Prashanth Asuri (bioengineering) is a co-founder of SE3D, an EdTech startup specializing in science education courseware and desktop 3D bioprinters for K9-14, which was recently awarded a Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant in the amount of $726,272 to develop a plug-and-play bioprinting solution for preparing the next generation scientists and engineers. Click here for the company press release and here for the official announcement from the National Science Foundation. SE3D is being incubated in the School of Engineering’s EdVenture Lab.

Mohammad Ayoubi (mechanical engineering) has been named an ASME Fellow in recognition of his significant engineering achievements in dynamics and control of aerospace vehicles, curriculum development, and service to his professional society. Nominated by ASME members and fellows, an ASME member has to have 10 or more years of active practice, at least 10 years of active corporate membership in ASME, and have significant achievements in the field of engineering, according to the ASME website. This achievement is reserved for only 2.8% of ASME's 140,000 members.

Joshua Baculi, graduate student, and Mohammad Ayoubi (mechanical engineering) presented a paper, "Fuzzy-Logic Supervisory Attitude Control of Solar Sail," at the AIAA Space Conference in Long Beach, CA, Sept. 13-16.

2016 Alumnae Rachana Deolikar and Sambhavi Raghuraman (computer science and engineering) and Mary Lilly and Gaby Vazquez (bioengineering) attended a 3-day event sponsored by VentureWell, a non-profit organization providing financial backing and training for student-led ventures that improve life for people and the planet. They presented, Aquasift, a low-cost water contamination detection system (advisors are Silvia Figueira and Ashley Kim) and were mentioned in PBS NewsHour's coverage of the conference seen here.

Engineers without Borders: A team from the SCU chapter of EWB traveled to Rwanda this summer. Advised by Tonya Nilsson (civil engineering), they delivered a clay mixer for a tile making cooperative to use in conjunction with a tile press created by last year’s team.

Faculty Awards: Congratulations to those who were recognized at the SCU Faculty Awards Celebration, Sept. 15: Yuling Yan (bioengineering) President’s Special Recognition Award; Silvia Figueira (computer engineering) Louis and Dorina Brutocao Award for Teaching Excellence; for promotions: Tokunbo Ogunfunmi (electrical engineering), Shoba Krishnan (electrical engineering), Ahmed Amer (computer engineering), Ashley Kim (bioengineering), Jonathan Zhang (bioengineering), Tonya Nilsson (civil engineering); and for length of service: Reynaud Serrette (civil engineering) 25 years, Sukhmander Singh (civil engineering) 30 years, Ron Danielson (computer engineering) 40 years, Tim Healy (electrical engineering) 50 years! Special thanks to Ruth Davis (computer engineering) who delivered a stirring speech, “STEM: Beware the Buzz,” as the outgoing Faculty Senate Professor.

The Frugal Innovation Hub this summer hosted several cohorts totalling more than 70 high school students from China, Thailand, South Korea, and Italy, conducting an interactive seminar on how to empathize with disadvantaged consumers and design solutions for those in need.

Brian Patrick Green (School of Engineering and Markkula Center) was quoted in a Smithsonian article, "Visiting Melting Glaciers Can Be Profound. But Is It Morally Wrong?," on the ethics of "climate change tourism." He also attended a workshop at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, which explored the potential for Pope Francis' environmental encyclical Laudato Si to promote social transformation on environmental issues. The topic of technology was a constant theme of the workshop, particularly what aspects of technology the Pope was trying to restrict or promote. 

For their Senior Design project last spring Alejandra Huitron '16 and Nicholas Supan '16 (electrical engineering) designed educational lantern kits with a solar charging system and lesson plans for assembly to teach high school students in Ghana how to bring lights into their homes. This summer, SCU Global Scholars Catherine Murray '18 (mechanical engineering) and Nick Redfield '18 (political science), supported by Bright Generation Community Foundation and SCU's Frugal Innovation Hub, took the Solar Lights project to Abenoa, Ghana. They installed a solar panel in the rural community and brought lantern kits to the teachers and schoolchildren. Watch this video of their experience bringing light to Ghana.

Mir Imran, Engineering Advisory Board member, is Chairman and CEO of InCube Labs. Their spin-off, Fe3 Medical, is developing an innovative transdermal patch to deliver iron to those folks suffering from anemia who cannot tolerate the effects of traditional oral treatment. Their non-invasive, overnight, once-a-week patch could ease the symptoms of fatigue, poor cognition, and defects in motor function experienced by millions of Americans (mostly women) due to some form of anemia. The company recently received $3.5 million in funding from the State of Texas (Fe3 Medical is located in San Antonio) to support clinical trials and regulatory submissions.

Krzysztof Izdebski (bioengineering advisory board) was an invited honorary speaker at the 12th International Voice Symposium held in Salzburg, Austria, Aug. 26-28, where he gave two lectures and chaired a session. On October 1, he is chairing the XXIV Annual Pacific Voice Conference (PVC) US Edition, to be held at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Among the invited speakers is Dr. Aditi Mandpe from the SFENT and Matt Blanco ’12, M.S. ’15, MBA ’16 (bioengineering). This conference is co-sponsored by the Pacific Voice & Speech Foundation, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Santa Clara University. The EU Edition of the XXIV PVC chaired by Dr. Izdebski with his EU colleagues is held in Warsaw and Lublin, Poland, Oct. 5-8. Over 100 speakers from all continents will present. Santa Clara University is represented by bioengineering chair Yuling Yan and Matt Blanco.

Manav Jaiswal, Yuhong Liu, and Nam Ling (computer engineering student and faculty) won the Best Paper Award for "Design and Implementation of a Greener Home Automation System," at the 9th IEEE International Conference on Ubi-Media Computing (UMEDIA 2016) in Moscow, Russia Aug. 15-17, 2016.

Congratulations to Shawn Lange, MSME '06 and Derek Pietz, MSME '08, co-founders of L2F, which was just named #2 on the engineering list and #267 on the Inc. 500, an annual ranking of America's fastest-growing private companies! L2F drives innovation in manufacturing from laboratory stage to full-scale fabrication (Lab2Fab) by delivering engineering consulting, product design, custom tooling and equipment, data collection and management, and full production line integration services. More good news: L2F is our KEEN industry partner for the quarter. Watch for speaker events, contests, and more opportunities to learn from this dynamic start-up this fall. Read more here.

Maker Lab: In August, through its Makers For Good program, the SCU Maker Lab demonstrated for the first time its long-range capability for providing educational 3D printing and fabrication to students.  Home-school student Kainalu Palaualelo, a 4th grader from Kailua, Hawaii, submitted a design for 3D printing and watched his design being fabricated in the SCU Maker Lab via a livestream broadcast. Read more here.

Ed Maurer (civil engineering) and colleagues at the Bureau of Reclamation prepared data used for an August 20 NY Times story on the increase in extreme heat waves. Take a quick minute to look at the graphics found here.

The Mobile for Social Benefit Lab in the Frugal Innovation Hub was busy this summer! Engineering students Axel Perez, Juliana Shihadeh, Manoj Adhikari, and Tracy Sun, along with high school student Druv Pai have been working on educational tools for Looma, an affordable and low power device that provides interactive educational content to village schools in Nepal. 

Mobile Maker Lab: SCU’s Maker Lab on wheels hit the road for the first time last week, visiting Irvington High School and Horner Junior High in Fremont, where students created their own laser-cut balsa wood gliders and catapults and learned about the Lab’s 3D printers, vinyl plotter, laser cutter, and other tools. The Mobile Maker Lab program would not be possible without its sponsor, Makers 4 Good. Learn more here.

Catherine Murray and Nicholas Redfield implemented a 2015-16 senior design project advised by Timothy Healy (electrical engineering) with seniors Alejandra Huitron and Nicholas Supan this summer in Ghana. The Solar Lights project couples electrical engineering training with the building of solar lights for young school children to read by. See the video here.

On Shun Pak (mechanical engineering) presented a conference paper entitled “Propulsive thrust of a driven filament at low Reynolds number with non-uniform flexibility” at the 24th International Congress of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, Aug. 21-26, Montreal, Canada, and a presentation entitled “Effects of shear-thinning rheology on low Reynolds number locomotion” at the 2016 SIAM Conference on the Life Sciences, July 11-14, Boston, Massachusetts. On Shun Pak and collaborators also have a paper, “On gating of a mechanosensitive channel by fluid shear stress," accepted for publication in Acta Mechanica Sinica.

PayScale, creator of the world’s largest compensation database reports that of the 25 majors with the highest starting salaries, 21 are engineering-focused. Read more here.

Hisham Said (civil engineering) presented a progress report on his current research study, “Identifying BIM-related Costs due to Changes,” at the ELECTRI International (EI) Council meeting on July 21 in Napa, CA. The study is funded by EI to investigate the costs and impacts of ill-timed design changes on a project’s virtual coordination using Building Information Modeling (BIM).

Alex Shubat, Ph.D. '95 (electrical engineering), Engineering Advisory Board member, is CEO of start-up Espresa, which recently launched an app to help companies manage the types of perks that help draw and keep the best talent within their ranks. Companies like Google and Facebook are known for treating employees to benefits such as onsite massages, dry cleaning service, yoga, and car repair, but not every organization has the staffing required to curate and moderate those incentives. Espresa takes the hassle out of managing those extras by offering more than 250 services provided by 40 vendors. They have already enrolled 25 companies for their service, and recently received $2 million in seed funding.

Sukhmander Singh (civil engineering) presented a paper, "Relevance of Technology Enhanced Educational Tools for Geotechnical Engineering Education," and chaired a session at the 6^th International Conference on “Recent Advances in Geotechnical Earthquake Engineering and Soil Dynamics (6ICRAGEE)," Aug. 1-6, in Roorkee, India. He also reviewed a Ph.D. thesis in civil engineering from Delhi University, and presented an invited lecture at an International conference on the "Legacy of Sikhs in Canada," July 9, in Vancouver, Canada. 

The Summer Institute for Humanitarian Computing (SIHC), funded by Google and hosted by the Computer Engineering Department and the Frugal Innovation Hub, was successfully run this summer with a cohort of 10 high school students.  The students worked for four weeks to create mobile applications for underserved populations.  Check out the 2016 SIHC cohort's final projects here.

Tiny House Update from JJ Galvin ’17 (mechanical engineering): The Tiny House Team was able to make incredible progress over summer! The 10 students who were hired worked many long days to make sure that the house will be ready for the competition. However, the team will still be working in the next few weeks to finish everything and run full scale tests. This week, the countertop will be installed and the house was moved from campus to the parking lot of Guadalupe Hall so that there is more space to test the 40 ft. solar tracking ring that the house attaches to. Before leaving on October 9, the team still has to build the outside deck, install the PV system, and finish furnishing the bedroom. Be sure to stop by and say hi to anyone on the team who may be working, we love to see support! More on rEvolve House here.

Sarah Kate Wilson (electrical engineering) has a new book: Transmission Techniques for Digital Communications; editors: S.K. Wilson, S.G. Wilson (no relation), and E. Biglieri; Elsevier Academic Press Library, 727 pages. Find it here.

Engineering Welcome Lunch: Please come for pizza, drinks, and dessert on Tuesday, Sept. 27, 11:30 a.m.–1 p.m., Engineering Quad. Student organizations will be tabling, faculty will be serving food, and all will be enjoying camaraderie!

Dean’s Tea: Join us for the first Dean’s Tea of the academic year, Thurs., Sept. 29, 3:30 p.m., Bannan Engineering, 2^nd Floor.

Fall Innovation Challenge: Join us for lunch as we kick-off our Fall Quarter KEEN Competition, Thurs., Sept. 29, 12-1 p.m., Rotunda Room, Guadalupe Hall, 3^rd Floor. Shawn Lange from L2F, Inc., will be the guest speaker. RSVP by noon Tues., Sept. 27 to Anne Mahacek at amahacek@scu.edu