22 minute read
INFOGRAPHIC
A DAY IN THE LIFE 3
ELYSIA CHANG ’23 BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING
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9:04 AM *Cue iPhone Alarm Radar Sound*... Snooze Count: 2
9:23 AM Time to get up—accept the fact that I will never be a morning person
9:45 AM Pick up my usual breakfast order from Hodgdon Food-on-the-Run: coffee w/ cream and sugar + Medford bagel (cream cheese, onion, dill & cucumber on a plain bagel) 10:30 AM Engineering Science 2: Introduction to Computing: Professor Cross in the Science and Engineering Complex Anderson Wing
11:43 AM Join my two friends Gaby & Tara on our short walk between classes
12:00 PM Physics 11: Professor Hammer
1:30 PM Social Psychology: Professor Remedios begins. We learn about famous social psychology research studies and how they relate to our real life—everything from love and attraction to prejudice and stereotypes.
3:00 PM Math 34 (Calculus 2) Recitation
3:50 PM Now the fun part begins! This semester, I’m working in Professor Kaplan’s Biomedical Engineering Lab with the Cellular Agriculture team on research projects regarding culturing cells and growing meat in the lab. 5:30 PM Walk back to Houston Hall to begin some homework so I can have most of my weekend free to hang out with my friends or explore Boston
7:00 PM Dinner at Carmichael Dining Hall with some friends on my Houston Hall fl oor
8:15 PM Club Volleyball practice in Chase Gym
11:00 PM FaceTime my family and friends from back home, then call it a day!
BECKY LEE ’22 HUMAN FACTORS ENGINEERING
10 AM Wake up and make tea
10:30 AM Open laptop and start working on emails and to-do list
12:00 PM
Lunch time!
1:30 PM Engineering
Forensics: Professor
Pollard & Stearns
3:00 PM
Human-Machine System Design: Professor Intriligator
No day is alike for any two Tufts engineers—so we asked three Tufts engineers to share a day in the life, complete with classes, snacks, and shenanigans.
5:00 PM Make dinner with my roomie (challenge: college version of miso soup without miso)
6:00 PM Computer Aided Design: Professor Marshall
8:00 PM E-Board meeting for Wuzee (a Chinese fusion dance club)
9:00 PM Homework and Fun Fact Night with roomie (share random facts learned in class)
12:00 AM Time to sleep
ANDREW VU ’22 COMPUTER SCIENCE
8:55 AM Walk briskly up Packard Avenue to get to my 9 AM. Calves are burning.
9 AM Computer Science 170: Computation Theory in Cabot Center. Always get my mind blown on how a computer actually works!
10:15 AM Class ends. I call my friend to meet up at the base of the Memorial Steps.
10:20 AM Blast pump-up music with my friend to get ready for our swim class
10:30 AM Swim!
12 PM Go to Curtis Hall to attend the Redefi ning the Image of Science and Engineering (RISE) Alumni Lunch. Present peer leadership project!
2 PM Lunch with my friends! Begin working on homework so I don’t get swamped for the weekend
4 PM Nap time. Nap time is very powerful.
6 PM Grab Hodgon and get ready for my Senator Education Committee Meeting!
7 PM “Walk-in” in the senate offi ce. Catch up with my senate friends and continue working on pushing for a diversity course requirement at Tufts
8 PM Meeting ends. I meet my whole suite downstairs at the Campus Center and get ready to work out!
9 PM Headphones in and ready to get pumped!
10:30 PM Gym closes; head back to Haskell Hall
11:30 PM Sit in the common room with friends and just talk about our days and how we feel
1 AM Yawn too much and decide to go to bed
MARINA RUEDA GARCIA ’21
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING MAJOR FROM GRANADA, SPAIN
Ever since she was little, Marina Rueda Garcia has delighted in learning through doing. When she began her college search, it was a dream to her that the School of Engineering at Tufts not only enables students to apply concepts every day in small-sized laboratory courses but also guides students towards research and internship opportunities at the undergraduate level. Three years after first entering Tufts, Marina describes to me her 3,500- mile journey from Spain to the Hill.
As the only student in her class to leave Spain for college, Marina was terrified to start a new life abroad. But upon entering the pre-orientation program GO, short for Global Orientation, she felt less alone. Reflecting on the enthusiastic, caring student leaders that welcomed her onto campus, she feels happy that she was able to “find [her] community right away” and have the resources to help her through culture shock. Through GO, she was pleased to meet new friends who also traveled from worlds away and, with them, share “what home means” to her. Marina’s positive experience as a first-year motivated her to contribute to the program as a second-year host advisor. Marina declares GO to be one of her favorite experiences at Tufts. Now entering her senior year, she remains close friends and neighbors with her co-participants and co-advisors.
Marina beams when she speaks about the collaborative and positive energy she encounters in her academic classes each and every day. Though in high school she felt isolated as the sole woman in her 20-student STEM classes, she pushed through others’ alienating comments and gender expectations to take the engineering classes she loved. Upon entering Tufts, she was amazed at how, in her entering class, nearly 50% of incoming engineers identified as women. Marina was hopeful that she “would not feel out of place anymore.” During
her first day of classes, when her ideas were greeted with the same consideration as those of her male classmates, she felt that she could confidently say, “I belong here.” This fall, she is most excited to craft independent projects on chemical reactions in her biotechnology processes laboratory course. Through direct application of the concepts she has learned, she is eager to further shape her view of how she will apply her coursework in the chemical engineering field.
When considering her academic support system, Marina makes sure to credit the strong women who support her throughout the highs and lows of chemical engineering. She feels continually empowered by her mother, who studied engineering and taught her that she deserves to take up space and pursue what she is passionate about. At Tufts, Marina is inspired by her major advisor Ayse Asatekin, who is an international chemical engineering professor specializing in polymer science. Glowing with pride for her ever-helpful mentor, she shares that “it is really comforting” to see a woman of similar circumstances achieve success in chemical engineering and be able to think, “Okay. I can do this too!” During their one-on-one meetings, Marina always looks forward to receiving helpful advice and tasty chocolates.
To Marina, home is her family and how they treat each other. She hopes to bring a piece of home to Tufts in her everyday life, as she tries to hold the same values that she learned from her parents. And through giving guidance to sophomores as a community development assistant, offering support to other international students as a Global Orientation host advisor, and attending lunches with prospective applicants as a mentor, she does just that. —KEESHA PATRON ’21
UNREAL RESEARCH
FOR THE REAL WORLD
By Chris Panella ’21
The phrase “tier-one research university” can feel like intimidating college jargon. It’s a classifi cation given to institutions that have a high supply and high demand for research opportunities. On the Hill, “tier-one” is a title we’re especially proud of. It means that Tufts off ers incredible research resources to its students—especially undergraduate students. Our students and faculty care about doing research that’s socially engaged, generating ideas that improve lives and the world. That “tier-one research university” designation becomes concrete when we look at the numbers: at Tufts, more than 60% of engineering students pursue independent research. And for the Class of 2020, 57% did research with a faculty member.
Those numbers always surprise me, but I’m more struck by the motivation behind this research; it’s fueled by passion and a desire to make the world a better place. I’m not an engineer, but it is apparent that Tufts engineers work to make themselves, their resources, and their work accessible. To learn more about what it’s like to do research with students, I call Associate Professor Ayse Asatekin.
At the end of her PhD, Asatekin co-founded Clean Membranes, Inc., a start-up company with the goal of commercializing a project she had worked on during her PhD—developing new materials for water fi ltration membranes. Then, in 2012, she joined the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Tufts. Asatekin’s lab does good work— both morally and evaluatively—that spans from research to thinking about commercial stages for companies. Her group studies the research’s real-world applications, which include “improving the energy effi ciency of chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing” and “designing new plastics that will create controlled properties” for the fi lters that the lab makes.
This work is impressive—I’m truthfully in awe of how lucky we are to have Asatekin at Tufts—but Asatekin’s connection with students is perhaps the most exciting part. “Research is an excellent way to mentor graduate and undergraduate students,” she says. Her group usually includes four graduate students, two postdoctoral students, and anywhere from two to fi ve undergraduate students. “Being able to mentor them and being able to see them work together is really rewarding,” Asatekin comments, before adding that for some of those students, the skills they learn in the lab and the connections they make can lead to exciting job opportunities.
In Asatekin’s lab, students get involved and take lead on the work. But even outside of working with faculty, Tufts students can pursue independent research, allowing them to focus on their particular passions. To me, no student is a better example of this than Hezekiah Branch ’21.
Branch, who’s majoring in cognitive and brain sciences and double minoring in computer science and engineering management, has completed multiple projects involving data science. “I think about data science as working with information in multiple forms, whatever that may be,” Branch explains to me, “and whatever insights you can draw from it.”
Branch’s fi rst exposure to data science—and the technical aspects of the fi eld—was Dataquest, a coding bootcamp he was involved in during his fi rst year at Tufts. Since then, Branch’s work in the fi eld has ranged from data science internships to a computer science teaching assistant position. In 2018, he founded Code with Hezekiah, a coding boot camp that equips students with design and engineering skills, and in 2019, he co-founded Tufts Black Students
Ian Jones ‘20 uses data gloves to control a complex audiovisual display, which harnesses the inspiration of synesthesia to model patterns in data. in Computer Science, Tufts’ fi rst organization for Black students studying computer science. “It was really good experience not only getting to learn about data science, but also being able to create events and programs,” he confi rms.
And this experience continues, even during the summertime. “Right now, I’m working on a mobile app with a team of students through this IBM program,” he says. “It’s looking at streamlining donor processes. It’s really about creating an almost radical, transparent way of seeing where every donor’s dollar is tracked from the funds they contribute.”
But even with so much independent experience already under his belt, Branch still fi nds time to work with professors on research. “I was able to do research in the Psychology Department on artifi cial intelligence last year, and I’ll be working in a machine learning lab this fall.” Branch’s work in the lab this fall will directly connect to the School of Engineering’s Master’s in Data Science combined degree program, which Branch was recently accepted into.
Like Branch, many Tufts community members pursue multiple passions— through taking classes and participating in research projects that excite us. The phrase “multiple passions” seems especially relevant for Professor of the Practice James Intriligator.
I call Professor Intriligator—we’re having Zoom connection problems—and ask him about his career history, which includes working with high-tech consulting fi rms and being a professor of innovation and consumer psychology in Wales (UK). He was brought to Tufts in 2016 to work in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, specifi cally to become the director of Tufts’ Human Factors Engineering program. “I’m just trying to create more of a community in the program,” he explains. “And to involve more ideas of civic engagement.” Now, with student involvement and plenty of research projects, the program is thriving.
One of Intriligator’s most interesting ventures is a research project focused on an exosuit. “A student, William Liu, and I got to talking about some ideas about exoskeletons and exosuits. He started working in my lab and invited some other students, and—long story short—we now have about a dozen students volunteering in the lab,” says Intriligator.
The exosuit involves soft robotics, which help guide human movement in a way that’s less abrasive and forceful than what we might think of when we imagine an exosuit. “The idea is that it helps you make gentle adjustments, like making movements on your back when it measures that you’re not sitting up straight,” Intriligator explains. The work is making big progress. “We’ve evolved fairly quickly in the past few months,” he adds, but there’s more work to be done to think about what the exosuit would look like—Intriligator chuckles that it could be shoulder pads or a “Michael Jackson glove”—and what it would be like on the commercial market.
Intriligator is working on plenty of other projects, as well, like MIDAS (a catchy acronym for Multisensory Interactive Data Analysis System). “My whole life, I’ve had synesthesia,” Intriligator tells me, “and whenever I hear music, I see patterns, colors, and shapes.” It’s the same neurological condition that music artists Lorde and Billie Eilish have. Intriligator’s synesthesia inspired him to think about how to apply these pattern phenomena to data. “I realized that we should be able to make a system that lets people see patterns in data,” he explains.
It’s certainly a cool idea. Intriligator offers examples, like using sounds or colors to show a consumer confi dence pattern or a trend in data that we normally wouldn’t see. Now, MIDAS is funded by the Missile Defense Agency, partnered with Triton Systems, and full of students excited to complete research in the project. In addition to these projects, Intriligator has students working on projects ranging from self-driving cars and virtual reality to military cave exploration and collaborative public art works.
These research projects blend interests and areas of study, expanding far beyond the classroom. But I’m still not sure what research inside the classroom looks like for engineers. Is it all related to their specifi c fi elds of study? Or is it more interdisciplinary? To learn more, I talk to Becky Lee ’22, a human factors engineering major and engineering management minor. She’s also one of Intriligator’s advisees.
“I’m interested in the potential of human factors engineering in traditional business fi elds,” Lee explains. This led her to take a class in entrepreneurial marketing, which involved working with professionals from local start-ups and
companies. “My group and I worked with S2N (Signal to Noise), a local MedTech business and market strategy consulting fi rm.” The fi rm was looking to market their new data analytics tool and wanted to learn what business strategies would work best.
Lee tells me how her group went about this research. They researched the medical technology industry and investigated competitors, their products, and their marketing strategies. It all sounds very Shark Tank to me. “In the end, we were able to fi nd a niche market area for S2N’s product and provide recommendations on how S2N could make their product more competitive,” Lee says. By the end of the project, S2N had congratulated the group on their suggestions and fi ndings. What a fulfi lling project! It shows how interdisciplinary research— even in the classroom—can be.
When I think about impactful research, I’m reminded of a class I took. In the fall of 2019, the Experimental College offered The Technology of Space Exploration: From Voyager to Mars 2020, a Robyn Gittleman Graduate Teaching Fellowship course. Taught by Margaret Stevens, a PhD candidate in electrical engineering, the class followed the history of space exploration and examined the technology behind space missions. I’ve always thought space travel was interesting, and the course material certainly didn’t disappoint.
I call Stevens to hear more about her PhD, which she defended in June. Her research occurs at the Renewed Energy and Applied Photonics Lab. “We look at new materials that can be employed in optoelectronic devices,” Stevens explains, “which are devices that interact with light and electricity.” The lab is directed by Professor Thomas Vandervelde, whose research is focused on optoelectronics and photonics. This includes thermophotovoltaics and solar cells—the former is just like the latter, except thermophotovoltaics can be tuned to absorb any heat source. They’re useful, versatile, and applicable for many projects. Stevens’ research is mainly spent understanding how that applies to space power systems, like for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
“My dissertation was focused on developing new materials for thermophotovoltaic radioisotope power systems,” Stevens explains. Radioisotope power systems are directly connected with space travel—they involve using the heat from the natural decay of plutonium-238 for electricity. It’s something Stevens
explained well in The Technology of Space Exploration. But her fi rst exposure to renewable energy research, and research in general, came long before her PhD. When Stevens was as an undergraduate, she was involved in solar cell research. “When I was looking at graduate schools, I was really looking to do solar cell research,” she explains, “and when I moved to graduate school, I began looking at materials that could go beyond terrestrial applications.” Her work began to make much more sense in other applications, like space travel.
As a NASA Space Technology Research Fellow and an intern at the US Naval Research Laboratory as well as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Stevens saw how various technologies were being researched for space exploration applications and commercialization. It led her to think about designing an Experimental College course, which she saw as an amazing way to continue her work. “The opportunity to design and teach my own course is an unparalleled opportunity,” she notes.
Now, after Stevens has defended her dissertation—she chuckles as she calls herself Dr. Stevens—there is an exciting future for her. “I’m defi nitely looking forward to switching gears and working on something new,” she says. It won’t be the research she’s been doing at Tufts. Rather, Stevens will be at the US Naval Research Laboratory working on lasers and infrared neurostimulation. They’re working towards a rehabilitation device for people who suffer from spinal cord injuries. We take a moment to discuss her bittersweet departure. “I’m excited,” she tells me. “But it is really hard to leave a research project I’ve been working on for six years.”
When I fi nish talking to Stevens, I’m in awe of how expansive these engineering projects are. Researchers at Tufts aren’t driven by any alluring accolade or potential praise. Rather, every single person I talked to was focused on how their work could build something better for the world. For projects like Branch’s coding boot camp, the goals are to create community and teach new skills. In Stevens’ PhD work, the research is all about applicability and the future of energy consumption. And Asatekin’s water fi ltration work is sociological, ecological, and economic. No matter how you slice it, School of Engineering research takes the enormous resources that come from a “tier-one research university” and gives them to projects that make a difference. While those projects are so forward thinking that they can at times sound imaginary, their impact is real.
Since his arrival to Tufts in the fall of 2015, Dean Jianmin Qu has prioritized the interaction of the School of Engineering with everything outside of it, partnering with Tufts’ constellation of schools to encourage experiential learning and innovative thinking. His continued success is seen across the university: Tufts engineers are more creative, forward-thinking, civic-minded, adaptive, and socially-conscious than ever. Dean Qu was originally drawn to Tufts in part because of its interdisciplinary curriculum. Specifically, he believes in the power of an engineering school with strong ties to the liberal arts. “I’ve always believed that engineers shouldn’t be just engineers,” he asserts. “The liberal arts should be a prerequisite to everything.”
Dean Qu’s success as a mechanical engineer is well-trodden territory; his theoretical and applied mechanics research has led to many innovations, including safer airplanes, and his papers and works are studied and used at universities globally. But Dean Qu’s role as a mentor and leader is key to understanding his work at Tufts, which involves a shift in how professors connect with students. “The faculty in the School of Engineering have fostered an environment in which students are encouraged to pursue their interests, whatever those interests might be,” he says.
That seems to be the pride and joy of Dean Qu’s time at Tufts: the increasingly special relationship between faculty and students. But he’s also focused on providing students with the research opportunities and resources necessary to understand the practical applications of their engineering studies and the societal impacts of their work. “Tufts has invested great resources to ensure that students have access to the latest technologies used in the discipline,” he says, highlighting the Nolop FAST Facility, Engineering Project Development Center, and Virtual Engineering Computing Lab, which grant students access to specialized engineering spaces and software. It’s all meant to give students the resources needed to complete their work and prepare for their careers.
And while not every student will “pursue a deep dive into a faculty member’s current research,” Dean Qu says, he notes that research outside the traditional curriculum has increasingly enriched students’ understanding of material. Around 57% of the recently graduated Class of 2020 has done research with a faculty member—a number that shows the accessibility of professors, as more students work with their faculty on exciting projects. Under Dean Qu, engineering research is impacting both students and the world.
But Dean Qu believes the biggest change he’s noticed during his time at Tufts has been the School of Engineering’s growing gender diversity. “In September 2019, we welcomed the most gender-balanced undergraduate class in the School of Engineering’s history,” he says. It’s the first time that women made up more than half of the incoming class—a sign of increasing accessibility and opportunity. This is part of Dean Qu’s and Tufts’ longstanding goal of making the university a more diverse and inclusive environment.
The future, albeit an uncertain topic globally given the current times, is bright for the School of Engineering. Thanks to Dean Qu, the school continues its “unique mission to not only prepare students for success in research and industry, but to empower students to help shape engineering into a just and equitable practice.” Dean Qu relates that unique mission to the unique students who apply to Tufts. “We continue to attract talented and ambitious students who want to address the most pressing needs of society,” he says. And with passionate leadership from Dean Qu, there seems to be no stopping the success and growth of the School of Engineering, or its students. —CHRIS PANELLA ’21
JIANMIN QU
DEAN OF THE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING AND KAROL FAMILY PROFESSOR
