– Emily Mae Gong, UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering

April 14, 2026 – The Samueli Foundation has funded another round of the UCLA–UC Irvine Collaborative Grants Program. Established in 2024, the initiative pulls together faculty from both Samueli Schools of Engineering and is designed to deepen cross-campus partnerships and accelerate high-impact research.

Building on the momentum of the 2024 awards, this year’s program encourages ambitious, high-risk ideas under the theme “100× Multipliers.” The intent is to inspire exploratory, proof-of-concept projects that combine analysis, design and initial experimental demonstrations capable of positioning UCI–UCLA collaborative teams for future extramural research funding from federal agencies, foundations and industry.

“From reimagining how we trust artificial intelligence to unlocking the hidden workings of satellite networks, accelerating life-saving medical imaging, and enabling swarms of autonomous machines to operate at unprecedented scale, this year’s cohort reflects the remarkable breadth of what becomes possible when two world-class engineering schools work as one,” said Andre Shkel, UCI associate dean of research and innovation.

Here are the newly funded early career faculty collaborations.

Maxim Radikovich Shcherbakov (UCI), Md Shafayat Hossain (UCLA) 

Assistant Professors Maxim Shcherbakov, electrical engineering and computer science, and Md Shafayat Hossain, materials science and engineering, are developing a new kind of light detector that can sense the handedness, or circular polarization, of light without requiring an external power source. Today’s detectors that can do this are bulky, power-hungry and impractical for compact devices. By layering specially engineered nano-scale surfaces called chiral metasurfaces onto advanced quantum materials, the team aims to amplify the electrical signal produced by polarized light by up to 100 times all within a small, chip-compatible design. If successful, this technology could transform how light-based information is processed in applications ranging from augmented reality and infrared sensing to ultrafast communications and quantum computing.

Fei Xia (UCI), Liang Gao (UCLA) 

ei Xia, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and Liang Gao, associate professor of bioengineering, are working together to dramatically speed up how scientists capture 3D images of living tissue. Today’s best microscopes can only capture about one 3D image per second of deep tissue, which is far too slow to observe rapid biological events like brain activity or immune responses in real time. By combining a cutting-edge optical technique called squeezed light-field microscopy with advanced computational algorithms, the researchers aim to achieve imaging speeds of over 1,000 frames per second — a leap of 100 to 1,000 times faster than current technology. If successful, this could unlock entirely new discoveries in neuroscience, cancer biology and beyond, enabling scientists to observe biological processes in living tissue that were previously impossible to capture.

Click here or visit https://bit.ly/samueli-foundation-ucla-collab to read full article on the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering website.

Author: Gabrielle Comfort