Admissions notifications went out Friday (March 11), prompting a flurry of social media activity ... like this tweet from Kent Romo:

Students who are already here are welcoming the Class of 2026 in a big way!

 

Our administrators are delivering personal replies:

And Chancellor May? Well, he’s doing his thing, too!

 

‘Free Hugs for Finals’

Idea of the Year

 

The engineering students’ assignment? Build a box — but not just any box, a Corsi-Rosenthal box, invented by Dean Richard Corsi of the College of Engineering and Jim Rosenthal, CEO of Texas-based Tex Air Filters, in the early days of the pandemic when people began to understand the coronavirus was being spread by respiratory aerosols.

“This open-source design is an effective, inexpensive, safe and easy-to-build DIY air cleaner,” the Toronto-based Waterloo Filtration Institute said in a blog post designating the filter as the 2021 Idea of the Year. “The multiple filters provide for high efficiency and substantial airflow.”

Corsi and Rosenthal introduced their box fan during an institute webinar in September 2020, a month after Corsi — a UC Davis alumnus — arrived as the new dean of engineering.

Hear from him in the video above, where he says, in part: “For the general public that’s building these ... we’ve shifted from ‘citizen science’ to ‘citizen engineering,’ which is that people can build their own devices, they can engineer their own devices to do something really positive in terms of protecting themselves and protecting others in their community.”