Research and Economic Development

After a busy year of accomplishments, UC Riverside’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, or NSBE, was voted 2024’s Outstanding Student Organization of the Year and Social Justice Activists of the Year. This marks the second time UCR’s Student Life office has recognized NSBE in four years.

The University of California system has awarded a $1.4 million grant to UC Riverside chemical and environmental engineering professor Haizhou Liu and a collaborative team from several UC campuses to combat water scarcity by developing strategies to clean and reuse water for agriculture.

Computer processing demands for artificial intelligence, or AI, are spurring increasing levels of deadly air pollution from power plants and backup diesel generators that continuously supply electricity to the fast-growing number of computer processing centers. This air pollution, a new UCR and Caltech study estimates, is expected to result in as many as 1,300 premature deaths a year by 2030 in the United States and bring health costs to nearly $20 billion a year. 

Four UC Riverside research scientists have been named among the top 2% of scientists worldwide in a list compiled by Stanford University and Elsevier.