Student Profile

In many ways incoming freshman Ezekiel Bhasker is a typical Jacobs School of Engineering student. He rides his bike around campus, plays tennis and basketball, and he took a summer job. But unlike other students picked for the first batch of fellowships awarded by Calit² -all of whom were juniors and seniors- Bhasker was fresh out of high school. Even more surprisingly, he's only 15.

"UCSD was very aggressive in recruiting me," admits Bhasker. "And I was able to fulfill my desire to do research during the summer." That research was part of CSE professor Bill Griswold's ActiveCampus project, which aims to implement a campus-wide network that will make UCSD seem like a more intimate environment even as it gets bigger. Bhasker applauds the goal: "Technology can push people apart, because you have your e-mail and you can just sit at home and type. This is supposed to cause accidental meetings with friends on campus and keep you aware of what's going on around you, creating more of a community feeling."

Over the summer Bhasker spent a lot of time walking around campus and measuring the strength at each spot of wireless signals from nearby access points. He is using that real-world information as a benchmark to test mathematical algorithms for location sensing in a wireless environment. "Today we can guess approximately by saying you are close to whichever access point is transmitting your signal," says Bhasker. "But we want to be able to say in which building, on which floor and, eventually, pinpoint within five or ten feet where you are. This information can help newcomers get accustomed to the campus, assist students in finding professors if they need to clarify a concept, or even find a buddy anywhere on campus."

The Calit² fellowship wasn't Bhasker's first chance to do research on a college campus. In 2000, he was among five high-school students nationwide selected for a physics summer research fellowship at Caltech. It was just one in a string of honors and awards in math, science and humanities that, despite his young age, take up three single-spaced pages on his resume! As a 7th-grader in 1997, Bhasker started taking college courses at Cal State Dominguez Hills. A year later, he captained the California team to a third-place finish in the finals of MathCounts, the nationwide mathematics competition for high-school high achievers.

Before June, when Bhasker graduated as Student of the Year from Redondo Union High School in Redondo Beach, he was weighing multiple full-scholarship college offers. Stanford and MIT said he was too young, but he had his pick of UC campuses. In the end, he chose the Jacobs School over Berkeley, UCLA, UCI and Santa Barbara: "I was planning on Berkeley, but I found that San Diego is very influential in my area. I met the professors and got a positive feeling about San Diego. I felt the campus was more warm and receptive. And Calit² seemed like a very great adventure." Bhasker landed Regents and Jacobs scholarships, as well as the Calit² summer fellowship. And while attending school and pursuing his passion for playing the tabla, classical Indian drums, he'll be able to live at home-thanks to a supportive family. "They even moved to San Diego so that I could attend UCSD," says Bhasker. "My parents have sacrificed a lot for me."

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Student Profile