CLASS HIGHLIGHTS

INTO THE MIX CLASS HIGHLIGHTS

Senior Capstone Project: She is the Music Database Engineering can be used as a mechanism for social change, especially when students have the opportunity to implement their own ideas through senior capstone projects. Together, Ashley Wicks ’20, Laurel Haeger ’20, and Zaila Foster ’20 built a database to connect women in the music industry. Ashley, Laurel, and Zaila all recognize that women have been and continue to be underrepresented in the music industry. Furthermore, they emphasize that women of color are especially marginalized in this industry. The three teammates conjectured, “If we offer an easier way for women to be discovered and connected to projects in the music industry, representation of women might increase.” To address this problem, their engineering goal was to build a product to support a pipeline for both current and future generations of women in music—a product that is easily accessible by both the general public and professionals. The three women built a VOCL (Voices of Change Leaders) database, which allows users to search, sort, and filter in order to locate various female artists. The foundation provided by Tufts Engineering allowed the three seniors to construct a project that addressed a pertinent real-world issue.

EN-0001 Applications in Engineering: Engineering in Crises Interested in examining engineering ethics alongside engineering design processes? Engineering in Crises explores a different topic each term that it is offered. When Elana Chan ’21 took the course, it was “centered on case studies, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and [the] 2010 Haiti earthquake and cholera outbreak, which made lectures super engaging.” Elana says that the course included multiple, hands-on projects. Her favorite was building a small-scale levee to test in the structures lab. “I learned so much about context-specific engineering and the role of engineering in public health throughout the semester,” she reflects. “This course solidified my decision to pursue engineering!” René LaPointe Jameson ’22 thinks that Engineering in Crises is a great example of Tufts Engineering as a whole: “I really enjoyed how collaborative [this class] was… Tufts Engineering is challenging, but not competitive amongst students. We engage with one another to learn and consider new ideas. I like to think the only competition that goes on is with yourself in an attempt to grow and do better.”

Tackling real-world problems encourages students to think outside the box, and Tufts engineers engage in this kind of learning from day one. Introduction to Engineering courses, or “EN1,” are anything but surface-level—allowing for innovative thinking, collaboration, and real impact. Tufts engineers end their four years in the same way, through groundbreaking senior capstone projects. Explore a mix of unique courses below. —Kamille Bernard ’21

EN-0001 Applications in Engineering: Music and Art of Engineering Is audio engineering your forte? Many of the songs we all know and love use an immense amount of electrical diagnostics during production. This course allows students to gain a deeper understanding of the physics of sound, audio engineering, and electronic music synthesis. From pitch, tone, and distortion to amplification, sampling, and digital filtering, students in this course learn critical aspects of audio engineering, using MATLAB as a computational tool for engineering problems that are focused on the digital synthesis of sound. After taking the class, Kamar Godoy ’22 now feels “confident enough that if you wanted me to turn your laptop keyboard into a piano, saxophone, or even your own voice, I could do so.” One might think that music and engineering are entirely separate fields, but this class shows that the two can be in tune.

EN-0001 Applications in Engineering: Innovation in Biomedical Engineering The goal of biomedical engineering is to utilize big picture themes to gain insight into the current state of technology and its relationship to the future of human health and well-being. In this course, all students work together in teams to challenge the limitations of technology and project future technological opportunities. Ishan Ahuja ’23 describes his final project, in which the task was to create a new piece of technology that would solve a problem in the biomedical field: “While our project had to be grounded in current scientific research, we were encouraged to think outside the box, as well as be creative in our presentation medium. My group and I decided on a self-sufficient insulin patch, which would produce insulin through photosynthesis and deliver directly through its interface with the body. But we were perplexed—how would we explain this already far-reaching project with an even more ambitious medium? Then one night, it came to us... a rap. By the end, we had not only learned a lot about insulin production and delivery and the vast future possibilities in the field of biomedical engineering, but we’d produced a fire rap song.”

TUFTS’ TOP 10 STUDENT INVENTIONS

Designing, building, and inventing are at the core of Tufts Engineering. Whether revolutionizing robot communication, advancing autonomous vehicles, or problem-solving patient-saving equipment during a pandemic, Tufts engineers don’t wait until after they graduate to innovate.

SENIOR DESIGN PROJECTS

Thread-Based Data Glove How do you make a data glove user-friendly and cost-effective? Using the resources of the Tufts Nanolab, Danny Bronshvayg ’20, Aaron Epstein ’20, Nadya Ganem ’20, and Ben Santaus ’20 achieved this goal by developing a thread-based sensor for each finger of their data glove, which can identify hand rotation and detection.

Multichannel Micropipette You can find many Tufts engineers partnering with local startups to kick-start their senior design projects. Courtland Priest ’20 and Jordan Hindes ’20 prototyped a multichannel micropipette for the Tufts University Medical School. Through developing a standardized diagnostic technique, this multichannel micropipette will reduce error rates and develop a calibration standard for breast cancer diagnosis.

CLASS PROJECTS

Swarmbots As part of their junior research project, Ashwin Swar ’20, Chris Markus ’20, Benny Roover ’20, and Danielle Blelloch ’20 set out to create one of the first fully autonomous passenger vehicles. These vehicles, known as swarmbots, were equipped with color sensors, a collision detection and pedestrian detection system, headlights, brake lights, and even turn signals. These swarmbots were able to successfully navigate a simulated city block.

Visualizing a Robot’s Perspective of the World Want to learn what’s going on inside the mind of a robot? Working together with Professors Jivko Sinapov and James Schomolze, Amel Hassan ’20 and Faizan Muhammad ’20 used augmented reality software to project robots’ inside thoughts. This brought them one step closer to improving how robots communicate with humans.

Lopbot What can Tufts engineers invent with a budget of $400 and three months’ time? Human factors engineering major Janna Sokolow ’20 and her team created a vacuum impeller, motor, suction mechanism, and power system...all to build their very own autonomous, high-powered, high-volume, industrial shop vac!

Fighting Covid-19: Flowmeter Tufts engineers solve real-world problems outside and inside of the classroom. As part of his mechanical engineering design class, Kamar Godoy ’22 designed a flowmeter that would help adjust ventilators to treat more COVID-19 patients. As hospitals become more crowded and life support resources more limited, doctors are expecting the need to have four people per ventilator. Kamar’s apparatus could help reconfigure the ventilators and balance the airflow equally to multiple people.

Addressing Medical Non-Adherence in the Elderly For their product design class, Becky Lee ’22, Katie Jordan ’22, Noaf Alsheikh-Ali ’22, and Sami Rubin ’22 formed the team MedCo and took on a challenge from Design Science, a human factors engineering company located in Pennsylvania. For this semester-long project, the team performed user research, planned usability tests, and designed an app and interactive pillbox to help address medical non-adherence in the elderly population.

Smart Toys for Kids Imagine building and inventing as soon as you arrive to Tufts as a first-year student! For Anica Zulch ’23, Madeleine Pero ’23, Kennedy May ’23, and Kate Wujciak ’23, that’s exactly what happened in their Introduction to Engineering (EN1) course, Inventing Smart Toys for Kids. By building circuits, writing code, and crafting puzzle pieces with neodymium magnets, this team developed an electronic puzzle that would know when it has been completed. They even created an app so parents can see how long it takes their children to complete the puzzle.

Programming a Pendulum When she was assigned a pendulum project with other students in her engineering science class, Madeline Fabela ’23 faced her first ever coding challenge. After building a two-foot-tall pendulum in the Nolop FAST Facility, her team gathered data about the acceleration, displacement, and speed of the pendulum, and then wrote a script that analyzed and plotted the data. The project not only introduced her to computer programming, but also allowed her to better understand what she was learning in her physics course.

CLUB PROJECT

TEMS Tracker Tufts students are always helping each other! Design for Social Good (DSG) club members worked together with Tufts’ Emergency Medical Services (TEMS) to create an ambulance tracker system. Built from Arduinos, this tracker updates the location of the university’s EMS truck every 10 seconds and collects driving data. With this information, the student EMTs working for TEMS can organize better shift changes and improve their response to medical emergencies. A safer and healthier campus to look forward to!

ENTREPRENEURSHIP FOR HUMANITY

Kevin Oye ’79 is the executive director of the Tufts Gordon Institute, which fosters engineering leadership and provides venture opportunities through its Entrepreneurship Center. Professor Oye believes in business and technology for good. We spoke about what makes this possible, and teachable.

BY ABIGAIL MCFEE ’17

What distinguishes the Tufts approach to entrepreneurship? At Tufts, we care more about developing the entrepreneurial mindset in all our students than teaching them just the mechanics of startups or measuring our success by the number of startups they launch. It’s more important to us that they discover how to find problems that matter, and develop the tools and agency to take action, risk failure, and persist even when challenged, knowing they can make a difference. We differentiate our approach to entrepreneurship in three ways: 1) Rather than just focus on generating startups, we aspire to give every Tufts student the opportunity to experience the entrepreneurial mindset… 2) We only hire faculty who have deep industry experience… and 3) We take a very practical, hands-on, not theoretical, approach to teaching entrepreneurship, immersing our students in doing, not just studying, venture launching.

You graduated from Tufts yourself with a BS in electrical engineering and then eventually returned as a faculty member. Could you speak a bit about that journey? It takes more than an understanding of technology to drive a successful technology business, especially during times of rapid change… Becoming a trusted leader requires humility, empathy, and a deep appreciation for the richness a diverse group can bring to a creative enterprise… It was at Tufts that I first began to realize this, when I took Jungian Interpretation of French Literature with Professor Seymour Simches. It was a remarkable class; through the lens of interpreting French literature with Jungian concepts, he conveyed the importance of seeing the uniqueness in every individual, and the importance of encouraging and nurturing that uniqueness…as the bedrock for continuing creativity in society, whether it be the arts, sciences, government, or business.

Tufts engineers today are fortunate to have access not only to top engineering and liberal arts faculty, classes, and research, but also top entrepreneurial and business faculty with deep industry experience. Taking classes far afield from their technology roots increases the probability they’ll run into ideas and people they did not expect, which can be the sources of the deepest insights into oneself, other people, and the world we live in. By developing their people skills as well as technology skills, they’ll be more than great engineers,

they’ll be great engineering leaders. The world needs leaders who are steeped both in technology and business skills, with deep sensitivity to humanity, to ensure we do great good, and not great evil, with all the emerging technologies. What better place to start this journey than at Tufts?

What opportunities are available to students through the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center (TEC)? Over 500 undergraduates a year take one of our entrepreneurship classes and over 100 complete the requirements for an undergraduate minor in entrepreneurship, making it the most popular undergraduate minor at Tufts. Besides offering classes on a variety of topics, from startup launching to marketing and finance to leadership, the TEC also hosts a number of co-curricular events, including workshops and weekly venture cafes featuring entrepreneurs, many of them Tufts alumni, sharing their wisdom and stories. A variety of pitch contests, hackathons, and the annual school-wide $100k New Venture Competition, give students multiple opportunities to learn and practice the entrepreneurial mindset and skillset. Along with Professor James Intriligator (Mechanical Engineering) and Professor Chris Swan (Civil and Environmental Engineering), you co-taught a course on commercializing research. How do engineering and business go hand-in-hand? It takes more than having a great technical idea to impact society. The technology has to be applied to a tough problem in a more compelling way than existing approaches. Discovering how to translate research into applied solutions, and building a viable business model that is scalable and financially investable, is what we cover in our commercializing research class. It’s been a joy coteaching this class with James and Chris, as we each bring unique and complementary perspectives, and can be great facilitators and sounding boards for our students, helping them discover within themselves the confidence and creativity to translate research into societal impact.

In partnership with the Tisch College of Civic Life, the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center has created a new minor in entrepreneurship for social impact. Could you speak to its purpose? As the world is changing so rapidly, we need people in large and small organizations, for profit and nonprofit, governments and NGOs, who see the world with fresh eyes and take the risks to experiment with new ideas, knowing they may fail many times before they succeed, but [who are] confident they will converge faster and with higher quality solutions to our biggest challenges. The new entrepreneurship for social impact minor gives students the opportunity to develop and apply the entrepreneurial mindset to social issues. It’s a powerful combination.

Is there a particular story that stands out to you of Tufts engineer-entrepreneurs making an impact? Alex Rappaport graduated from Tufts in 2017 with an undergraduate degree in environmental/environmental health engineering and a minor in entrepreneurship. He then enrolled in the Master of Science in Innovation and Management program (MSIM) at the Gordon Institute where he connected with chemical engineering Professor Ayse Asatekin who had recently developed a new patented membrane filter technology that had the unique property that it didn’t clog. Working with a team of other MSIM graduate students, Alex reached out and did over 100 interviews across multiple industries to discover opportunities to leverage the technology into industrial water treatment applications that are superior to existing filtration methods while also lower cost, and longer lasting. In the spring of 2018, the team entered the Tufts $100k New Venture Competition where they captured first place in the technology track and received their first investor inquiry. Within months of completing his MSIM degree, Alex launched ZwitterCo, raised over $1.2M, and is now in the midst of entering pilot trials and closing a multimillion-dollar investment round. It’s a wonderful example of a Tufts engineering student combining his engineering technology skills with his entrepreneurial mindset…to build a company that translates leadingedge research into a venture that will have great positive impact on society… He is a role model as we build a worldwide community of transformative leaders, with heart.

You can put the “E” in “Extracurricular” by joining an engineering-themed student organization and put your skills and knowledge to work alongside equally passionate peers. Explore just three of these clubs below.

JOIN THE CLUB

DESIGN FOR SOCIAL GOOD

Problem-solving is messy. People often brainstorm first and then realize their idea doesn’t solve the right problem or carries unexpected issues. Design thinking is a process that prevents either scenario, making it an essential skill for modern engineers. For this reason, one of Tufts’ newest clubs, Design for Social Good (DSG), is rapidly rising in popularity as members are trained in design thinking and take on challenges to help the community.

DSG focuses on user-centric solutions. Students aren’t just building—they’re learning to be empathetic by talking, interviewing, and discussing with clients. Through workshops and hands-on projects, they identify problems, brainstorm, and prototype. Through partnerships with other engineering clubs, any DSG student can learn to code, solder, and more.

DSG’s first partnership was with a retirement center. Students added GPS capability to the center’s life alert system, allowing nurses to identify the locations and needs of patients. DSG’s second partnership was with the immigrant nonprofit group The Welcome Project. Students designed a low-cost sound dampener to minimize the noise pollution disrupting people’s lifestyles. They also created a collapsible device to help the nonprofit organize their paper documents better.

DSG is part of Tufts’ Maker Network. This network also includes Tufts’ MAKE Club, which is dedicated to helping students access the tools, knowledge, and space needed to build their next great inventions. From offering tours of engineering companies to hosting Python workshops, both clubs embody the supportive spirit of Tufts engineers.

ENGINEERS WITHOUT BORDERS

Tufts’ Engineers Without Borders (EWB) is an incredible student organization that designs and implements sustainable engineering projects in developing communities. The club’s goal is to build a better world through engineering projects that empower people to meet their basic human needs. Founded in 2004, the club has since grown to 17,000 members (current students and alumni!) and welcomes students of all majors in order to integrate the strengths of liberal arts, fine arts, and engineering. Talk about a triple threat! The club also partners with professionals and faculty members and builds robust relationships with partner communities. Previous communities that the club has worked with include: Shilongo (Uganda), Porvenir and Arada Vieja (El Salvador), and El Cristal (Ecuador).

In recent years, the club has partnered with two nonprofit organizations. The first organization is Joshua Orphan and Community Care (JOCC) based in the Solomoni Community in Malawi, Africa. The project for the club’s Malawi chapter is called Clean Water Access. Tufts students are designing, testing, and developing a system that would help residents, particularly primary and secondary school students, access clean water. The second organization EWB is now collaborating with is the in-country office in Silvio Mayorga, Nicaragua. A wildlife refuge, Reserva Silvestre Quelantaro, is also involved to monitor any environmental impacts of EWB’s work. For this particular project, Tufts students are planning to improve the community’s central water storage tank, pump, and distribution system.

For each partnership, EWB members travel to the community to experience the environment firsthand and form connections with the people they’re serving. They also conduct interviews, test samples on-site, and supervise construction. EWB projects are a fantastic example of the hands-on experience offered by Tufts, as students not only apply their classroom knowledge, but also develop new skills such as CAD modeling, site evaluation, and negotiation. To learn more about their projects, check out EWB’s website!

STEM AMBASSADORS

Run through the Center for STEM Diversity (CSD) and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, STEM Ambassadors is a professional development and mentorship program for students in the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering. STEM Ambassadors partner with local high schools to lead workshops on various relevant, engaging STEM topics. In creating and leading these workshops, ambassadors become stronger communicators and leaders. As first-generation, underrepresented students themselves, STEM Ambassadors are inspiring the next generation of STEM students.

For this most recent academic year, 21 Tufts students are part of STEM Ambassadors—the largest group in the program’s history! With an increase in size, the program has been able to increase its presence in the local community and expand its curriculum to include Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) and special needs classrooms. One of their most popular lessons covers the fundamentals of kinetic and potential energy. In this activity, students build roller coaster tracks throughout their entire classrooms using foam tubing. STEM ambassadors inspire students to gain new scientific perspectives on everyday activities.

STEM Ambassadors are passionate about issues surrounding accessibility and representation in STEM fields. Kamar Godoy ’22, a mechanical engineering major, shares his connection to the program: “I am a STEM Ambassador because it allows me to give back to the community that encouraged me to get into STEM and pursue a college degree. High school students need to see other students of color excelling in college and in STEM… I want them to know that they have everything in them to be as successful as they want to be and that it is their culture, beliefs, color, and community that make them far more important than they could ever imagine.” In forging connections with underrepresented students, STEM Ambassadors are redefining what it takes to succeed in STEM. Follow their Instagram, @stemambassadors_tufts, to meet more ambassadors and to learn about their projects!