REACH-Seattle University's College of Science & Engineering

VOLUME 5, ISSUE 2. WINTER 2018

REACH

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ULTIDISCIPLINARY EXPL

COMBINED EXPERTISE

When you hear a sound, why do you turn your head toward it?

You may think it’s instinct, but Associate Professor Brian Fischer and his student researchers will tell you the process is much more complex than that.

For 15 years, Dr. Fischer has studied the complex mechanisms governing sound localization in barn owls. In simple terms, the owl’s brain is encoding sound and extracting information that creates a mental map. For barn owls, which hunt in the dark, this is a survival skill.

Thanks to a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Fischer and his fellow primary investigators at UC Davis, UC San Diego and Albert Einstein College of Medicine are pooling their expertise and using newly developed tools to investigate the sound localization process at a cellular level.

“We are using anatomical, neurophysiological and behavioral data to create functional models of the owl’s sound localization pathway,” Dr. Fischer says.

Dr. Fischer’s portion of the grant also funds two paid student research assistants for five years. Last summer, Julia Gorman and Anna Miller—both double majoring in mathematics and biology— spent 10 weeks performing some of the mathematical modeling and data analysis for the study. “Our models are zooming in on very specific neurons in an owl’s brain,” says Julia. “We are trying to build a mathematical model to simulate the process that leads to the decision about where the sound is coming from.”

The multidisciplinary aspects of the project appealed to both undergraduates. For Anna, the study relates to her intended graduate studies in biomath, which is offered at only a handful of universities. Julia has enjoyed the opportunity to explore a field she wants to pursue in graduate school. “I like the fact that computational neuroscience resides mostly in math,” she says.

The students recently synthesized their findings in a report to Dr. Fischer and his colleagues. “Part of the write-up process is realizing what you haven’t done,” Anna says. “If you didn’t tie up all the loose ends, that’s a new project.”

“Important qualities in a student researcher are inquisitiveness and a willingness to learn.”

BRIAN FISCHER DSc, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF MATHEMATICS

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LORATION A CONFLUENCE OF IDEAS “We evolved to survive. In the midst of our surviving, which is mostly eat, don’t get eaten, procreate, humans also developed music as a tool of social cohesion,” says Mehmet Vurkaç, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). In addition to developing expertise in computer engineering, he has studied and performed Afro-Latin music for 23 years.

“There are latent structures in music, something I had to learn through years of listening, studying and analysis,” he says. “If we can use machine learning and signal processing to understand those structures, we can teach people to understand and play music in any idiom.” How the brain processes music, how an artificial neural network might do the same thing, and how knowledge of each can improve the other is the focus of Dr. Vurkaç’s research.

This synthesis of computer engineering in the service of society and the individual has engaged three teams of student research assistants mentored by Dr. Vurkaç.

ECE majors Tim Nguyen, Edward Gao and Irwan Winarto have evaluated cloud-computing environments for experimenting with neural architectures. An interdisciplinary team—Kalana de Silva Agampodi (ECE), Lin Ye (Business Analytics, MBA), Jerry Wang (Math and Finance) and Shuai Yuan (Computer Science)—has learned about the challenges inherent in extracting subtle musical features through the use of otherwise powerful algorithms.

Brigid Kelly (ECE) and psychology major Mary Jane “MJ” Perdiguerra have been working with Emergent, a brain-model simulator. “Emergent simulates the human brain adjusting itself and making connections between certain neurons,” says Brigid.

She and MJ have been running experiments on the role of dopamine and the premotor cortex in rhythm perception. Their abstract was accepted for the November meeting of the Auditory Perception, Cognition, and Action Research Foundation.

As the students broke new ground, their interests and areas of exploration began to overlap, just as Dr. Vurkaç had planned.

“The work these students have done is laying the foundation for the next several years of research,” says Dr. Vurkaç. “From this I hope to develop culturally aware and socially responsible machine-learning tools for music education, music theory and music-making.”

“Dr. V told us to think big and come up with the next radical idea.” BRIGID KELLY, ’19 ECE Barn owl neuron image provided by William DeBello, PhD, Associate Professor, University of California, Davis

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IVERSE CONTRIBUTION

MANY BACKGROUNDS. A COMMON GOAL. Life can take peculiar turns. A promising job may reach a dead end. A subject that seemed exciting in college might not yield a rewarding career.

After taking a deep breath and reassessing their goals, many people turn to computer science for a second career.

But what if their bachelor’s degree is in something else?

Seattle U has the perfect answer! Our highly successful career change certificate program in Computer Science welcomes a widely diverse group of highly motivated students and is driving the dramatic growth of our Computer Science department.

Students in the hands-on program quickly shed their “novice” training wheels. After an intensive summer boot camp and yearlong certificate program during which they gain fundamental knowledge, successful students are eligible to enter our Master of Science in Computer Science program—and over 80 percent of them do.

The program director, Sheila Oh, describes the students as “super motivated.” She says, “Our classes are small and the work is very hands on.

Faculty members are very accessible and focused on student success. Every student knows he or she is not just an anonymous face in a 100-student lecture hall.”

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“The end game was getting an industry job.”

BAILEY STROM-PILLAR, ’16, ’18 MSCS, SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER, EXPEDIA GROUP

“I feel like I’m the poster child for this program,” says Victor Chimenti, who entered the MSCS program in September after first completing the certificate program. “I spent five years as a starving novelist, and the next eight in sales. I was really good at selling, but ultimately I never had the passion for it that I did for writing. Now I write code, so this path is just what I needed.”

Students who enter the career change program are ready for the challenge. They contribute their life experience, perspective and expertise in other disciplines, creating a rich learning environment and preparing them for new careers. “At a tech company, you’re not going to have just coders on the team,” says Sheila Oh. “You will have the software engineer, the programmer, the designer, the project manager and someone from marketing, all serving the client.”

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A chemistry major.

A political science professor.

A novelist.

A journalist.

What do they have in common?

The strength of the program is reflected in our students’ successes. Here is just one of many stories!

Bailey Strom-Pillar, ’16, ’18, describes herself as “the kid who wanted to do everything.” After earning a BS in Chemistry, she discovered that she really didn’t like working in a lab. When Bailey made a list of what she did like—solving puzzles, looking at data and analyzing it—she realized she had summarized a software developer’s job. The career change program in Computer Science was exactly what she was looking for.

“The end game was getting an industry job,” she says.

Not only was Bailey a superstar in her program, but she also helped found the Women in Technology organization in her department. She is now a Software Development Engineer at Expedia Group, focused on providing a positive, seamless user experience for the company’s customers.

“This program is great at getting you where you want to be,” she says. “The field is constantly changing, and the ability to jump into something new and learn as you go is the most important quality you can have as a computer scientist.”

“If you’ll commit fully to the program, do the work and figure out how to apply it to the real world, you’ll come out with a degree that’s the most valuable in the world.”

MATTHEW IRWIN, ’16, ’18 MSCS, SOFTWARE ENGINEER, AMAZON Rendering by EYP/Mithun

COMING IN 2021: AMAZON COMPUTER SCIENCE PROJECT CENTER CS students work on yearlong, industry-sponsored design projects for corporate partners such as Amazon, Microsoft, F5 Networks and more.

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INVESTIGATING THE UNKNOWN “Proteins are temperamental.” That’s what Assistant Professor Katie Frato tells the students in her biochemistry labs. A protein is made of a linear chain of chemical groups which folds into a specific 3D structure and creates a very specific chemical environment in the center. How the protein “decides” to fold into a particular shape is a huge question in biochemistry and biology.

Dr. Frato’s research group studies a smaller, but related question. She and two student researchers— Miranda Wilson, ’19, and Emily Tabaie, ’19—are studying two very similar diatoms, one of which lives in arctic sea ice and one of which lives in the temperate ocean. How does the sequence of a closely related protein in these two single-celled organisms enable them to adapt so they can maintain the very specific structure necessary for the proteins to function at such dramatically different temperatures?

Dr. Frato says, “How organisms evolve to grow in such different environments is a very ecological question. But it’s also a kind of engineering question. If we can figure out how biology defines the structure that these proteins have, then as biochemical engineers could we design a protein that works at different temperatures?”

There are many industrial applications that use proteins. For example, laundry detergents contain enzymes that break apart fats. If those enzymes worked better in cold water, doing the laundry would be much more energy efficient. Dr. Frato’s former research student Saveeta Rampur, ’17, is now testing laundry and dish detergents at DuPont in the Bay Area.

Both Miranda and Emily are Cell and Molecular Biology majors, minoring in Chemistry. Miranda joined Dr. Frato’s lab shortly after changing her major to Cell and Molecular Biology two years ago. “I chose this project because it combined both chemistry and biology, with an emphasis on biochemistry, and explored a discipline of science I knew very little about,” she says. “I have learned much more than there would be time for in a classroom setting.”

“Science is universal. The more science courses I take, the more I realize I want to be the person asking the big questions.”

MIRANDA WILSON, ’18 CMOL

Emily has worked on this project since last spring. “It’s so rewarding when an experiment goes as expected,” she says. “It also tests your problem-solving skills, because when an experiment does not go the way you expected, you have to troubleshoot and find another method to get the results you wanted.”

“We have great data on this project,” Dr. Frato says. The students presented their preliminary data at the Biophysical Society National Meeting in San Francisco in February. They are currently “nerding out” on their data and working on a paper for submission in December to either “Proteins: Structure, Function and Bioinformatics” or “Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry.”

COMING IN 2021: SCIENCE ON DISPLAY New multi-investigator labs for world-class research. Flexible teaching labs equipped for science courses at all levels, from the Core to the advanced.

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UNITIES MAKING SMART DEVICES SMARTER Smart homes and the smart devices within them can make day-to-day life easier. But the systems that control smart devices can just as easily cause chaos. What happens if a hacker inserts malicious code into the system that controls a smart device?

How can smart home systems protect users against data leaks—or worse?

Computer Science majors Mengshan Chen, ’18, ’20, and Jared Alonzo, ’19, spent the summer probing for vulnerabilities in a system that coordinates and controls numerous smart devices found in smart homes. Mentored by Assistant Professor David Lillethun, the students chose to work with the system that controls a smart lock.

After first creating a legitimate application that communicated with the smart lock, the students developed malicious code and installed it within the system controlling the lock. Eventually, Jared and Mengshan successfully simulated a malicious smart app that could leak sensitive data, undetected.

Rendering by EYP/Mithun

“The tool we used to leak information did not have any built-in features that would prevent developers from abusing it,” Jared says.

Because the vulnerability they found is within the system itself—not within the smart lock—it could affect all smart devices that use the system.

The team’s findings are important, and the two students are now working on a paper with guidance from Dr. Lillethun. What’s more, both students have made significant progress toward their own personal and professional goals.

Mengshan, who entered the Master of Science in Computer Science (MSCS) program in September, says this project has provided valuable research experience, while exposing her to many aspects of the software engineering process.

For Jared, this project opens up avenues for a career focused on Internet of Things (IoT) security. “Once we know about a security problem in a smart device we could potentially design an app that protects it,” he says. “Otherwise, there’s no telling what a crafty hacker could achieve.”

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ROSS-CAMPUS COLLAB

THE PERFECT INTERFACE

Tucked away on the Seattle U campus is Middle College High School (MCHS), an alternative school for students who have not had success in the Seattle Public Schools system. “They need a fresh start, and we offer a small, personalized environment designed to give them confidence,” says administrator Steve Miranda, who also teaches humanities courses at the school.

“Many of the MCHS students struggle with attendance,” he says. “I started wondering about a digital system that could give students daily feedback on their attendance.” For help, he turned to Computer Science Instructor Mike Koenig.

This challenge was the perfect opportunity for the students in Mike Koenig’s Software Lifecycle course, part of the career change certificate program in Computer Science. The first step in any software development project is gathering requirements, and the students did just that, interviewing Steve for 90 minutes! Afterward, working in 10 teams of four, they got busy.

Soon, 11 students from the Digital Design program housed in the College of Arts and Sciences joined the CS students. Six very intense weeks later, the student teams were ready to present their ideas to Steve Miranda.

“The 10 teams pitched me as if I were their client,” he says.

“They were super professional, really outstanding. I liked components of each proposal. They decided to create our attendance system by combining the best elements from each team’s proposal.”

With the academic year rapidly coming to an end, Mike Koenig asked if any of the students would be willing to keep working over the summer—as volunteers. Nearly a dozen hands went up.

Why would the students work for free during their holiday break?

Front-end designer Alice Zhang, ’19, was motivated by the opportunity to work on a software design project from end to end. Digital Design graduate Samantha Schnabel, ’18, says this was a rare opportunity to work on an interdisciplinary team. And recent graduate Troy Osland, ’18, rose to the challenge, tackling aspects of the project above and beyond his undergraduate experience.

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BORATION “This project gave me a taste of many different aspects of the software development cycle,” says Karen Marcjan, ’18, ’20, a former psychology researcher who recently completed the career change certificate program in CS. “The experience was the perfect bridge to the MSCS program.”

On September 5, the team deployed the new system—now called Attendance Star—complete with customizable avatars and even a game component. The MCHS students have been beta testing the system. For the CS and Digital Design students, the project demonstrated that a group of highly motivated people from different disciplines can make a significant difference when they come together with a single purpose.

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COMING IN 2021: CREATIVITY + TECHNOLOGY + DIY = INNOVATION From fine arts to computer science, drama to electrical engineering, students from every field of study will use technology, tools and materials to bring their ideas to life in the new Maker Space—learning as they go.

All students are welcome, and the possibilities are almost endless.

COMING IN 2021 :

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A NEW ERA IN STEM AT SEATTLE UNIVERSITY THE CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND INNOVATION The CSI is more than stone, steel and glass. It is the new heart of the university. A place to shape the next generation of leaders. A place where students will gain the skills and knowledge to solve the most pressing problems of today—and tomorrow.

MAKE AN IMPACT. MAKE A GIFT. Alumni, parents, corporate partners, foundations and friends—it’s going to take all of us!

For the future of our students.

For the future of our community.

Together, we are greater than the sum of our parts.

KEEP THE MOMENTUM GOING! Visit seattleu.edu/scieng Select the GIVE button in the right column Designate Center for Science and Innovation or Science and Engineering Dean’s Fund

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Contact Michelle Finet 206-296-2846 / finetm@seattleu.edu

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GREATER THAN THE SUM OF OUR PARTS You’ve read the stories. You’ve seen how our students and faculty are reaching beyond our campus to collaborate on wonderful projects. More students than ever are having life-changing experiences and producing impressive results. Working across disciplines, they are achieving more together than they ever could on their own.

I am very proud of all of them. And I am excited about what’s coming next!

In 2019 we will launch the Center for Science and Innovation project by breaking ground on a new, five-story building housing our biology, chemistry and computer science programs. In the new building, computer science seniors will work in an environment modeled after top companies, engaging with faculty mentors and industry liaisons on yearlong research and development projects. Upstairs, our teaching labs will be bustling with undergraduates from across campus taking their science classes, while biology, biochemistry and chemistry majors will collaborate with their professors on cutting-edge research in multi-investigator labs.

The CSI project also provides a fantastic opportunity to create a better teaching and learning environment in our existing buildings. New research labs for engineering professors will allow research in these fields to reach new heights. An integrated Engineering Project Center will bring together our teams of senior engineering majors, fostering creativity and increasing engagement with industry partners. More than a dozen new study rooms will provide attractive spaces where students can meet with their peers to complete class projects.

In every corner of the three-building STEM complex, our students will be exploring new possibilities.

STEM majors in every discipline will collaborate with faculty researchers investigating contemporary problems. Senior-level engineering and computer science majors will dive deep into yearlong projects assigned by our industry partners. Students from across campus will bring their creative ideas to life in the new Maker Space. Others will become disc jockeys at KXSU-FM, and still others will visit the Center for Community Engagement and sign up for service opportunities in our neighborhood.

Forward-thinking students. Top-notch, innovative faculty.

Dedicated staff. Engaged alumni. Together, we are much more than the sum of our parts. Together, we will usher in a new era in STEM education at Seattle University.

Michael J. Quinn, PhD Dean, College of Science and Engineering

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY 901 12th Ave PO Box 222000 Seattle, WA 98122

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A NEW ERA IN STEM ARRIVES IN 2021 Rendering by EYP/Mithun

Find out more: seattleu.edu/science-innovation

Michael J. Quinn, PhD Dean, College of Science and Engineering

seattleu.edu/scieng Printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper free of chlorine chemistry. Printed with bio-renewable inks.