace. The goal is to allow developers to specify high-level security policies on traces as well as enforcement techniques that will ensure their software adaptively defends against new attacks.

Visualizing microbial metabolism to uncover the pathogenesis of bacterial vaginosis in aging

Erika Cyphert, bioengineering professor
Lingyan Shi, bioengineering professor

This cross-disciplinary team will visualize and analyze the metabolic activity of the vaginal microbiome in women before, during and after menopause. In doing so, the team aims to improve how bacterial vaginosis (BV) - the most common vaginal infection - is understood and diagnosed in postmenopausal women. This is particularly relevant because today's definitions of vaginal health are based on younger populations even though the vaginal microbiome is known to naturally change during menopause. This project combines Erika Cyphert's expertise in microbiome biology and bacterial pathogenesis with Lingyan Shi's expertise in metabolism and advanced optical imaging techniques including Stimulated Raman Scattering microscopy. An even broader goal of the collaboration is to establish a framework that can be leveraged to study age-related metabolic shifts within microbiomes in other regions of the body.

Development of a Programmable Self-Disintegrating 3D-Printable Biocomposite Filament

Adam Feist, bioengineering professor
Jonathan Pokorski, chemical and nano engineering professor

The team is developing a new class of plastics for 3D printers - plastics that will be programmed to disintegrate thanks to bacterial spores embedded within the plastic that have been optimized to treat plastic as food. This project leverages Adam Feist's automated laboratory evolution platform and Jon Pokorski's polymer processing and additive manufacturing expertise. Together, the team will develop strains of a spore-forming bacteria that are capable of: 1) surviving being integrated into PLA-based plastic filaments for 3D printers, 2) surviving the 3D printing process itself, and 3) producing a specialized enzyme that degrades the PLA filament plastic into shorter chemical building blocks that the bacteria then use as food. In doing so, the team aims to create a new class of programmable and printable "living" materials - materials with characteristics that are determined by embedded microbes that have been evolutionarily optimized to thrive in this context.

Characterizing Metabolic Mechanisms in Single Ventricle Disease Progression

Stephanie Lindsey, mechanical and aerospace engineering professor
Lingyan Shi, bioengineering professor

Congenital heart disease is the most common birth defect, and single ventricle disease of the left heart is one of its most severe forms. While genetics are involved, abnormal blood flow during early development also plays a crucial role in shaping how the heart forms. This collaborative project led by professors Stephanie Lindsey and Lingyan Shi aims to better understand how blood flow changes early in development lead to cardiac disease progression at the molecular level. The project brings together Lindsey's expertise in cardiovascular developmental biomechanics and Shi's metabolism and multimodal nanoscopy imaging expertise. The team's efforts to uncover the links between blood flow (hemodynamics) and cellular metabolism could pave the way for new approaches to treat congenital heart disease, including restorative in-utero procedures.

Safety-Critical Cislunar Rendezvous and Formation Flight

Aaron J. Rosengren, mechanical and aerospace engineering professor
Miroslav Krstic ́, mechanical and aerospace engineering professor

This project aims to develop and validate a unified modeling-and-control framework for cislunar space operations. Here, cislunar refers to the region inside the Moon's orbit around the Earth. The resulting methods, though, are intended to apply more broadly to operationally relevant Earth-Moon scenarios, including lunar-transfer corridors, libration-point neighborhoods, and lunar-adjacent operating orbits. The work brings together Aaron Rosengren's expertise in astrodynamics and space navigation with Miroslav Krstić's expertise in nonlinear controls and dynamics, with the goal of enabling spacecraft to safely maneuver, rendezvous, and maintain formations in the cislunar environment while relying on limited support and guidance from personnel and resources on Earth. The effort addresses a need articulated by NASA: developing new methods that enable safe, autonomous spacecraft navigation in the cislunar realm. At the same time, the project provides distinctive educational and workforce development opportunities for the collaborating graduate students, who will integrate innovations in controls and astrodynamics.