Engineering Highlights 2022, Harvey Mudd College

ENGINEERING

ENG NEERING

Update from the Department

We were thrilled to return to in-person learning in 2021–2022. Hands-on experiential learning and student-faculty interactions are hallmarks of the Harvey Mudd engineering education and cannot be replicated remotely. Our students have returned to the shop, our hallways and labs, and their Clinic spaces, and we can again build community both formally and informally.

As you’ll see from these highlights from the past academic year, we’ve adapted where necessary and continued to deliver the exceptional engineering education that Harvey Mudd College is known for. Faculty and students are collaborating on a number of exciting research projects, and companies continue to offer their challenging problems to our students through the Clinic Program. Last year, we added new members to our staff and faculty, and we’re currently searching for three tenure-track faculty members. We also celebrated the contributions to the department and College of Professor Ruye Wang who served on the faculty for more than 30 years.

Be sure to read the updates from engineering alumni as well as the news from younger alumni who have attended some of the fun events exclusively for members of GOLD (graduates of the last decade). Whether attending an event or sending us an update, we always love to hear from you, so please stay in touch!

Nancy Lape Chair, Department of Engineering

New Directors

Entrepreneurship

Kash Gokli is the inaugural director of entrepreneurship initiatives. In this new role, Gokli will strengthen and expand the College’s entrepreneurial education offerings and activities.

“This is an exciting opportunity,” says Gokli, Oliver C. Field Professor of Manufacturing Practice and Engineering Economics. “There are a lot of initiatives already happening at Harvey Mudd, and now we can bring it all under one umbrella and add more, to create a truly impactful entrepreneurship program. It’s not a question of whether we will be successful or not, it’s a question of how far we can take it.”

Gokli will collaborate with a multiconstituency entrepreneurship working group co-chaired by trustees Sergio Monsalve P25 and Bob Hulse ’96/97 and faculty members Albert Dato (engineering) and Darryl Yong ’96 (math), to design and support a set of curricular and co-curricular activities that will nurture Mudd’s next generation of entrepreneurs. Gokli will build upon the substantial legacy of Gary Evans,

professor of economics emeritus, and the ongoing efforts of the Harvey Mudd College Entrepreneurial Network.

“We want to provide opportunities to students from their first year through the fourth, so they can learn and grow and become entrepreneurs,” Gokli said. “Starting with seminars, workshops, events, summer fellowships and eventually coursework, we hope to provide education, practical experience, networking and funding opportunities. Entrepreneurial skills and an entrepreneurial spirit can benefit students in all career paths.”

Engineering Clinic

Steven Santana ’06 has stepped into the role of Engineering Clinic director. During 2022–2023, there are 40 sponsors participating in the Clinic Program and 41 projects. In engineering, there are 18 projects (18 sponsors) and 10 alumni liaisons.

E80 Spring 2022

This year of E80 was unlike any other. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, E80 was postponed during the 2020–2021 academic year, so during spring 2022, all engineering sophomores and juniors were enrolled in the class.

The main goal of E80 is for students to develop their identity as engineers by learning how to design experiments and measure physical quantities. Students spend the first half of the semester on seven laboratory experiments working in small teams to learn how to use their robot, model systems, design instruments, and collect and analyze data. During the second half, students design an experiment to conduct with an underwater robot and then design a robot with the instrumentation necessary to make measurements relevant to addressing their hypothesis.

During the project phase, students move through a design process. In the first few weeks, they design and develop the instrumentation for their robots, first on breadboards and then on a soldered printed circuit board to mount on their robot chassis. Then, they have two deployments to test their robots in the field.

The first deployment is at pHake Lake at the Bernard Field Station just north of campus. Here students often experience Murphy’s Law in the field: ”Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” They take these lessons back to the lab and redesign their robots to get ready for a second deployment at Dana Point, where they launch their robots in the bay.

Filling three school buses, students took the hourlong drive from Claremont to Dana Point, where they unloaded, made last-minute adjustments to their robots, then launched them in the bay. After running their experiments, they had some time to relax and enjoy the fruits of their hard work throughout the semester.

The first deployment for the robots is at pHake Lake, Bernard Field Station.

E80 students make final adjustments before deploying robots in the bay at Dana Point.

SWEet Life

The Harvey Mudd College chapter of the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) continues its legacy of encouraging women to achieve their full potential in careers as engineers and leaders. In addition to social events and a mentorship program called SWEethearts where first years pair with upper-level students for group outings, the club hosted several professional programs in 2021.

For the 2021 National SWE Conference, 28 HMC-SWE members participated virtually. The HMC-SWE officer team hosted watch parties, and the students had opportunities to network and learn from other women in engineering and technology, through speaker sessions, workshops and the career fair. For the 2022 national conference Oct. 16–22, 16 HMC-SWE members attended in-person at Houston, Texas. The departments of Computer Science and Engineering, President Klawe, ASHMC and the Alumni Association Board of Governors provided SWE with funds to make the trip possible.

The HMC SWE chapter also holds a Women Engineers and Scientists of Tomorrow (WEST) Conference each year

SWE holds an annual conference for high school girls.

for high school girls. They did not have an in-person WEST Conference in 2022 because of COVID restrictions/guidelines and, instead, held the conference virtually via Zoom. The 37 high school students who attended the conference had the opportunity to attend an opening/keynote address,

professor panel, student panel, and various engineering-related workshops hosted by professors Lucas Bang, Leah Mendelson and Albert Dato. The 2023 WEST Conference will be held in March or April.

SWE members, spring 2022

Meet the Newest Engineering Faculty Members

Two tenure-track faculty members were hired during 2021–2022. Searches for three more are underway for 2022–2023.

Whitney Fowler designs and synthesizes bio-inspired materials to detect contaminants in water. She received her B.E. in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Vanderbilt University. She then worked for a nonprofit organization where she mentored undergraduate students before beginning work on her PhD at University of Chicago, Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering. Under the co-advisement of professors Matthew Tirrell and Juan de Pablo, she designed materials to selectively isolate and recycle phosphate from aqueous solutions. She says she loves engineering and mentorship because of the potential to “bring about good in students’ lives and through them to the world around us,” so she looks forward to “holistically training up the next generation of diverse engineers to tackle pressing and complex global issues.” She and her students will pioneer designing, synthesizing and characterizing bio-inspired materials for environmental applications, with a particular focus on the global clean water crisis. She is looking forward to teaching E138 Introduction to Environmental Engineering this fall.

Dre Helmns is a project scientist in the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and will start as an assistant professor in engineering in January 2023. Their research involves developing decarbonized space conditioning and water heating systems that incorporate heat pumps, thermal energy storage, evaporative cooling, and waste heat recovery components. Specifically, they use physics-based modeling of thermal equipment to enable innovative design and optimal operation of integrated energy systems for buildings and districts. As a queer and trans scholar and educator, Helmns aspires to transform the culture of engineering by cultivating inclusive learning environments and making space for new leaders, while contributing to sustainable solutions for our climate crisis.

Fowler If a student is interested in a class that I’m teaching, they should know that they will have my support and that I really want to foster whole-person growth. I will prompt us to consider real-world issues from multiple angles to complement our technical skill set, such as important policy, history and societal factors. Problems today are so complex, and we as engineers need to know how our expertise fits into the world and so that we can leverage our skills for good.

Helmns It’s most important to me that students find a way to connect course material to their daily lives. I love the “aha” moments when someone suddenly recognizes science in a routine occurrence. I want students to know that they are invited to share those experiences with me and with their peers, as that’s the substance that expands our awareness and deepens our appreciation of new knowledge.

What book(s), blog or podcast would you recommend for someone who wants to learn about your academic area?

Fowler Regarding the water crisis, I suggest this great TEDxNaperville talk, “Invisible water, the hidden virtual water market,” by Seth Darling, who was on my PhD thesis committee.

Helmns There are so many incredible resources for learning, and it’s hard to name just a few. I’m a big fan of Jeffrey Grossman’s lectures on “Thermodynamics: Four Laws That Move the Universe.” I have Paul Sen’s “Einstein’s Fridge” on my shelf as my next science read. For a deep dive into U.S. energy flows, I enjoy the way-too-detailed, interactive Sankey diagram at departmentof.energy. The next long podcast I have bookmarked is from the Ezra Klein show, “The Single Best Guide to Decarbonization I’ve Heard.” If anyone reading listens to this episode, I’d love to discuss it sometime!

What is the most important thing for students to know about taking a class with you?

Happy Retirement, Professor Wang

Engineering professor Ruye Wang taught and mentored students at Harvey Mudd for more than 30 years. A Tianjin University graduate and former lecturer at Peking University in China, he worked on ways to enable computers to “see” the world as well as humans do. In 2008, he traveled with college presidents and other leaders from The Claremont Colleges on an historic trip to Asia to introduce the consortium and to seek areas of collaboration with officials in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Bejing. He returned to China each summer from 2011 to 2019, to run a program with the China Studies Institute at Peking University in Beijing that provided a unique study abroad opportunity for about 80 HMC students each year. As a NASA project principal investigator, he collaborated with other scientists and provided HMC students with the opportunity to develop a smart system to help NASA analyze the huge amount of multi-spectral data collected by various NASA satellites that could help better understand the geological evolution of early Mars. Wang worked with JPL’s Machine Learning Systems Group to find software solutions to hard problems requiring data mining, knowledge discovery, pattern recognition, and automated classification and clustering.

Astronaut Scholar Alec Vercruysse ’23

Based upon exemplary academic performance, ingenuity and unique aptitude for research, engineering major Alec Vercruysse ’23 was one of two Mudders selected by the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation to join the elite group of Astronaut Scholars for the 2022–2023 academic year.

A scholar-athlete, Vercruysse is passionate about electrical and computer engineering. His interest stems from “awe at the power and potential of modern electronics and a desire to harness this power to improve our world,” he says. He has done research with engineering professor Matthew Spencer on phased array technology, which enables advanced transceivers to computationally control the direction of sensitivity of the antennas to improve their gain in relevant directions. “The field of communications and radio-frequency is still in rapid development,” says Vercruysse. “While over half the world is now somehow connected

Faculty Promotions

Promotions and tenure appointments for two engineering faculty hired in 2016 that were approved by the board of trustees, effective July 1, 2022.

Timothy Tsai earned tenure and promotion to associate professor. His research lies at the intersection of signal processing, machine learning and music. He recently received a National Science Foundation grant to develop tools to counteract the spread of false audiovisual information and to establish the reliability of true audiovisual information.

Werner Zorman, an associate professor and holder of the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair in Leadership, earned tenure. In addition to teaching classes on leadership, communication and team building skills, he conducts research on leadership education and facilitates leadership development among students, faculty and staff.

to the internet, reliable access is still a luxury for the lucky half of the world that is connected. Furthermore, as more devices become wireless and wirelessly connected to home and organizational networks, more advanced schemes are required to support this massive increase in devices. Advanced antenna technologies and modulation techniques are in development that can allow wireless communication between an ever-increasing set of nodes without interference or other degradation of quality.” As a member of the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps men’s swimming and diving team that earned the 2020 SCIAC title, he reached the finals in multiple events to help give CMS its victory.

Offered to students pursuing degrees in STEM, the 2022 ASF Astronaut Scholarship provides networking and mentoring opportunities with astronauts, alumni and industry leaders; participation in the Michael Collins Family Professional Development Program; and a paid trip to attend ASF’s Innovators Week, which provides an opportunity for the Astronaut Scholars to present their research at a technical conference.

Paulsen Studying Empathy During Watson Year

Encouraged by her research advisor and mentor, engineering professor Lori Bassman, to apply for the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Kaitlyn Paulsen ’22 is now traveling the world developing deeper empathy while investigating “Caring over Curing: Endurance through Challenging Health Experiences.”

The one-year, $36,000 grant she received allows Paulsen to explore Australia, France, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, where she plans to identify programs that seem to focus on the emotional well-being of patients. In each country, she’ll shadow workers in various programs, interview patients, families and caregivers, and support the development of more holistic and inclusive models of care.

In addition to engineering, Paulsen majored in human-centered design, which allowed her to work on open-ended design projects, like one with the Brain Tumor Network, a nonprofit organization and free patient navigation resource for those impacted by brain tumors. One of the caregivers she interviewed had a 22-year-old daughter who had been diagnosed with a brain tumor.

“Since that project, my passion for understanding emotional endurance in healthcare has only grown,” she says. Further interviews led her to surmise that often the medical field can be focused on curing instead of caring. “In a disease where a cure may not be possible, sometimes all we can do is care. This is the idea I decided to explore for my Watson project: what it means to focus on caring instead of curing.”

2022 Binder Prize Recipient:

Lorena González

Lorena González, Engineering Clinic project manager, was one of two employees to receive the Mary G. Binder Prize, which honors support staff for their exceptional service. The prize, which includes an $800 award, was established in 1996 by engineering

Professor Emeritus Sam Tanenbaum and his wife, Carol, in honor of Carol’s mother. Gonzalez has worked in the Department of Engineering for nearly 15 years, beginning as an administrator for the Clinic Program. Now a coordinator, she helps facilitate all aspects of the program, from Clinic project preparation to creating new processes, including those necessary to pivot from virtual to in-person classes and events.

Paulsen says there are many dimensions to explore in this space of emotional endurance and shared some of what she’ll be investigating.

1. The impact on caregivers and families. Caregivers bear both the emotional and practical challenges of caretaking. Particularly in degenerative diseases, caregivers can experience a preemptive grieving process.

2. Expectations around emotional support in healthcare. What factors shape expectations around receiving emotional support? Is emotional support and connection present in the care environment? What barriers might there be to adopting these programs in different settings? How do expectations around emotional support change across the treatment continuum? “I’m curious how cultural definitions of health care shape these expectations,” she says.

3. Resources that exist for provider well-being. What level of professionalism are clinicians expected to maintain? How does this level of professionalism affect stress levels and compassion fatigue?

“One reason this project means so much to me is because of the personal challenge and growth I hope to experience by conducting this project in an immersive way,” Paulsen says. “By positioning myself in a variety of emotionally and geographically foreign experiences, I want to not only explore what emotional resilience is for patients and providers, but what it is to me. I am eager to challenge my own ability to speak this language and develop deep empathy.”

Welcome to the Department

The department welcomed staff engineers Xavier Walter (systems administration and technical course support) and Lynn Kim (technical course support). Their work was critical in running a double-sized version of the Experimental Engineering course (E80) during spring 2022 to make up for pandemic cancellations in spring 2021.

Ashwini (Asha) Srikantiah is an HMC clinical professor of engineering and associate director at The Rick and Susan Sontag Center for Collaborative Creativity (The HIVE), a 5C resource. A creative leader experienced in using human-centered design to build programs that drive systemic change, she teaches classes in human-centered design and interpersonal dynamics and assists with HMC’s Clinic.

How to Teach Mechanical Design

Mechanical Design course prepares students to tackle creative construction challenges

Written by Kristin Baird Rattini

For assistant professor Leah Mendelson, there’s nothing like broken 1980s thrift store appliances for teaching the principles of mechanical design in her Mechanical Design class (190AU). “We’ve used juicers, electric carving knives, fans,” she says. “I’m definitely partial to eggbeaters that are built like a tank.”

The teardown—and subsequent recreation in CAD (computer-aided design) software—of common consumer products kicks off the course’s semester-long exploration of hands-on design, analysis and build opportunities. “Mechanical design is really experiential,” Mendelson says. “You learn by jumping in, doing it and trying to create different systems and use different mechanical elements to see what works and what doesn’t.”

When she launched the class in spring 2020, Mendelson aimed to fill a gap she saw in such experiential learning opportunities in the engineering curriculum. “Students learn the build side in E4, our Intro to Engineering Design and Manufacturing class, and the analysis side in the Continuum Mechanics class, but there was nothing else that put hands-on mechanical systems at the center,” she says. “The mechanical design class pulls all of those pieces together.”

The class also parallels Mendelson’s pursuits in her Flow Imaging Lab, where she and her research assistants mechanically recreate swimming behaviors seen in nature to identify new strategies for underwater vehicle propulsion. “The overall emphasis is on producing a mechanical system that can perform some set of functions,” Mendelson explains. “In my lab, that function happens to be running fluid mechanics experiments. But in the mechanical design class, those functions are student-defined and self-directed.”

The students, largely junior and senior engineering majors, work in randomly assigned teams on three core projects. The appliance teardown and CAD project requires them to evaluate their appliance’s design and consider how they might have approached it differently. They then work

together to recreate the product’s design using SolidWorks CAD software. “These students may only have experience working with one or two other people on CAD,” Mendelson explains. “That’s very different than sharing CAD files with six other people in a way that everyone can access and contribute and support the team.”

For the kinetic sculpture project, Mendelson gives teams a stock supply kit and assigns them mechanical components that their moving sculpture must incorporate, such as a chain plus gears or a timing belt plus linkages. “The project really focuses on getting their hands dirty,” Mendelson says.

Teams spend much of their time in the Harvey Mudd makerspace and machine shop crafting additional parts using 3-D printers, machining and welding tools, and iterating their designs, which have ranged from a mechanism that plays a xylophone to a model of the balloon-powered house in the Disney movie Up

“Machine shop manager Drew Price has been a huge creative partner in making this class happen,” Mendelson says, “and in creating the right balance between design theory and practice.”

The third and main project, which runs from before spring break through semester’s end, encapsulates all the course’s learning objectives by challenging each team to design, analyze, build and test a mechanical system from their own idea or from facultygenerated suggestions. One team created a

loom, which required a complex combination of components to perfect the timing and motion. Another team collaborated with the College’s escape room club to build a puzzle box with multiple mechanisms.

“The class is structured, especially during the main project, to give students opportunities to observe and learn from what the other teams are doing at the same time,” Mendelson says. “That makes it collaborative both within the project they’re working on but also with the rest of the students in class. That’s how they can build a mental library of design strategies that they can draw on later in their studies and their career.”

A model of the balloon-powered house in the Disney movie Up

DREW PRICE

A Mechanical Design student works on a puzzle box that will be part of the Mudd Escapes escape room.

Can You Hear Me Now? Amazon126 Engineering Clinic

If your smart speaker can’t hear you, it’s not likely to respond. Figuring out how devices can better hear their operators is a challenge for companies like Amazon Lab126, a Sunnyvale Bay Area research and development company that designs and engineers high-profile consumer electronic devices like the Echo family (including Alexa). The company’s audio technology team is working to develop new audio algorithms for Amazon devices, but their current methods of audio data collection in household environments are not fully automated, time intensive and expensive.

Through the Engineering Clinic, company liaisons Edouard Oliveira, Akira Wang, Jeff St. Clair and Nimit Pandya asked a student team to develop an autonomous robotic platform capable of automatically collecting audio data using accurate localization and navigation within a model household environment. With guidance from their advisor, engineering professor TJ Tsai, team members Vadim Mathys, Berlin Paez, Lauren Le, Aaron Murdock and Ashley Cheung worked through the problem. Cheung describes the process and their solution.

How did the team begin to tackle the problem?

The first thing we did after defining the problem was to compile a list of robot kits that we could buy that were applicable to the task of moving around a room and carrying heavy equipment like a mannequin.

The goal of this project was much more software-focused, and we weren’t asked to make a custom hardware setup unless absolutely necessary.

We decided pretty early that we wanted to use mecanum wheels, which have special diagonal rollers that allow the robot to travel left and right as well as forward and back. We eventually chose a robot kit from SuperDroid Robots that had a durable aluminum chassis and got to work building the robot and hooking up the wheels.

What challenges did you face?

The toughest challenge was the complexity of the project. For the robot to know where it was, we put up images (AprilTags) in set locations and had a camera on the robot that could tell how far it was from each of

the tags. We also used wheel encoders that told us how much each wheel was rotating. Combining all of these inputs in the correct directions to try to tell us where the robot was was very complex, especially because only one person on our team had taken a class in this subject before.

What was the outcome?

At the end of the year, the robot could successfully navigate our test space in the Clinic makerspace while avoiding obstacles that we pre-set on a map. The robot would pause at several points to simulate taking data. We also were able to plot the difference between the robot’s estimated position

and its true position and were within 10 cm almost all of the time. We assembled two robots in total to send to Amazon Lab126 in Sunnyvale and shared our GitHub repository with our liaisons.

What are some impacts of this project?

The purpose of the project was to reduce manual labor by automating data collection. Ultimately, this data is used to improve the Echo suite by making devices able to hear people better if they’re turned away or in a different part of the room relative to the device.

Robot and mannequin mount

Top of robot base

Bottom of robot base

Research: Democratizing Bioimaging

Written by Janie Fisher

Assistant Professor of Engineering Josh Brake loves light. He loves the beauty of it. The physics behind it. And, above all, the possibility of it.

“Light is unbelievably beautiful and, at the same time, so mysterious. There’s the quantum nature of it. And all these different wavelengths, so we have all the color and the beauty of that.”

Brake first fell in love with light as an undergraduate at LeTourneau University, where his professors invited him into the world of optical scattering and biophotonics while recognizing his talent for teaching, even giving him opportunities to lecture. And—something like light when it’s scattered—his path was forever changed.

“It was a transformative experience for me, shaping the trajectory of my life. I think about my undergraduate professors every day. They’re a large part of who I am today.”

His path led him to Caltech, where he earned his PhD in electrical engineering, and then on to teach at Harvey Mudd, where he passes on his enthusiasm for research and the potential of biophotonics to improve people’s lives to a new generation of undergraduates. Biophotonics, in the simplest terms, is defined as the use of light to investigate biology. And for Brake, it sits at the intersection of many different fields of interest. “As an engineer, as a toolmaker, I want to create technologies. Tools that can be useful.”

As a bioimaging tool, scattered light has some big advantages over other imaging technologies. It has better resolution than ultrasound, it’s safer than X-ray, and cheaper than MRI—important because expensive bioimaging systems are out of reach for most small university research labs.

“Biophotonics has a lot of avenues for me to investigate and explore. Beyond connecting with a deep theoretical and scientific understanding of photons and optics, all of the science and physics and engineering that kind of undergirds all of that, this stuff has the potential to make a real difference in people’s lives. It holds opportunity to create lower-cost, more accessible diagnostic and medical imaging tools.” It’s something Brake calls “democratizing access to bioimaging.”

At a recent Scialog initiative to advance bioimaging research, held by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, Brake and his colleague Kevin Cash proposed working together with their teams on developing a modular, inexpensive, open-source and multi-modal in-vivo imaging system. They were awarded a $50,000 grant which now funds their combined research.

Brake likes the synergistic spirit that’s at the heart of the Scialog experience. It’s a spirit he feels is very much embedded in the Harvey Mudd environment, an environment he values because of the relationships with his students and with the supportive and collaborative HMC faculty.

“Competition can often become adversarial. And while it can be motivating, there’s so much more that you can reap from trying to think together, rather than playing a zero-sum game, where if I get something, you don’t get it. I think there’s a lot more power and benefit to be garnered within a collaborative framework, rather than a competitive one.”

Brake and his HMC team work together— remotely, but in parallel—with the team at Colorado School of Mines, where Cash is a professor. When they’re not collaborating on the new imaging system, Brake and his students spend their time investigating light in general, trying to find and develop new ways of focusing it deep inside of scattering media, like biological tissue and beyond. Something new they’re working on in the lab is looking at ways of using photonics in a completely different realm: the plant world.

As much as he loves research, it’s just a small part of what Brake wants to achieve at Harvey Mudd. “The reason I’m here is because I believe very deeply in the value of those formative experiences in the undergraduate years. For me, it’s not so much about generating the next big scientific discovery as it is about training the next generation of engineers who will go on to develop the next generation of technologies.”

Professor Brake and Nandini Garg ’23 examine Garg’s soldering technique.

Research Enhances Engineering Teaching and Learning

In June 2022, engineering professor Matthew Spencer presented his research on competency-based learning at the American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference and was given the Electrical and Computer Engineering Division’s best paper award. The research paper “Implementation of Competency-Based Learning in a Laboratory-Focused Analog Design Course” provides a template for adapting competency-based learning to a common course in electrical engineering and coincides with a public release of the teaching materials, which may help adoption of this beneficial teaching practice.

Krauss Participates in U.S.-Africa Education Partnership

An avid interest in learning more about and sharing cultural perspectives led engineering professor Gordon Krauss to Africa where he engaged in bidirectional collaboration relating to teaching engineering design, sustainability and entrepreneurship as part of the U.S.- Africa Education Partnership developed by the Rice 360 Institute for Global Health. Through the faculty partnership, Krauss worked alongside engineering faculty champions from Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria and Tanzania, seeking to embed researchbased, experiential best practices in design education so that students are trained to meet engineering challenges.

Dato Lab Produces Novel Water-Repellent Graphene

An unexpected discovery by Albert Dato and students in his Energy and Nanomaterials Lab holds exciting potential for creating robust water-repellent coatings using gas-phase-synthesized graphene (GSG) and other nanomaterials. The research by Dato, Weston Miller ’21 and Makenna Parkinson ’23 was published in ACS Materials Letters and Chemical & Engineering News

Last summer, Miller and Parkinson were working on two projects: A National Science Foundation-funded project characterizing nanocomposites and a project supported by the College’s Rasmussen Summer Research fund that involved using graphene to separate oil from water. “While working on these projects, the students discovered that water droplets falling on our graphene powder were easily sliding off and bouncing from it,” says Dato. “This was a completely unexpected result since we weren’t even looking into this phenomenon called superhydrophobicity.”

The trio found the result so surprising that they decided to use the Rasmussen funds to purchase an instrument to measure the contact angle of water on materials. Miller and Parkinson discovered that the graphene produced in the Dato Lab can repel water immediately after it is created. Graphene that is grown by other methods cannot achieve such water repellency without considerable chemical modification, and graphene that is

made from exfoliating graphite also needs to be treated with chemicals to be able to repel water. “Our method of making graphene is sustainable and produces useful byproducts that can be collected and utilized in other applications,” says Dato. “In contrast, creating graphene by other methods requires significant energy and resources, and chemical modification can produce hazardous waste that is harmful to the environment.”

With the goal of testing the hypothesis that their graphene could protect surfaces from water droplets, Miller and Parkinson

conducted experiments that showed exactly that: arbitrary wettable surfaces became non-wettable when covered with their graphene.

Highly water repellent surfaces are desired in numerous applications, says Dato, “such as aircraft wings that resist icing in cold weather, ships that can resist corrosion and have low drag forces and even biomedical devices that can have tiny channels that can transport fluids with minimal effort. The graphene produced in our lab can potentially make these applications a reality.”

NSF Supports Machine Learning in Music Information Retrieval

Grant Connects Researchers

Patrick Little, professor emeritus of engineering and visiting scholar, will co-chair the conference workshop “Prototyping, Developing and Exploring Collaborative Relationships Among Germination Researchers” with Tom Maiorana, assistant professor in the Department of Design at UC Davis. Their NSF-supported project supports the Germination program, managed and supported by the NSF Office of Emerging Frontiers and Multidisciplinary Activities. It brings together sponsored research teams to discuss, critique and intellectually support one another. Staff support will be provided by two HMC students and one graduate student from UC Davis.

TJ Tsai uses interesting problems in music as a playground to develop mastery of tools and techniques in signal processing and machine learning. He received a $500,270 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation for his project “Ordered Alignment Methods for Complex, High-Dimensional Data.” He’ll focus on design ordered alignment methods that are scalable enough to be used in interactive music applications, are flexible enough to handle complex, structured music data, and can be integrated into the training process of modern neural networks. Music genres that have not been explored very much in his field, like gospel and hip-hop, will be foundational to Tsai’s research.

“I would love to partner with students who have domain expertise in these areas, whether it’s dancing in a hip-hop group or singing in a gospel choir,” he says. “In this way, I think this project can take advantage of the diversity in our Mudd community.”

More Engineering Activities

• Lori Bassman was awarded an NSF grant for her project “U.S.-Australia collaboration on a new class of lead-free copper alloys to meet international health demands.”

• Riggs Fellows Liam Chalk ’23, Sam Marquez ’22, Sidney Taylor ’23 and Nick Zemtzov ’23 won first place in the technical paper competition at the West Coast Industrial and Systems Engineering Conference. They were advised by Kash Gokli, director of entrepreneurship initiatives.

Meetings during 2022-2023 will help establish longer-term relationships among past, present and future Germination researchers that outlive the length of individual grants. A virtual workshop is planned for fall 2022, and an in-person workshop to develop relationships will be held in spring 2023 at Harvey Mudd College. Each event will emphasize interaction, recognition of interesting and creative approaches and identification of connections.

Spencer Publishes MEM Switch Contact Research

Microelectromechanical (MEM) switches are tiny devices—imagine the diameter of a single strand of hair or smaller—that are crucial parts of cell phones and radios. A study of the changes in conductivity of specific types of MEM switch contacts is the subject of a paper co-authored by engineering professor Matthew Spencer and his students Ethan Falicov ’21 and Jessica Marvin ’23 (first and second author, respectively). The paper “Breakdown and Healing of TungstenOxide Films on Microelectromechanical Relay Contacts” was published in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems

While the current practical application of MEM switches is for cell phones and radios, Spencer says MEM switches with tungsten contacts could have high endurance, which could enable them to be used in new applications, like low-power computing.

2022 Outstanding Alumni GOLDen Connections Tour

An engineer in manufacturing since graduating from Harvey Mudd College, Gina Janke ’87 is involved in a variety of programs supporting young people in STEM. Most noteworthy is her lifelong involvement with the Society of Women Engineers. Among her leadership and community outreach activities are the collection and administration of scholarships for local female engineering students. Her STEM outreach has included presenting workshops for Girls Empowered by Math and Science, representing SWE at Milwaukee’s STEMfest and judging at Future City Competitions for Milwaukee middle school students. She is a quality engineer at Andis Company and remains a passionate advocate in the community, making significant contributions to the field of engineering.

Scott Park ’87 is recognized for his leadership in business operations at a major international corporation. He earned a master’s degree in international management from the University of California, San Diego and is now president and chief executive officer of Doosan Bobcat in 2013. Over his career, spanning from consulting to construction equipment, he furthered the practices of manufacturing excellence, total quality management, information technology and strategy development. He is helping train the next generation of engineers through Doosan Bobcat’s sponsorship of Clinic Program projects and by serving on HMC’s Engineering Leadership Advisory Board.

Share Your Story with Students

We are looking for HMC alumni to make an impact in our current students’ lives by sharing about your post-HMC careers and interests! As part of the department’s Prototyping Mindset courses we offer to sophomores and seniors, we ask students to read short profiles of several alumni and reach out to one or more alumni for 30-minute conversations. Students who have spoken with alumni as part of these courses have told us that these conversations are one of the most impactful experiences of their semester, and also commented on both how inspired and relieved they were to see such a broad range of careers and interests in the alumni profiles. We also hear from alumni that they truly enjoyed these conversations! If you are interested in participating, please fill out this Google form, and we will ask you to create a quick profile in an Alumni Lookbook (should take less than 10 minutes) and be willing to have a 30-minute conversation with a student if they reach out to you: lnkd.in/gDHBs6Wk

The GOLD (Graduates of the Last Decade) Society maintains connections among the most-recent graduates. They receive exclusive invitations to GOLD-only programs and events like professional development opportunities, social events and community service initiatives. Alumni from all majors have volunteered as hosts in their hometowns. Here are a few events hosted by engineering alumni.

Find out more at alumni.hmc.edu/GOLD

Sushi-making Class in Torrance, hosted by Michael Jang ’22

Brewery Night in San Diego, hosted by Jonathan Perez ’16

Ice Cream Social in Palo Alto, hosted by Marissa Lee ’18 and Joe Sinopoli ’17

1967

Hugh Saurenman: I have oficially retired and closed our small engineering company after 20 years.

1968

James (Buzz) Wisda: I left HMC in 1967, graduated from USC in 1969 and received an MBA in 1970. I worked for Pardee Homes for 37 years, retiring in 2009 as Senior Vice President. We built over 60,000 homes plus all the other facilities needed to complete communities. Valorie and I married in 1971, and we celebrated 51 years of marriage this June. We moved to Scottsdale Arizona in 2011. We built a second home in Poipu, Kauai in 1998, and a summer home in Sugar Mountain, North Carolina, last year. We spend about six months in Arizona, two months in Poipu, and four months in Sugar Mountain. I play golf five days a week and compete in USGA and other national amateur golf tournaments. We travel often, visiting Kenya and Tanzania last year. In 2019, we spent almost two months in Scotland and Ireland playing golf. We spent a month in Scandinavia searching for Valorie’s ancestors. Pretty good considering my HMC advisor Dr. Alford wrote a letter to USC telling them not to admit me.

1972

Don Albrecht ’71/72: Retired. Living in Huntington Beach.

1976

Yiannis Fotopoulos: Two important milestones this summer for the Fotopoulos family. Our daughter, Nefeli, got married, and I went into retirement after 43 years of work.

1984

Craig Matsuno: Spent the last 13+ years at ChargePoint leading the hardware group in the development of some of the first and most recognizable electric vehicle charging stations. Recently semi-retired but still working at ChargePoint in an advisory role and enjoying the ongoing technical challenges.

Mark Pitchford: Recently elected executive vice president and chief marketing officer of California Casualty, leading marketing, sales and customer service. As a result, my wife and I are moving back to the Bay Area from Hawaii, where we have lived the past five years while she completed her PhD.

Larry Tong: I officially hit the age of being OLD (like many of us in the Class of 84!). My payment processing software company celebrated its 30th anniversary, too! In 2017, we added a new start-up company, Intuitive Data Analytics, with emphasis on delivering spontaneous, no-code, voice and gesturebased analytics and BI. My dream is to deliver real life “Minority Report” … BHAG (big hairy audacious goal)!

1987

Chris Donnelly: Married for 20 years. Three kids. Lived in San Francisco, now in Park City, Utah. Spent the last 15 years in Nike and Oakley as COO, head of strategy and product development. Ski 75 days a year, mountain bike, golf and travel. My priorities are around family and everyday happiness.

Calvin S. Miles: The GPS world has been very active lately. The FAA signed an MOU with Air Force Research Lab to work with them on Navigation Test Satellite #3 (NTS-3) which is exploring future technologies for GPS. There are several good articles on NTS-3 on the internet. I’ve also been spending a great deal of my time fixing a problem where if more than one satellite has a ranging error caused by the control segment, the algorithm in the receiver (receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM)) is blind to the failure. We’re working on several fixes to the problem. As always, we continue to look for people that are interested in contributing to the future of GPS.

1989

Steven Molin: I have been working in cloud engineering in the financial technology sector for Envestnet.

1991

Eric Burke: I’m excited to be starting a new position with Alaska Airlines as manager of agile delivery. I’m making this change after more than 12 years with Slalom Consulting. I loved my time with Slalom and will miss so many people but I’m also super excited for my next chapter with Alaska!

1992

Sunny Trinh ’92/93: Global warming is and will continue to be the biggest threat to the welfare of our planet and every creature on it. It has a severe impact on food and water supplies while being a major cause for more frequent and severe weather, higher death rates, higher wildlife extinction rates, higher sea levels and more polluted air. I believe that all the solutions necessary to slow and reverse climate change exist in the world today. In order to enable these solutions, major barriers need to be removed: funding, lack of transparency and geography. By working with some great partners, I am now fortunate enough to have the opportunity to lead a company with a mission to remove these barriers to help companies, organizations and governments accelerate the reversal of climate change. The company is called DevvStream (devvstream.com; sunny@devvstream.com).

Carl Carrera ’75/76: I’m just enjoying retirement and our four grandkids. We are all healthy, happy and doing well.

1993

Ellen Heian: I’m participating in the Climatebase Fellowship, an eight-week jumpstart into Climate Tech.

2006

Robert Panish: Enjoying time with family, including two kids (ages 5 and 3). At work, I am a chief engineer at Ultra Naval Systems & Sensors building sonars for the Navy.

2007

Badier Velji: I was recently promoted to director, growth strategy at Ernst & Young’s strategy consulting group. I focus on the energy and industrials sectors, and leverage my HMC degree every day to guide corporate clients through market and product challenges.

2009

Trevor Ashley: I was recently promoted to the role of assistant group leader in the Control and Autonomous Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. I help lead an amazingly brilliant and creative group focused on solving our nation’s toughest problems.

2012

Winnie Ding: I started a nerdy, punny sticker shop on Etsy inspired by start-up life as a mechanical engineer! Follow @pocketfulofsprockets on Instagram or check out my Etsy shop (shop name: Pocketful of Sprockets).

2015

Brittany Borg: I spent five fruitful years in engineering after graduating from Harvey Mudd in 2015, and in June this year, I wrapped up a new chapter of education and graduated with an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and an M.S. in design innovation from the McCormick School of Engineering. I’m a few months into my new role as a product marketing manager at Intuitive Surgical, advancing the landscape of medical technologies within the lung cancer space. There hasn’t been a time where I haven’t been grateful for the lessons I learned at Mudd and how it’s guided me in my roles and career trajectory since.

2017

Kathryn Jones: I’ve been working as a PhD researcher at the University of California Irvine in the civil and environmental engineering track. My focus is on sustainable concrete additive manufacturing, and one of my ongoing projects, is developing a concrete 3-D printed ultra-tall wind turbine tower.

Liz Lee: Our team at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab has almost finished production of new, Nb3Sn superconducting Rutherford cables for the High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider upgrade at CERN. It’s been exciting to see our colleagues wind our cables into coils and integrate them into focusing quadrupole magnets, which will operate at 12 Tesla and enable new discoveries in high energy physics. It’s also been fascinating to learn about the history of accelerator engineering and related technologies from old timers, librarians and archivists in the DOE lab system along the way.

2018

Wenkai Qin: I left my job as a GNC engineer at Raytheon and enrolled in the Aerospace Department at UT Austin as a first-year PhD with a focus on controls and doing research under Prof. Humphreys.

Sarah Silcox: I’ve been living it up in glorious but parched Salt Lake City, Utah, as the distribution integrity management engineer at Dominion Energy, a gas company. At night

I go home to draw comics. I wish I had more to share but life has been stable and mundane, which is good. There are infinite carp to catch and release back into the local pond.

2020

Max Maleno: For the past two years since virtual-graduation, I’ve worked at Lockheed Martin Space in the Bay Area designing/testing/integrating electro-optical instruments for spacecraft. Recently, I was accepted into LM Space’s Engineering Leadership Development Program, which offers early career engineers the opportunity to rotate to three different positions (that

ELDP participants have to hunt down themselves) over three years, as well as other leadership training and higher-education benefits. My first rotation will be within life support systems on the Orion spacecraft for NASA’s Artemis II and Artemis III missions. These will be the first human-crewed missions of the vehicle bringing astronauts back to the moon within the next few years!

2021

come to life! I spent this past summer doing materials engineering research at the University of Kiel, Germany. My work focused on creating thin films of thermoresponsive polymers using a novel method called initiated chemical vapor deposition. These materials are especially promising for drug delivery systems and biosensors. This opportunity was perfect for diving deeper into chemistry, polymerization principles and common analysis techniques. Most of the equipment in the lab was designed, machined and constructed by the lab engineer and graduate students which was inspiring to an HMC machine shop proctor alum. It was difficult to get me out of the lab when I got sucked into debugging the reactor! Beyond academics, I hiked and biked my way around Northern Germany with my university friends. I even got to travel around Scotland and scramble up some peaks for my last month!

Aubrey Egerter: A post-COVID dream