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MagazineSummer 2017BROWN

Engineering

Inside this issue:

Senator Jack Reed Tours School of Engineering Research Labs

With 3D Printing, Students Create a “Wolverine” Arm for Local Boy

Commencement and Awards 2017

BROWN SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING 2 1 SUMMER 2017

Message from the Dean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Faculty and ResearchNew Ceramic Nanofiber “Sponges” Could Be Used For Flexible Insulation, Water Purification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2Sea Sponges Offer Clues to How Human-Made Structures Can Resist Buckling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4Like a Slice of Pizza, a Curvature Could Give Fish Fins Their Strength . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6Senator Jack Reed Tours School of Engineering Research Labs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8Faculty News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10Awards and Honors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

StudentsWith 3D Printing, Students Create a “Wolverine” Arm for Local 12-Year Old . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14Brown Design Workshop Showcase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16Drone-Delivered Cookies Invade College Green as Students Demonstrate Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18Rube Goldberg Society Takes Third with Inaugural Contest Entry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19Commencement and Awards 2017 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20Data Analysis Helps Form Big Picture View for Michael Manning ’17 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22Caleb Tulloss ’18 Looks to Develop Implantable Eye-Tracking System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23Students in the News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24Brown Space Engineering: Nasa Launch Date For Student Space Project Nears . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26Cliff Weitzman ’16 Makes Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28NSF Fellowship, Brown Connections Lead Marielena Gambo Castro ’15 to Cancer Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

Alumni, Corporations, and DonorsCognex - Brown Collaboration Advances Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30Corporate Affiliates Board . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32Advisory Council/Development Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33David DiGiovanni Awarded Brown Engineering Alumni Medal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34Donor Perspective - Ching-i Hsu ScM ’70 PhD ’74 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35Donor Perspective - Conrad Herrmann ’82 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36Campaign For Engineering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .IBC

School of Engineering MagazineEditor - Gordon Morton ’93Manager of Communications & External RelationsBrown School of EngineeringEditorial Assistance - Beth JamesDesign - Amy SimmonsPhotography - Nicholas Dentamaro, Ravi Kumar, Gordon Morton, Yumiko Sakurai, Amy Simmons

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On the cover: The Leading Edge team tested a protoype on the Sakonnet River in Tiverton, R.I. The project is supported by a $3.8M grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E).

Larry Larson

Larry LarsonSorensen Family Dean of Engineering

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INSIDE THIS ISSUE MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN

There has been a lot of discussion in the news recently about the value of scientific research amid the proposed federal budget cuts to federal funding agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), and Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). The NSF alone funds nearly a quarter of all federally supported basic research conducted by U.S. colleges and universities. These agencies are key drivers for connecting the great research that we do at universities with our nation’s new industries, new technologies, economic growth, improved public health, and energy sustainability. Here at Brown, the School of Engineering conducts roughly $20M per year in research that will make the world a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable place in the years ahead. I honestly think this is one of the best investments our country can make in its future. Scientific research has a great return on investment because, as we find a great technical solution to a problem, it can be used to help everyone on the planet.

Budget cuts for basic research undermine this crucial pipeline in several ways. An underappreciated aspect of advancing scientific research is how long it takes to develop a genuine technological innovation. Big breakthroughs in science - breakthroughs that create entirely new industries - do not adhere to schedules; they come at their own pace, often after many frustrating years of setbacks and dead-ends. Consistency and reliability of support is often what makes or breaks a research effort. Unexpected termination of support - or repeated stops and starts - can negate the impact of an entire research program, losing the promise of that wonderful research, which if it had just progressed for a little longer, would have had an amazing impact for all of society.

When I think of an example of great research from our work at Brown that illustrates this point, our brain-machine interface project (Braingate) comes to mind. Starting from very basic neuroscience research from well over a decade ago, we are now giving profoundly disabled people the ability to move robotic arms with their thoughts. This technology is not ready today for mass application in a clinical setting, but it will be someday. Our success today and in the years to come is thanks to consistent and long term investment by the NIH, NSF, DARPA and many other funding sources. Incremental progress year after year leads to exciting breakthroughs that can change lives. These are long term projects that our society undertakes for the benefit of all, and regardless of political trends, the value of that science is going to continue to have impact.

While we may be dealing with an uncertain federal funding environment and even the possibility of reduced federal funding for research, the University and the School of Engineering are continuing to make contingency plans. Earlier this spring, United States Senator Jack Reed visited Brown and the School of Engineering (see story page 8-9) and Senator Reed is among a group of Rhode Island senators and congressmen advocating for funding for science research.

In addition to federal funding, corporate and donor support are also crucial to sustaining our research. Our mutually beneficial research partnerships with companies such as GM, Medtronic, and Cognex (see story on page 30-31) have helped to support faculty research in areas of common research interest. Our tremendously valued donors have stepped up to fund key research priorities, including postdoctoral research positions, space in the new engineering research center, and research equipment.

Engineers are creative people and problem solvers. Most engineers do what they do for the love of the science, the love of technology and the love of creating things. So, the future is very bright when engineers are working on a problem. Together, we will creatively navigate these uncertainties with federal funding and continue to move forward in pursuit of advancing scientific discovery for the benefit of society.


FROM THE LAB

known as creep, where atoms can diffuse along grain boundaries, enabling the mate-rial to deform without breaking.”

Because of those nanoscale dynamics, mate-rials made from ceramic nanofibers have the potential to be deformable and flexible, while maintaining the heat resistance that make ceramics useful in high-temperature appli-

cations. The problem is that such materials are not easy to make. One often-used method of making nanofibers, known as electro-spinning, doesn’t work well with ceramics. Another potential option, 3D laser printing, is expensive and time-consuming.

So the researchers used a method called solu-tion blow-spinning, which had been devel-oped previously by Wu in his lab at Tsinghua. The process uses air pressure to drive a liquid solution containing ceramic material through a tiny syringe aperture. As the liquid emerges, it quickly solidifies into nanoscale fibers that are collected in a spinning cage. The collected material is then heated, which burns away the solvent material leaving a mass of tangled ceramic nanofibers that looks a bit like a cotton ball.

Compression and recovery processes of macroscopic TiO2 sponge.

Researchers have found a way to make ultra-light sponge-like materials from nanoscale ceramic fibers. The highly porous, compress-ible and heat-resistant sponges could have numerous uses, from water purification devices to flexible insulating materials.

“The basic science question we tried to answer is how can we make a material that’s highly deformable, but resistant to high temperature,” said Huajian Gao, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering at Brown University and a corresponding author of the research. “This paper dem-onstrates that we can do that by tangling ceramic nanofibers into a sponge, and the method we use for doing it is inexpen-sive and scalable to make these in large quantities.”

The work, a collaboration between Gao’s lab at Brown and the labs of Hui Wu and Xiaoyan Li at Tsinghua University in China, is described in the journal Science Advances.

As anyone who has ever dropped a flower vase knows well, ceramics are brittle materi-als. Cracks in ceramics tend to propagate quickly, leading to catastrophic failure with even the slightest deformation. While that is true for all traditional ceramics, things are different at the nanoscale.

“At the nanoscale, cracks and flaws become so small that it takes much more energy to activate them and cause them to propagate,” Gao said. “Nanoscale fibers also promote deformation mechanisms such as what is

Huajian Gao

New Ceramic Nanofiber “Sponges” Could Be Used for Flexible Insulation, Water Purification

Ceramic materials tend to shatter when deformed, but new research shows a way of using ultra-thin ceramic nanofibers to make squishy, heat-resistant sponges with a wide variety of uses.

The researchers used the method to create sponges made from a variety of different types of ceramics and showed that the mate-rials had some remarkable properties.

For example, the sponges were able to rebound after compressive strain up to 50 percent, something that no standard ceramic material can do. And the sponges can main-

tain that resilience at temperatures up to 800 degrees Celsius.

The research also showed that the sponges had a remarkable capacity for high-tem-perature insulation. In one experiment, the researchers placed a flower petal on top of 7-millimeter-thick sponge made from tita-nium dioxide (a common ceramic material) nanofibers. After heating the bottom of the sponge to 400 degrees Celsius for 10 minutes, the flower on top barely wilted. Meanwhile, petals placed on other types of porous ceramic materials under the same conditions were burnt to a crisp.

The sponges’ heat resistance and its deform-ability make them potentially useful as an insulating material where flexibility is important. For example, Gao says, the mate-rial could be used as an insulating layer in firefighters’ clothing.

Another potential use could be in water purification. Titanium dioxide is a well-known photocatalyst used to break down organic molecules, which kills bacteria and other microorganisms in water. The researchers showed that a titanium dioxide sponge could absorb 50 times its weight in

The sponges’ heat resistance and its deformability make them potentially useful as an insulating material where flexibility is important. For example, according to

Gao, the material could be used as an insulating layer in firefighters’ clothing.

water containing an organic dye. Within 15 minutes, the sponge was able to degrade the dye under illumination. With the water wrung out, the sponge could then be reused — something that can’t be done with the titanium dioxide powders normally used in water purification.

In addition to these, there may be other applications for ceramic sponges that the researchers have not yet considered.

“The process we used for making these is extremely versatile; it can be used with a great variety of different types of ceramic starting materials,” said Wu, one of the corresponding authors from Tsinghua. “So we think there’s huge prospect for potential applications.”

The work was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University and the U.S. National Science Foundation (CMMI-1634492).

- Kevin Stacey

Sponge heated by an alcohol lamp without damage, indicating good heat resistance. Credit: Gao/Li/Wu/Brown/Tsinghua

High-temperature insulation capacity of ZrO2 sponge. The ZrO2 sponge effectively protects the fresh petal from withering, whereas petals on other materials were already carbonized on the 400° C heating stage after 10 minutes.

after 10 minutes


FROM THE LABFROM THE LABHaneesh Kesari

Judging by their name alone, orange puffball sea sponges might seem unlikely paragons of structural strength. But maintaining their shape at the bottom of the churning ocean is critical to the creatures’ survival, and new research shows that tiny structural rods in their bodies have evolved the optimal shape to avoid buckling under pressure.

The rods, called strongyloxea spicules, measure about 2 millimeters long and are thinner than a human hair. Hundreds of them are bundled together, forming stiff rib-like structures inside the orange puffball’s spongy body. It was the odd and remark-ably consistent shape of each spicule that caught the eye of Brown University engineers Haneesh Kesari and Michael Monn. Each one is symmetrically tapered along its length — going gradually from fatter in the middle to thinner at the ends.

Using structural mechanics models and a bit of digging in obscure mathematics journals, Monn and Kesari showed the peculiar shape of the spicules to be optimal for resistance to buckling, the primary mode of failure for slender structures. This natural shape could provide a blueprint for increasing the buckling resistance in all kinds of slender human-made structures, from building columns to bicycle spokes to arterial stents, the researchers say.

“This is one of the rare examples that we’re aware of where a natural structure is not just well-suited for a given function, but actually approaches a theoretical optimum,” said Kesari, an assistant professor of engineering at Brown. “There’s no engineering analog for this shape — we don’t see any columns or other slender structures that are tapered in this way. So in this case, nature has shown us something quite new that we think could be useful in engineering.”

The findings are published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Sea Sponges Offer Clues to How Human-made Structures Can Resist Buckling

Brown University engineers looked to nature to find a shape that could improve all kinds of slender structures, from building columns to bicycle spokes.

Function and form

Orange puffball sponges (Tethya aurantia) are native to the Mediterranean Sea. They live mainly in rocky coastal environments, where they are subject to the constant stress of underwater waves and tidal forces. Sponges are filter feeders — they pump water through their bodies to extract nutrients and oxygen. To do this, their bodies need to be porous and compliant, but they also need enough stiff-ness to avoid being deformed too much.

“If you compress them too much, you’re essentially choking them,” Kesari said. “So maintaining their stiffness is critical to their survival.”

And that means the spicules, which make up the rib-like structures that give sponges their stiffness, are critical components. When Monn and Kesari saw the shapes of the spic-ules under a microscope, the consistency of the tapered shape from spicule to spicule was hard to miss.

“We saw the shape and wondered if there might be an engineering principle at work here,” Kesari said.

To figure that out, the researchers first needed to understand what forces were act-ing on each individual spicule. So Monn and Kesari developed a structural mechanics model of spicules bundled within a sponge's ribs. The model showed that the mismatch in stiffness between the bulk of the sponge’s soft body and the more rigid spicules causes each spicule to experience primarily one type of mechanical loading — a compression load on each of its ends.

“You can imagine taking a toothpick and trying to squeeze it longways between your fingers,” Monn said. “That’s how these spic-ules see the world.”

The primary mode of failure for a structure with this mechanical load is through buck-ling. At a certain critical load, the structure starts to bend somewhere along its length. Once the bending starts, the force trans-ferred by the load is amplified at the bending point, which causes the structure to break or collapse.

Once Kesari and Monn knew what forces were acting on the spicules and how they would fail, the next step was looking to see

if there was anything special about them that helped them resist buckling. Scanning electron microscope images of the inside of a spicule and other tests showed that they were monolithic silica — essentially glass.

“We could see that there was no funny busi-ness going on with the material properties,” Monn said. “If there was anything contribut-ing to its mechanical performance, it would have to be the shape.”

Optimal shape

Kesari and Monn combed the literature to see if they could find anything on tapering in slender structures. They came up empty in the modern engineering literature. But they found something interesting published more than 150 years ago by a German scientist named Thomas Clausen. In 1851, Clausen proposed that columns that are tapered toward their ends should have more buckling resistance than plain cylinders, which had

been and still are the primary design for architectural columns. In the 1960s, mathe-matician Joseph Keller published an ironclad mathematical proof that the Clausen column was indeed optimal for resistance to buck-ling — having 33 percent better resistance than a cylinder. Even compared to a very similar shape — an ellipse, which is slightly fatter in the middle and pointier at the ends — the Clausen column had 18 percent better buckling resistance.

Knowing what the optimal column shape is, Monn and Kesari started making precise dimensional measurements of dozens of spicules. They showed that their shapes were remarkably consistent and nearly identical to that of the Clausen column.

“The spicules were a match for the best shape of all possible column shapes,” Monn said.

It seems in this case, natural selection figured out something that engineers have not. Despite the fact that it has been mathemati-cally shown to be the optimal column shape, the Clausen profile is not widely known in the engineering community. Kesari and Monn hope this work might bring it out of the shadows.

“We see this as an addition to our library of structural designs,” Monn said. “We’re not just talking about an improvement of a few percent. This shape is 33 percent better than the cylinder, which is quite an improvement.”

In particular, the shape would be particularly useful in a new generation of materials made from nanoscale truss structures.

“It would be easy to 3D print the Clausen profile into these materials, and you’d get a tremendous increase in buckling resistance, which is often how these materials fail.”

Lessons from nature

The field of bio-inspired engineering began at a time when many people viewed adap-tive evolution as an unceasing march toward perfection. If that were true, scientists should find untold numbers of optimal structures in nature.

But the modern understanding of evolution is a bit different. It is now understood that in order for a trait to be conserved by natural selection, it doesn't need to be optimal. It just needs to be good enough to work. That has put a bit of a damper on the enthusiasm for bio-inspired engineering, Kesari and Monn say.

However, they say, this work shows that nearly optimal structures are out there if

researchers look in the right places. In this case, they looked at creatures from a very old phylum — sea sponges are among the very first animals on Earth — with plenty of time to evolve under consistent selection pressures.

Sponges are also fairly simple creatures, so understanding the function of a given trait is relatively straightforward. In this case, the spicule appears to have one and only one job to do — provide stiffness. Compare that to, for example, human bone, which not only provides support but must also accom-modate arteries, provide attachment points for muscles and house bone marrow. Those other functions may cause tradeoffs in adap-tations for strength or stiffness.

“With the sponges, you have lots of evolu-tionary pressure, lots of time and opportu-nity to respond to that pressure, and func-tional elements that can be easily identified,” Kesari said.

With those as guiding principles, there may well be more ideal structures out there wait-ing to be found.

“This work shows that nature can hit an opti-mum,” Kesari said, “and the biological world can still be hiding completely new designs of considerable technological significance in plain sight.”

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation (1562656).

- Kevin Stacey

“We see this as an addition to our library of structural designs,” Monn said. “We're not just talking about an improvement of a few percent. This shape is

33 percent better than the cylinder, which is quite an improvement.”

Optimal Shape: The odd shape of tiny structural rods found in a species of sea sponges turns out to be optimal for resistance to buckling. Credit: Kesari Lab/Brown University

Below: Ph.D. candidate Michael Monn and Assistant Professor Haneesh Kesari discuss the device they used to measure the mechanical properties of the spicules. Photography: Ravi Kumar


FROM THE LAB

Pizza enthusiasts know well that a simple u-shaped curvature at the crust can keep a thin slice from drooping over when lifted from a plate. A team of engineers from Brown University has shown that fish may take advantage of roughly the same dynamics to stiffen their fins for swimming.

Using a mathematical model and the mackerel pectoral fin as an illustrative example, the researchers show how fin stiffness may be changed by applying a u-shaped curvature at the fin's base. The effect, the researchers say, might underlie the ability of fish to swim at widely varying speeds in all kinds of currents with great maneuverability.

“One way to become more maneuverable is by having the ability to generate varying amounts of force on the water when flapping a fin,” said Shreyas Mandre, an assistant professor in Brown’s School of Engineering and a co-author of the research. “We think that fish modulate curvature at the base of the fin to make it stiffer or softer, which alters the force they generate on the water, which in turn may underlie some of their maneuverability.”

The research was conducted in collaboration with Khoi Nguyen from Yale University

Shreyas Mandre

Like a Slice of Pizza, a Curvature Could Give Fish Fins Their Strength

Brown University engineers have shown that applying curvature to the base of a fish fin can increase its stiffness, an effect that could underlie the maneuverability of fish and provide a new design concept for robotic swimmers.

and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Madhusudhan Venkadesan from Yale, Ning Yu from UCLA and Mahesh M. Bandi from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. It is described in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

The mathematical model that Mandre and his colleagues developed applies to a large class of fish known as Actinopterygii. These are fish species with fan-like fins made of long bendable bones held together by an elastic soft tissue.

Generally speaking, the researchers say, it has been assumed that the stiffness of these fins is calculated by the bending rigidity of each bone multiplied by the number

of bones. But that simple picture ignores mechanical interplay between the bendable bones and the elastic skin, which could produce vastly more stiffness than the simple model would suggest. That interplay also turns out to be the mechanism through which fish change a fin’s stiffness via curvature at the base.

The researchers looked at micro-CT scans of bone arrays in mackerel fins, which are broadly representative of ray-finned fish. They showed that the bones’ shape makes them bend more easily in particular

directions, and that each bone’s “preferred” bending direction is misaligned slightly with respect to adjacent bones. According to their mathematical mode, this arrangement means that when a force is applied across a fin, the bones bend collectively in a way that causes them to splay apart. However, that splaying motion is resisted by the elastic tissue that lashes the bones together, and it’s that resistance that stiffens the entire fin.

The way in which this architecture transmits forces is broadly similar to the way in which forces are transmitted in a slice of pizza that is curved at the crust and becomes more rigid along its length. Only in this case, the effect of the curvature is “baked in” to the fin, meaning it has the mechanical benefits of a curve even when it is flat. Applying an actual curvature at the base of the fin would magnify the rigidifying effect.

“So by adjusting curvature, fish could quickly and dramatically alter how hard they could push on the water, which could make them more maneuverable,” Mandre explained.

The researchers say their model suggests intriguing possibilities for the design of robotic swimmers.

“These results help us to understand the functional significance of curvature in fish fins,” Mandre said. “In that way, it gives a design principle we can potentially use for developing robotic appendages for highly maneuverable aquatic propulsion.”

The research was funded by the Human Frontier Science Program.

- Kevin Stacey

“These results help us to understand the functional significance of curvature in fish fins,” Mandre said. “In that way, it gives a design principle we can

potentially use for developing robotic appendages for highly maneuverable aquatic propulsion.”

Schematic representation of the cross-section of a fin with a morphological curvature. The rectangles represent cross-section of rays, the connecting segments represent the membranes, and the arrows denote the ray-bending directions. The fin, when curved transverse to the rays, misaligns the ray-bending direction.

Schematic representation of a fin with a functional curvature. Note that this fin is morphologically flat, yet the directions of the soft bending axes of the cross section are misaligned, constituting the functional curvature.

X-ray of the internal structure of an isolated Mackerel pectoral fin held geometrically flat. The bony rays appear bright, whereas the soft elastic membranes appear dark.

Ray cross-sections taken at SS shown in the previous panel. The cross-hairs depict approximations to the principal axes and magnitudes of the ray bending rigidities. The difference in angles between any two adjacent rays constitutes the functional curvature in this sample fin.


FROM THE LAB

United States Senator Jack Reed toured two Brown University engineering labs this spring to learn about next-generation clean energy technologies that Brown researchers are developing with the support of federal re-search dollars. The visit comes in the wake of a White House budget proposal that would slash federal funding for scientific research, particularly clean energy.

Joined by Provost Richard Locke and Vice President for Research David Savitz, Reed met with engineering professor Nitin Padture, who is developing a new type of solar cell that rivals the performance of traditional cells, but could be produced at a fraction of the cost. Reed also spoke with the Brown research team behind Leading Edge, a system that harvests energy from rivers and tidal canals using oscillating underwater wings.

Rhode Island’s longtime U.S. senator warned that cutting funds for projects like these would undermine both the local economy as well as American competitiveness in the global economy.

“The next great revolution is going to come in alternative energy,” Reed said. “If we’re

not developing [those] products, we won’t be selling them to the world … and we won’t have these jobs.”

The Leading Edge project is supported by a $3.8 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which operates under the Department of Energy. The program was designed to fund breakthrough technologies that show fundamental technical promise but are too early for private-sector investment. President Donald Trump’s budget outline proposed a 17.9 percent cut in the energy department’s funding and the complete elimination of ARPA-E.

“If we lose this [funding], we’re not just going to lose projects, we’re going to lose our inno-vative capacity and our edge,” Reed said.

The budget proposal outlined similar cuts in research funds supported by the National Institutes of Health, Environmental Protection Agency, Commerce Department and other agencies. And while the Trump budget proposal did not address the National Science Foundation explicitly, many are concerned that the agency’s funding could see significant declines as well.

Padture’s work in solar technology is funded by a $4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in his lab are sup-ported by Department of Education as well as the Department of Energy.

Locke pointed out that approximately 18 percent of Brown’s annual budget comes from external research funding, the majority of which is from the federal government. He said the cuts proposed in President Trump’s budget outline would be “devastating” to research projects at Brown in alternative en-ergy, climate change, environmental science, public health and other areas.

“It has short-term impacts because those funds support our students,” he said. “But in the longer term, it also undermines our ability to be on the forefront of scientific and applied discoveries.”

The University is in the process of making contingency plans to help soften the blow of cuts in the short term at Brown, but the longer-term implications for research at Brown and across the country remain a grave concern — so do the broader consequences for the country, Reed said.

“We’re destroying our competitive advantage by undercutting our investment in science and technology,” he said.

- Kevin Stacey

UNIVERSITY NEWS

Professor Kenny Breuer and Senator Reed in the Brown Design Workshop

From left: Assistant Professor (Research) Yuanyuan “Alvin” Zhou, Ph.D. candidate Srinivas Yada-valli, and Professor Nitin Padture discuss research projects with Senator Jack Reed during his tour.

Above: Senator Reed meets with Provost Rick Locke, Professor Breuer and Tom Derecktor, CEO of BluSource Energy.

Below left: Ph.D. candidate Laura Turcer is funded by the Department of Education for her work in Professor Padture’s lab. Below right: Padture discusses research projects at Brown with Senator Reed in his lab.

Meeting with Brown Researchers, Senator Reed Makes Case for Sustained Federal Funding


Assistant Professor of Engineering Kareen Coulombe has been awarded a five-year $2.27 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. Her research proposes to develop an engineered human cardiac tissue therapy that addresses pressing needs for translational implementation by using human cardiomyocytes in natural hybrid biomaterials. Cardiac disease remains the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the U.S. and around the globe. Engineering human myocardium as a therapeutic means to restore muscle mass has great promise to enhance heart function, yet the current lack of integration of engineering tissue into the native heart limits its efficacy.

Coulombe specializes in cardiovascular regenerative engineering to address needs to develop novel therapies for cardiovascular disease. A major focus of her research is to re-engineer contractility in the heart after myocardial infarction (heart attack) using engineered human myocardium with cardiomyocytes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. The engineered tissue has electromechanical function and her lab works to improve the vascular and electromechanical integration of the implant with the host heart in order to restore cardiac contractility.

Coulombe earned a B.S. in biomedical engineering at the University of Rochester summa cum laude in 2001 and was a Whitaker pre-doctoral Fellow, earning a Ph.D. in bioengineer-ing at the University of Washington in 2007. She was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow in pathology at the University of Washington where she won an NIH Pathway to Independence K99/R00 award in 2012. She joined the Brown School of Engineering as an assistant professor of engineering and medical science in January 2014.

FACULTY NEWS

Christian Franck, David Henann Share $3.35 Million Naval Research Grant

Kareen Coulombe Receives Five-Year, $2.27 Million Grant from National Institutes of Health

Assistant Professor of Engineering Christian Franck and James R. Rice Assistant Professor of Engineering David Henann are among five principal investigators for an Office of Naval Research award worth $3.35 million over four years, led by Franck. The group will be investigating the finite defor-mation, time-dependent material response of soft matter due to inertial cavitation. Zhen Xu from the University of Michigan will join Franck’s effort of developing and validating a multiscale theory for cavitation and its as-sociated damage mechanisms in complex, soft materials through a rigorous and synergistic integration of experimental techniques. Eric Johnsen, also of Michigan, Tim Colonius of the California Institute of Technology, and Brown’s Henann will develop computational formulations. Once developed, the computational-theoretical framework will be utilized to quantitatively characterize the material behavior of soft materials across sev-eral orders of magnitude in length scale, strain rate, strain magnitude, temperature and stress, none of which is achievable with current material characterization methodologies.

FACULTY NEWS

Assistant Professor of Engineering Anita Shukla received an Office of Naval Research (ONR) Director of Research Early Career Grant. This is an extremely selective grant that will help fund research expenses up to $200K per year for five years. The award is given to select applicants to the ONR Young Investigator program, based on two specific criteria: innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology that is

relevant to the ONR mission, and community service demon-strated through scientific leadership and community outreach. Through this award, Shukla plans to develop biomaterials that act as sensitive indicators of potential infection, while incor-porating therapeutics ranging from small molecules to cells aimed at optimizing wound healing for injured personnel in future military applications. Shukla also serves as Principal Investigator for another grant from ONR aimed at developing advanced antimicrobial field dressings.

Prior to arriving at Brown, Shukla was an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Bioengineering at Rice University. She received her Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, her M.S. in chemical engineering practice from MIT, and her B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University with majors in both chemical engineering and biomedical engineering.

Anita Shukla Receives Prestigious $1 Million ONR Early Career Award

Christian Franck

David Henann

David Borton Named to Veteran Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development PostBrown School of Engineering Assistant Professor David Borton has been named Research Biomedical Engineer, joining the Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology. In his newest role, Borton and his lab will focus expertise on restoring function for veterans with spinal cord injury and brain disorders.

“Dr. Borton’s wide-ranging expertise in neural recording, neural decoding and wireless neuroengi-neering brings additional strength to our focus areas on restoring consciousness, communication and mobility and on restoring affective and cognitive health,” said Leigh Hochberg, MD, Ph.D. and Director of the Center for Neurorestoration and Neurotechnology (CfNN).

Borton’s research enables basic science innovation through technological integration. He is engi-neering new tools for wireless neural recording and stimulation in order to untangle neuromotor disease states, and more generally to understand how these states are dynamically represented in the brain and spinal cord. Using these tools, he explores how motor processing in the brain evolves during long-term, naturalistic recording.

Borton received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2006, his doctorate in Biomedical Engineering from Brown University in 2012, and performed his post-doctoral training at the École Polytechnique in Lausanne Switzerland (EPFL) under a Marie Curie International Fellowship. In 2015, Borton received the DARPA Young Faculty Award, and in 2016 was awarded an NIH Brain grant.

CfNN began with a June 2012 award from the Department of Veterans Affairs Rehabilitation Research and Development Service. The Center is a collaboration between the Providence VA Medical Center , Brown University, Butler Hospital, Lifespan, and Massachusetts General Hospital.


Professor of Engineering and the Director of the Institute for Molecular and Nanoscale Innovation, Nitin P. Padture has been awarded the 2017 Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay. The award recognizes Professor Padture’s achievements in research in materials science and education.

The Distinguished Alumnus Award recognizes IIT Bombay alumni who have excelled in the fields of business, industry, research, academia, or as entrepreneurs. Each year, a select group of alumni are chosen and receive their awards in March. Professor Padture graduated from IIT Bombay in 1985, and has been a professor at Brown since 2012. His current research is on advanced ceramics and nanomaterials, and he has recently been named the Otis E. Randall University Professor in the School of Engineering at Brown.

Padture has published more than 180 journal papers, which have been cited over 12,500 times, is co-inventor of four patents, and he has delivered over 200 invited/keynote/plenary talks in the U.S. and abroad. He is the recipient of several awards and is Fellow of the American Ceramic Society and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is editor of a prominent international journal, Scripta Materialia.

Nitin Padture Awarded IIT Bombay’s Distinguished Alumnus Award

AWARDS & HONORS AWARDS & HONORS

Lecturer Jennifer Franck has been awarded a 2017 Karen T. Romer Prize for Undergraduate Advising and Mentoring. The award was established in 2004 by the family of trustee Marty Granoff, and is named for a former Associate Dean of the College who was a creative and passionate advocate for undergraduate education. The Romer Advising Prize is presented each year to two faculty members who have shown exceptional dedication, imagination, and commitment in their mentoring of under-graduates. Each winner receives an award of $7,000.

Franck is a member of the Fluids and Thermal Sciences group within the School of Engineering. Her research expertise is in computational fluid dynamics (CFD), particularly the ability to simulate com-plex, turbulent flows that often occur in engineering and renewable energy applications.

Romer prize winners are selected by a committee of students, faculty, and administrators, after a cam-pus-wide call for nominations and student testimonials. Associate Professor, and current Associate Dean of the Faculty, Janet Blume, who won the award in 2011, is the only other Engineering professor to have been honored with the Romer prize.

Jennifer Franck Receives Karen T. Romer Award for Excellence in Advising

Rashid Zia Receives Philip J. Bray Award for Teaching Excellence Associate Professor Rashid Zia has been awarded the 2017 Philip J. Bray Award for Teaching Excellence in the Physical Sciences. Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards recognize Brown faculty members for sustained and continued excellence in undergraduate teaching, and one award can be made in each of the four major areas of the curriculum: humanities, life, physical and social sciences. Recipients receive a professional development fund of $3,000 for each of two years.

Zia, who is also an associate professor of physics, is a 2001 graduate of Brown with a dual degree in both English and American Literature, and Engineering. Zia received his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, before returning to Brown in 2006. He currently teaches courses in electricity and magnetism, photonics and applications, and interfaces, information and automation. He serves as both a first-year and second-year advisor for undergraduate students in engineering.

“Professor Zia has selflessly given his all to make Barus & Holley a special community for its engineer-ing students by simply listening to students and always being around,” said Stephanie Haro ’17, an electrical engineering concentrator. “Last semester he routinely wandered into the computer lab to check in and genuinely listen to students. Professor Zia exemplifies that being a profes-sor does not mean just showing up to lecture at 10 a.m., it means honoring the position with feelings of tremendous responsibility, humility, and care. The entire Brown Engineering family is honored to have Rashid Zia here with us as a faculty member. ”

Faculty teaching excellence awards are nominated by any member of the Brown faculty, and include the candidate’s current curriculum vitae, a written nomination from his/her chair or director, and summaries of departmental course evaluations from students for courses taught by the candidate over the past three years. Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Professor of Engineering Allan Bower (2003) and Associate Professor, and current Associate Dean of the Faculty Janet Blume (1997), are among past School of Engineering professors to have been honored with the Bray Award.

Huajian Gao Elected to German National Academy of SciencesHuajian Gao, Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Engineering, has been elected to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in recognition of his scientific achievements.

Prior to his arrival at Brown, Gao was Director and Professor at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart, Germany between 2001 and 2006.

The Leopoldina is the oldest German-speaking society of scholars with a history of more than 350 years. It is a free association of scholars acting to advance human scientific development beyond the boundaries of disciplines and countries. Approximately three quarters of its members are from the German-speaking countries of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, while the remainder are from other countries. In 2008, the Leopoldina became the National Academy of Sciences in Germany.

Gao has been honored by several professional societies for his work. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in 2012 for contributions to micromechanics of thin films and hierarchically structured materials. In 2015, he was elected as a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) for his scientific achievements and contributions made to promoting and developing science and technology in China. He received the William Prager Medal from the Society of Engineering Science (SES) in 2015 in recognition of his outstanding research contributions in theoretical solid mechanics. Gao was awarded the 2015 Nadai Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for groundbreaking contributions to hierarchical nanotwinned metals, energy storage materials, me-tallic glasses, and diffusional creep of metal thin films. His previous awards and honors include the Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics (high-est international award in mechanics; only one awardee every four years), Alexander von Humboldt Research Award (highest German award for international scientists), and Guggenheim Fellowship (for exceptional scholarship or creativity; only 1-2 awards in engineering per year).

Professor Gao received his B.S. degree from Xian Jiaotong University of China in 1982, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in engineering science from Harvard University in 1984 and 1988, respectively. He served on the faculty of Stanford University between 1988 and 2002, where he was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1994 and to full professor in 2000. He joined Brown University in 2006. Professor Gao has a background in applied mechanics and engineering science. He has more than 30 years of research experience and more than 400 publications to his credit.


From the moment he closed the last of the four Velcro straps on his new blue and yellow right arm, 12-year-old Ryan Dean eagerly began exploring what it could do.Seated at the kitchen table of his Warwick, R.I., home while his mother, Allison Dean, looked on, Ryan grabbed each of the accessories on hand — a small bottle of glue and rolls of extra Velcro and cottony padding — in case any last-minute adjustments to his new arm were required. Not satisfied with merely picking each object up, Ryan quickly moved on to precisely stacking and balancing them in towers to demonstrate his dexterity and his arm’s ability to realize it.

“I think it’s cool,” he said as he played. The arm was, after all, made not only in the colors he requested, but also featured a removable set of claws inspired by the X-Men comic character Wolverine.

“You know what you are going to be doing now: dusting, vacuuming,” his mom teased with an intonation that implied a longer list could be forthcoming.

But on that afternoon, Ryan seemed more dedicated to playing with his new Wolverine arm than spontaneously leaping to any chores. The custom-fitted, 3D-printed arm came courtesy of a team of Brown University students, led by biology graduate student Rana Ozdeslik, who visited the Deans’ home that day with engineering undergraduate Abigail Kohler.

Watching Ryan experiment with the Wolverine arm, Ozdeslik said that fun is the point. The arm is not a full-fledged medical prosthetic, after all.

“It’s just for them to play,” she said. “It’s kind a toy for them to have fun.”

As Ryan kept picking things up and stack-ing them, his mother vouched that the arm certainly added something in terms of functionality: “He can do extra things now that he couldn’t do, or couldn’t do easily. For somebody who doesn’t have a hand, that would be amazing.”

Helping hands

Ryan has been adapting to his right arm’s anomaly since birth. He has a shortened forearm with a hint of a wrist. His right hand is not fully formed in that he has four fingers that don’t produce a grasp.

Ryan does not let any of this hold him back. This spring he has been playing baseball — his favorite sport — for the Giants in the Apponaug Babe Ruth league. He is a first baseman and an occasional pitcher. Last year he was named an all-star. He also plays soc-cer and basketball. Sports, he says, are even cooler than the X-Men.

As much as she likes the arm, Allison said it probably will not help Ryan play baseball.

“He’s so adapted,” she said. “He’s been play-ing since he was four. It could actually hinder him.”

Though she has never sought a prosthetic for Ryan, she had been in touch with the Helping Hands Foundation, which builds commu-nity and provides support services among families of children with upper-limb anoma-lies. Early in 2017 she received an email asking if Ryan might want a 3D-printed arm from students at Brown.

“So I said we’ll jump at it then,” Allison recalled. “It can’t hurt. That’s for sure.”

The Deans have long attended the Helping Hands winter meeting, but at this year’s meeting in Massachusetts, they met with Ozdeslik and early team member Lauren Olinski. Ryan asked for the X-Men styling. The students made some measurements. They pledged to print him a right arm.

Ozdeslik has long been fascinated with the manufacturing technology that allows one to turn spools of colored plastic wire into virtually any object that can be rendered on a computer.

“I’m really interested in 3D printing,” Ozdeslik said. “There is a great potential in it. I was fascinated with the idea that we can use 3D printers for the good of the community.”

To her, that meant creating hands and arms for children. When she volunteered to help a local girl named Fiona in Westerly late last year, she also joined e-Nable the Future, which provides designs for 3D printing arms and hands. Now there is a Brown University chapter. “We are part of this really great cause,” Ozdeslik said.

Ozdeslik also applied for a maker grant from the Brown Design Workshop, where students can use all kinds of fabrication equipment for academic or personal projects.

“The Brown Design Workshop has so many printers and filament, and they are always open and there to help you,” Olinski said.

For Fiona, the group custom adapted an e-Nable design.

“Her hand was so little that the wrist mo-tion wasn’t enough to move it, so we had to use this elbow motion,” Ozdeslik said. “We wanted to print the fingers with a glow-ing filament because in the dark, since she doesn’t have the hand sense, she can at least see the fingers moving around.”

Ryan’s arm also glows in the dark. It is assem-bled from 16 3D-printed pieces and cleverly placed strings and elastics that allow it to grip when bent.

Working after classes and labs about five hours a week, the team, which also in-cluded engineering undergraduate Gregory Boudreau-Fine, took about two months to make the arm. That included printing proto-type arms to make sure it would work.

During that time, everyone still had course-work. Ozdeslik even defended her thesis. But they delivered the arm as promised in May, a few days before Ozdeslik graduated with the Class of 2017.

About 15 minutes after Ryan started playing with his new arm, his twin brother Josh and younger brother Matthew, 9, joined their mother at the table to watch. A bit later a pair of neighboring girls stopped by and beheld the Wolverine arm, too.

Then the boys’ father, Jeffrey Dean, came to pick them up. It was time to go.

“Do you like it?” Jeffrey asked.

“Yup,” Ryan responded.

That was all Ozdeslik and Kohler had hoped to hear.

- David Orenstein

With 3D Printing, Students Create a “Wolverine” Arm for Local 12-Year Old

BROWN DESIGN WORKSHOP

Taking advantage of 3D printing technology, a group of students is creating fanciful, but functional custom-made arms for local children with upper-arm anomalies.

“I was fascinated with the idea that we can use 3D printers for the good of the community,” Ozdeslik said.

“I think it’s cool,” Ryan said as he played.

The arm was, after all, made not only in the colors he requested, but also featured a

removable set of claws inspired by the

X-Men comic character Wolverine.

Grab that glue: The fingers of Ryan Dean’s new “Wolverine” arm, 3D-printed by a group of Brown students, close into a grab when he bends it at the elbow.

Piece by piece: During the spring Rana Ozdeslik, Gregory Boudreau-Fine and other team members built the arm at the Brown Design Workshop. Images by Nicholas Dentamaro

Students held their second annual Project Showcase in the Brown Design Workshop (BDW), where personal, group, class and capstone

projects that had been worked on all year were presented to the public . “It was exciting to see the range of projects and to know that the BDW played a role in turning student’s ideas into fully realized objects that they were proud to share,” said Chris Bull, the Brown Design Workshop’s Director . “It is also important to recognize that the event itself was organized by students working in the BDW and that they see the projects as work that they helped enable .”

Kenta Kondo ’17, a BDW manager, was the organizer of the showcase for both undergraduate and graduate projects. “A lot of times you know that someone is at the BDW working on a project, but not necessarily what they are working on. This showcase allows dialogue and communication between BDW mem-bers and the community,” he said. “Four years ago, the BDW used to be one small crowded room with a couple of 3D printers and a laser cutter. Now, it’s a full scale makerspace enabling students, who may have never used a single hand tool before, to physically create their abstract concepts. Seeing both the number and quality of projects presented at the showcase, it is extremely rewarding to see how far we have come.” - E.M.J.

BDW Showcase

Left: John Jaeger ’19 (chemical engineering) created a coffee maker which can extract all of the flavor from the grounds into a single cup, making it five times as potent as regular coffee. The water is condensed, dripped over the beans and collected back in the boiling chamber. In this way, recycling the water collects all of the coffee's flavor, while a lowered boiling point prevents the coffee from being bitter. The piping was constructed using soldering equipment in the BDW.

Computer engineering concentrator Rachel Murai ’17 shared Stressvess, a vest designed to help alleviate stress and anxiety. It uses elastics to give a hugging sensation and provide deep pressure therapy. In the future, Murai plans to add a heart rate sensor to pulse in sync with the heart rate.

Mechanical engineering’s Forrest Tran ’18 demonstrated his robotic table capable of holonomic drive. It can move in any direction on the floor and the tabletop can actuate up and down. It also showcases an RGB LED light display.

Right: Third year Ph.D. candidate Evan Matteson (biomedical engineering) demonstrated a portable ergonomic keyboard with 24 keys, useful for people with wrist and hand injuries.

Common letters are typed by pressing a single key, while rarer letters and programmable macros are typed by pressing two or more keys at once. The case was constructed using 3D printers

and laser cutters at the BDW.

Mechanical engineer Quincy McKown ’18 exhibited her electromagnetic harpoon release. She used capacitators and a DC power supply to effectively shoot a small projectile using electromagnetic force. McKown created the rail gun in the BDW using the laser cutter, metalworking tools, and a drill press.

Robotics, games, 3D-printed prosthetics – it was all in the Brown Design Workshop in early May.


STUDENTS IN THE NEWS STUDENTS IN THE NEWS

On a spring day in May, there were some very special deliveries made on the College Green, as students and onlookers feasted on cookies flown to the steps of the Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center and dropped off via drone.

The event was the brainchild of two Brown undergraduates who are exploring technologies that might make commercial drone deliveries a reality. The goal was to demonstrate a patent-pending tethering system they’ve developed, which allows a payload to be lowered from a drone while the craft itself stays in the air.

“For successful deliveries, there needs to be a safe and efficient way to lower packages to the ground,” said Jacob Dyer, a Brown sophomore who developed the system with senior Aaron Zhang. “Our system works without the drone having to land and take off, minimizing energy loss and avoiding potentially hazardous landing areas.”

During their demonstration, Dyer and Zhang piloted their drone by remote control, delivering boxes of cookies from one end of the green to the other. They partnered with the newly opened Insomnia Cookies in Providence to provide the goodies, which were happily gobbled up by those in attendance.

The students say that while there’s been a lot of talk about drone delivery, the idea has yet to truly get off the ground. Amazon and other com-panies are working on it, but no one is sure yet how such deliveries should work. At the moment, Federal Aviation Administration restrictions prevent commercial deliveries that fly over roads, buildings and people. Precautions were taken at the event to make sure none of those things happened.

“We think the regulations are totally appropriate,” Zhang said. “A lot of things can go wrong. So we’re developing this mechanism that we believe will increase safety overall.”

Dyer and Zhang recently landed a grant from Brown’s Jonathan M. Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship to continue their work, which includes the possibility of developing their own drone. Currently, they are using an off-the-shelf craft that they have modified with their tether device. But they’d like to explore the possibility of a more robust machine.

Ultimately, however, the jury is still out on whether they can eventu-ally create a business of this.

“We plan to validate our technology first, then decide whether or not the regulatory and consumer landscape is ripe for us to compete with the larger players,” Dyer said.

- Kevin Stacey

Drone-Delivered Cookies Invade College Green as Students Demonstrate Technology

The team from Brown finished in third place with the University’s inaugural entry into the an-nual Rube Goldberg Machine Contest held in Columbus, Ohio in April. This was the culmina-tion of a three-year quest of mechanical engineer Leanne Block’s ’17 founding of Brown’s Rube Goldberg Society.

Originally started more than 60 years ago, the contest itself is named for Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Rube Goldberg, whose drawings satirized machines and gadgets that he saw as excessive. Each year, multi-step machinery is created using household items to accomplish trivial tasks. Goldberg’s own granddaughter, Jennifer George, continues at the helm of Rube Goldberg, Inc., a corporation dedicated to keeping laughter and invention alive through the legacy of its namesake. This year, the competition challenged participants to build an overly complex contraption, designed with humor and a narrative, with the end result being the ap-plication of a Band-Aid®. Brown had never had an entry into the competition prior to this year.

The Brown theme was Rube’s Carnival. Built in the Brown Design Workshop, and using mostly recycled materials from the BDW, the team of Block, Matthew Bowler ’19 (mechani-cal engineering), Brendan Walsh ’19 (computer science) and graduate student Angela Pizzuto (physics) drove the machine in a UHaul to Ohio, to take on much larger and more established teams from schools like Purdue, Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Syracuse, and Texas.

Brown’s 40-step contraption started with an attached weight to a string that raised the curtain for the big opening. Along the way, the circus-themed narrative included a toy train hitting a pair of scissors, causing the scissors to cut a string that released a spring (cannon) to launch a doll into a target. A Ferris wheel (created using the laser cutter in the BDW) was part of the contraption, as was a tea cup ride. But the group’s favorite step, according to Block, might have been the small weight that instigated the Play-Doh spaghetti (simulating the bearded lady). A zipline (flying trapeze) carrying a second doll ended the machine by bumping into a pipe that attached the Band-Aid® onto Goldberg’s grand-daughter for the grand finale.

“We were the only team there that had a perfect run, with no need for human interference,” Block said. “We were very proud of that.”

Block began Brown’s chapter of the society when she was a sophomore, and most of that year was spent building the stage. During her junior year, while she was studying abroad in France, the group continued working with the hope of entering the competition in the spring of 2017. It

was this past academic year when the group really got into the swing of things, and put the plan of the machine into place. Block is quick to give credit where credit is due, pointing out that Bowler modified the Nerf™ gun (Nerf™ guns are notoriously difficult to trigger, and so needed a different spring mechanism to work efficiently). And that Walsh was instrumental in advising the group on what to expect at competition. He was the only one of the group with Rube Goldberg experience (which came in handy when they needed to transition from one mechanism to the other), having competed at the high school level. He has been attending Brown activities fairs to recruit new members, and leading the brainstorming for next year’s theme in hopes of continuing the group.

As for Block, she is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, and will be heading back to France next fall to work on her master’s degree in Renewable Energy in Science and Technology.

- Beth James

Rube Goldberg Society Takes Third with Inaugural Contest Entry

Brandan Walsh ’19 and Leanne Block ’17 work on their Rube Goldberg entry in the Brown Design Workshop.

Special delivery: A cookie-bearing drone lifts off from Brown’s College Green, demonstrating student-developed technology. Photo by Nick Dentamaro


COMMENCEMENT AND AWARDS 2017

2017 Undergraduate Engineering Awards

Domenico A. Ionata ’26 Award: Kurt Pianka Joseph Kestin Award: Sarah CowlesJoseph J. Loferski Award: Sophia Gluskin-BraunGeorge H. Main ’45 Award: Stephanie Haro Maria ParedesOutstanding SeniorsBiomedical: Grant MenonChemical & Biochemical: Sarah Cowles Civil: Maria MaddoxComputer: Samuel StefflElectrical: Ryan Izant Jaekyung SongEngineering/Physics: Amy Butcher Elena GlenEnvironmental: Gabriel BuchsbaumMaterials: Isabel NewtonMechanical: Matthew Shorter

Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award Civil Engineering: Maria Maddox

Outstanding Undergraduate Student Award Electrical Engineering: Jaekyung Song (left)Ryan Izant (below)

George H. Main ’45 Award: Stephanie Haro (above) and Maria Paredes (not pictured)

Outstanding Thesis Award: Jonathan Estrada

William N. Findley Award: Alison Engwall (right) and

Michael Monn (not pictured)

Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award:Steven Ahn (below)

Sc.M. Achievement Award: Jeray Thelwell

2017 Graduate Engineering Awards

Outstanding Thesis Award: Jonathan Estrada

William N. Findley Award: Alison Engwall Michael Monn

Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award: Steven Ahn

PRIME Achievement Award: Adam Zachary Nitenson Andrew Oberlander

Sc.M. Achievement Award: Jeray Thelwell


Perseverance: Steadfastness in doing some-thing despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.

When Michael Manning ’17 lays out the story of his four years at Brown, this is the word that comes to mind. It was the fall of his first year, while sitting in ENGN 3, when Professor Kenny Breuer showed the class some preliminary animations that would ultimately become the Leading Edge Hydrokinetics project.

“I thought ‘This is the coolest thing!’,” Manning said. “When they were looking for people to be part of the project, a year and a half later, I was quick to apply to be part of the team.” However, his application was not chosen.

“But from that, I later got the opportunity to work on a different project with Professor Breuer and Biology Professor Sharon Swartz.” This was a summer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award that involved bio-inspired flight research and the mechan-ics of electrostatically actuated membranes. Working under the supervision of a graduate student, he helped acquire and analyze high speed video of membrane strain after being subjected to large electric fields, and the end result was a published paper in which he was the second of four authors.

Prior to the summer of 2016, Manning sat down with Breuer to see what opportuni-ties were available to him before he entered his final undergraduate year. “We had talked about some industry internships and other things,” Manning remembered. “He mentioned an opening with Leading Edge, and I decided to jump on that.” The Brown-centered research project develop-ing a hydrokinetic energy harvesting device employs a large undergraduate team for testing the 2kW field device in the Cape Cod Canal. Manning’s primary duties included the development and fabrication of a water-proof data acquisition and device control system. A Neal Mitchell-Systems Thinking Project Award helped afford him the summer opportunity, and from there, the idea for his senior thesis was born.

Data Analysis Helps Form Big Picture View for Michael Manning ’17

The mechanical engineering concentrator with a focus on biomechanics turned his focus to the structure of an unsteady wake behind an oscillating hydrofoil. Working in a more controlled, experimental setting in Breuer’s lab, Manning was awarded the 2017 Doris M. and Norman T. Halpin Prize from the School of Engineering to provide seed money for his innovative and interdis-ciplinary senior capstone project. He used the funds to purchase a digital converter, enabling the direct measurement of digital data signal from the acoustic Doppler velo-cimeter. This allowed for rapid measurement of the velocities over a wide parameter range, making the analysis of data much quicker for more complex scenarios.

“I wanted to keep working on this project,” he said. “And doing a thesis seemed like a good way to do that.” He is taking the experiments done before by Yunxing Su, a graduate student in Breuer’s lab, and with data from the digital converter as well as the analog findings, built on those computa-tions and analysis. “It’s important to get nice, clean data, so that we confidently say ‘this is what we got’ and it will be useful,” he said. Specifically, his thesis surveyed the wake structure of flapping foils in water at medium

to high Reynolds numbers with applications in hydrokinetic energy harvesting, propul-sion, and fish motility.

This eye on the bigger picture is something which Manning has given much thought. He was especially stirred by a visit from John Dabiri to Providence last fall. Dabiri is a Stanford professor who presented the 2016 Dourdeville Lecture on Engineering in Service to Society on Brown’s campus, where he spoke on the topic of opportunities and challenges for wind energy.

“The way he re-framed science, and the geo-political context it plays, gave me hope in what I’m doing. If we can give more people access to affordable energy, we’ll have more stability worldwide economically and politically.

“In order to have a thesis that matters,” he said, “the reality is that someone needs to help fund it. And then you have to have faculty willing to devote the cognitive labor to it. If your project falls in line with your professor, then you have a faculty member who is inherently interested. And I cannot thank the Halpins enough for making it possible to fund equipment that will give us accurate, precise research and allowed me to have a high-caliber project.”

- Beth James

In the rapidly growing intersection between electronics engineering and neuroscience, Caleb Tulloss ’18 seems to have found his place. The electrical engineering concentra-tor from Weston, Mass. is working to develop a fully-implanted solution to eye-tracking. His work has begun with external benchtop electronics, and by the end of the summer, he will have outlined a plan toward fully implanted implementation. Such a system would enable constant tracking of gaze and focus in neuroscience experiments, gaining a greater technological ability to study atten-tional relationships to brain activity, but also basic processing of the visual system.

His proof-of-concept prototype apparatus was first envisioned by Assistant Professor David Borton, and Ph.D. student Marc Powell. Powell was working on his BrainCell project, linking several stages of wireless communication together to record from many different areas of the cortex at the same time. Occupied with this project, he needed an undergraduate to investigate an implantable eye tracking system. Meanwhile Tulloss, who had completed an Intro to Neuroscience class and was enjoying his for-ays into circuit design, still had the thought of neuroengineering in the back of his mind. He stumbled upon the opening in the Brown Neuromotion Lab at the right moment.

“They were looking for a device to be used by neuroscientists in experiments. We talked about coils embedded in the eye socket, to detect the orientation of the eye, which would involve similar circuitry to what I had been working on,” Tulloss said.

The goal of Borton’s lab is to design, develop and deploy neurotechnology to better under-stand the nervous system. By monitoring the nervous system of nonhuman primates as they move freely within their environment, scientists learn about the complex dynam-ics of neural circuits during movement in a naturalistic setting. Eye tracking is an important part of such studies, providing information about how an animal navigates its surroundings, interacts with objects, and avoids obstacles. Current solutions to the

challenge of eye tracking require the subject to be head-fixed, and are therefore of limited use in a freely moving paradigm. Tulloss’ prototype could solve that for researchers going forward.

“Professor Borton has certainly designed a lot of circuits, which is my passion as well,” Tulloss said. “He’s a biomedical engineer who is not afraid of the electronic side of things. Although we’re coming from the two different backgrounds, he’s a great role model for me – finding the interface between humans and technology. He’s been a very patient and supportive mentor.”

In January, Tulloss spent two and a half weeks working on a MATLAB algorithm for the orien-tation of the eye, and the spring semester was spent testing the circuit design on the benchtop model. Recently he and Powell have discussed changing the coil geometry, using simulations to validate their new approach. Thus far, the work has been purely electrical, not yet involv-ing any tissues. He is also aided by the fact that he recently completed Borton’s Implantable Devices course, a class that introduces design methods and challenges unique to creating an implantable device.

Over the summer, he plans to finalize the circuitry and software, and then determine the best way to implant an animal model. Tulloss will be greatly assisted in this venture by the Neal B. Mitchell ’58 Systems Thinking Project Award which provides monetary support for an under-graduate student, in a summer or semester of collaborative research with an individual faculty member, for research and study associated with systems thinking or an advanced building structure.

“I really like that the idea of the Mitchell award is to be used for project funds, not just a sum-mer stipend,” Tulloss said. “I feel like it is teaching me how to manage grants in a way.” Asked about his plans after graduation, he said, “I’m going to be looking at Ph.D. programs, in either electrical or biomedical engineering. I’d really like to explore feedback and closed-loop control for the nervous system.”

- Beth James

Caleb Tulloss ’18 Looks to Develop Implantable Eye-Tracking System

Caleb Tulloss ’18 probes the control circuit of his benchtop prototype. The rising senior is working toward a fully implanted eye tracking system by summer’s end.

Michael Manning ’17 uses the current flume setup to test multiple hydrofoils in the water. The heave and pitch of the hydrofoils can be controlled, while other data is collected from the foil sensors. The velocity-measuring device of his experiment is downstream.

STUDENT AWARDS STUDENT AWARDS



Brown School of Engineering’s Amy Butcher ’17, Sarah Cowles ’17, and Ph.D. student Helena Liu have each won a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) fellow-ship in the Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Recent engineering graduates Nikki Driscoll ’16, Marielena Gamboa Castro ’15, Cory Hargus ’14, Mehrdad Kiani ’15 and Jack Wilson ’16 were also honored this year with awards.

The NSF GRFP helps ensure the vitality of the human resource base of science and en-gineering in the United States and reinforces its diversity. The program recognizes and supports outstanding graduate students in NSF-supported science, technology, engi-neering, and mathematics disciplines who are pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions. NSF Fellows are anticipated to become knowledge experts who can con-tribute significantly to research, teaching, and innovations in science and engineering. These individuals are crucial to maintaining and advancing the nation’s technological

Butcher, Cowles, Liu Selected NSF Graduate Research Fellows

infrastructure and national security as well as contributing to the economic well-being of society at large.

Butcher’s proposal to the NSF involves producing clean water by essentially speed-ing up the water cycle. Her project involves using the plasmonic response of aluminum nanoparticles to evaporate water with solar energy. Sunlight excites electrons in these nanoparticles, which then heat up enough to be able to evaporate surrounding water, separating it from salt and pollutants. Butcher proposes assembling core-shell aluminum nanoparticles (which have layers of different materials, like gobstoppers) into a porous aluminum structure which floats on water and serves to make the nanoparticles’ photothermal response to sunlight more efficient. As a senior, she worked in Professor Dan Mittleman’s lab, completing her senior thesis in engineering physics. Her thesis work involved combining laser terahertz emission microscopy with nano-optics in order to study semiconductors which emit terahertz radiation when excited with short optical pulses. Later this year, she will begin working toward her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Molecular Engineering, exploring light-matter interac-tions on the nanoscale.

Cowles, a chemical and biochemical engi-neering concentrator, conducted research under the guidance of her thesis advisor Assistant Professor Anita Shukla, on the development of a novel antifungal liposomal delivery system. She investigated the use of a peptide fragment from the Histatin 5 protein to target Candida albicans. C. albicans, an opportunistic fungi, can lead to systemic candidiasis infection with a high mortal-ity rate of 33-54% and estimated treatment costs of two to four billion dollars each year. Targeted drug delivery systems limit un-necessary exposure to antimicrobials and still effectively treat virulent cells, there-fore minimizing the development of drug resistance. As she heads to graduate school,

Cowles plans to pursue research in drug delivery and biomaterials utilizing peptide engineering to improve cancer and infec-tious disease therapies.

Helena Liu, a second-year materials science Ph.D. student, is studying computational materials science under the guidance of Associate Professor Axel van de Walle. Liu’s research interests include the calculation of thermochemical and structural data of refractory oxides at high temperatures.

Driscoll and Kiani are both currently study-ing bioengineering. Driscoll has contin-ued her education at Penn, while Kiani is at Stanford. Gamboa Castro is studying biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech. Wilson is currently at Princeton, study-ing atomic, molecular and optical physics. Hargus is deciding on a school to continue his chemical engineering studies.

The GRFP provides a yearly stipend, along with a $12,000 cost of education allowance for tuition and fees (paid to the institution), opportunities for international research and professional development, and offers the honoree the freedom to conduct his/her own research at any accredited U.S. institution of graduate education he/she chooses.

- Beth James

Kuhn Honored for Making Difference in Community

Twenty seniors from Brown University’s Class of 2017, six graduate students and 11 recent alumni have landed coveted Fulbright student scholarships to conduct research or teach abroad, including the School of Engineering’s Leanne Block ’17. As the flagship international exchange initiative sponsored by the U.S. government, the Fulbright Program is designed to build relationships between Americans and people in more than 140 countries across the globe to collectively address global challenges and work toward world peace.

Block will be headed back to France, where she studied as a sophomore, this time to earn her graduate degree in the STEEM program (Energy Environment: Science Technology and Management) at the renowned École Polytechnique. Treating energy and the environment as two equal parts that will determine our climate future, the STEEM graduate degree provides a sophisticated understanding of energy in the 21st century. Based on a foundation of engineer-ing and applied sciences training, the program offers graduates the tools to understand the socioeconomic context of climate change and to master the evolutions of our relationship with energy, through two semesters of classes, followed by a six-month internship either at a French research institute or a company.

Block, who was drawn to Brown and mechanical engineering for the ability to blend engineering and art, believes that living in Paris and com-muting just outside of the city for classes will enhance and inspire both her artistic design side and her passion for solving the world’s energy crisis. During her time at Brown, she was awarded a DiMase Fellowship, working with the Leading Edge team to develop and test a hydrokinetic energy harvesting machine based in the current of the Cape Cod Canal. She was also published in Sensors and Actuators B for her materials research with the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and is a member of Brown’s science honor society, Sigma Xi, and the engineering honor society, Tau Beta Pi. She is also the founder of Brown’s Rube Goldberg Club.

“Perhaps the greatest humanitarian and environmental issue of our time, which will require a great deal of international cooperation to solve, is climate change,” Block said. “With my Fulbright grant, I hope to tackle this issue head-on. The STEEM program will give me an overview of various renewable energy technologies, as well as a focus on management skills to help implement these ideas. With my internship, I hope to focus on the mechanical design of new technologies, using what I have learned at Brown.”

Last year, Brown produced the most Fulbright winners in the United States, and the University has consistently ranked in the top 10 of Fulbright’s top-producing schools. Selection is made based on a variety of factors including the quality of application, personal qualifications and academic record, and the extent to which the candidate and the project will help advance the Fulbright mission.

Block ’17 Earns Fulbright Scholarship

Brown University School of Engineering Ph.D. candidate Lindsay Kuhn was honored at the Women in the Enterprise of Science and Technology (WEST) ceremony with a Making a Difference in the Community Award for her project Inventing Heron. Inventing Heron is an online community of people sharing stories about what they call work. Kuhn’s intention was to create the community so young people could learn about various careers firsthand and be inspired toward the many different science, technology, engineering and math professions.

Kuhn has a passion for learning and helping others, as evidenced by the collection of more than 500 people in careers ranging from mushroom farmers to astrophysicists who have shared their stories on her site, in written narratives and videos. She has also developed outreach programs in local schools, in-cluding an Inventing Heron inspired career fair in North Smithfield High School in Rhode Island. One of Inventing Heron’s main objectives is to encourage young people, especially women, to go into STEM, and to celebrate the everyday, hardworking person. The website can be found at inventingheron.com.

“Inventing Heron is an innovative approach to showcasing real people in real jobs,” said Karen Haberstroh, Lecturer in Brown’s School of Engineering. “It’s a relevant online tool to guide and mentor students in their career pursuits.”

Amy Butcher ’17 worked in the Mittleman Lab.

Sarah Cowles ’17 worked in the Shukla Lab.



After a six-year journey to prepare for a space adventure, a team of Brown students is now just one year away from seeing an out-of-this-world dream become a reality.

Since 2011, the student-led Brown Space Engineering group has been busy designing, building and testing a small satellite — a CubeSat — they hoped to someday put into orbit. In 2014, NASA agreed to provide space on a rocket for the four-inch cube, and now the team has been given its launch window. In the second quarter of 2018, the Brown satellite, dubbed EQUiSat, will fly aboard a resupply mission bound for the International Space Station, where ISS astro-nauts will deploy it into orbit 250 miles above the Earth.

The satellite’s mission is largely educational, says Hunter M. Ray, a junior engineering student and EQUiSat project manager. The idea is for EQUiSat to be a visible ambassador for space and space technology, showing people that the final frontier is within their reach. High-powered LED beacons will flash brightly enough to be seen with the naked eye from the ground as the satellite streaks across the night sky. A transmitter will relay telemetry and other data on amateur radio frequencies. And opportunities to see and hear EQUiSat will be combined with public outreach programs including space science curriculum modules for elementary, middle, and high school students.

from RISD and a high school student from the Met High School in Providence. Last year, the group changed its name from the Brown CubeSat team to Brown Space Engineering in the hope of expanding its focus and drawing more students. While Fleeter continues to oversee the group, the project is fully owned by the students.

“It’s 100 percent student-run,” Ray said. “If we don’t turn something in or if we mess some-thing up, it’s our responsibility.”

Ray, who had long been interested in aerospace technology, joined the team as a first-year student and started working on the solar array. He said he was drawn to the idea of working on something that would eventually go to space, but he admits to being a little overwhelmed by the complexity of the project.

“I was completely lost at first, but I learned to ask a lot of questions and use the resources around me, whether it’s been professors, other students, or even Google,” Ray said. “Over the past three years, it’s been a constant process of breaking down these large, seemingly impenetrable problems into a series of smaller hurdles that can be approached from a better angle.”

To keep the project on track, the team has had to deal with the inevitable departure of students when they graduate. It’s a challenge, but one they’ve been able to handle pretty well so far, says Ryan Izant, a senior who is the elec-tronics lead for the project. When he started, Izant says he had a weekly phone call with his predecessor on the project to help get him up to speed.

“We not only have to avoid losing the expertise we have, but we have to keep raising the bar,” Izant said. “That’s challenging, but I think we’re getting better at doing it.”

A first in space

The EQUiSat team has plenty of ground to cover over the next few months. They’ll be tweaking the design of the satellite’s major systems and carefully assembling the final product. They’ll also undertake a series of NASA-mandated tests to make sure EQUiSat can survive a trip into orbit and function properly in the vacuum of space. EQUiSat’s

LED beacons are its principal payload. Making them visible from Earth (they’ll be as bright as the North star) requires quite a bit of electri-cal current — more current than traditional lithium ion batteries could supply. So the team has turned to a newer battery technology.

“We’re testing lithium iron phosphate batter-ies that can handle a higher current,” Ray said. “They’re also considered to be a more stable chemistry and are able to handle more charg-ing cycles.”

There’s a catch, however. This will be the first time anyone has flown these batteries in space. So the team will have to do extensive safety and reliability tests before launch. Once in orbit, NASA will likely be quite interested in how the batteries perform, Ray says, as the agency investigates this battery type for use in future space suits and rovers.

Another of the team’s priorities is to demon-strate that building an operational satellite need not be egregiously expensive. Despite their diminutive size, CubeSats can come with hefty price tags. Nearly all the components necessary to build one can be purchased off the shelf, but going that route can cost any-where from $30,000 to upwards of $100,000. The EQUiSat team wanted to see if they could develop their own custom-made parts for a lot less money.

The team milled the satellite’s aluminum chas-sis themselves. To charge their experimental batteries, they built their own solar array using scrap pieces of gallium arsenide cells, carefully

COUNTDOWN In 2018, NASA will launch into orbit a small satellite designed and built by a team of Brown undergraduates over the past six years.

Nasa Launch Date For Student Space Project Nears

Roni Midyat ’20 and Lauren Haller ’18, manufacturing lead, look over a chassis for the Brown Space Engineering club’s CubeSat. Photo: Nick Dentamaro

“If you had asked someone in the industry 20 or 30 years ago if undergrads could build a satel-lite, they would have said you’re crazy,” Ray said. “But here we are. We want to show people that space is right there — that it’s accessible and you can interact with it.”

Student-led project

The launch is part of NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative, which aims to give universities, nonprofits and other organizations an affordable pathway to space. The program also offers young engineers and developers a chance to get hands-on experience with space technology.

The EQUiSat team was formed in 2011 by a handful of students taking an aerospace engineer-ing class taught by Rick Fleeter, an adjunct professor of engineering who founded a private satellite company before coming to Brown. The team’s ranks have since swelled to over 40 members. Many are engineering concentrators, but the group also includes students from physics, computer science and environmental science, as well as industrial design students

A Brown satellite wouldn't be complete without a bear engraving.

“First bear in space as far as I know,” jokes team member Ryan Izant ’17.

arranged to maximize their ability to gather light. The resulting arrays provide plenty of power, but cost 35 times less than an off-the-shelf solar panel.

All told, the team says EQUiSat could be reproduced for as little as$5,000, helping to demonstrate the increasing affordability of space technology.

Testing and deployment

Over the next few months, EQUiSat will undergo a series of critical tests to make sure it’s mission-ready. Vibration tests will confirm that a rocket ride won’t shake the satellite’s vital components to pieces. After that comes a series of thermal tests. When exposed to direct sunlight in the vacuum of space, EQUiSat will see temperatures as high as 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Out of the sun, it will be negative 250. The team will need to make sure all systems are able to function in these extremes.

If all systems are go, EQUiSat will be packed in pods with other CubeSats, loaded aboard a rocket operated by SpaceX or another of NASA’s contractors, and flown to the International Space Station. ISS astronauts will load the satellites onto the station’s robotic, and a spring-loaded ejection system will scatter the collection of cubes into space.

A Brown satellite wouldn't be complete without a bear engraving. “First bear in space as far as I know,” jokes team member Ryan Izant.

The first order of business after deployment will be getting the satellite in the proper orientation relative to Earth. In order for the beacons to be seen, they’ll need to be pointed downward. Two pairs of perpendicular magnets called hysteresis rods will help dampen any spinning that might be generated by the deployment process. Another magnet will then align the craft with Earth’s magnetic field, keeping the beacons pointed in the right direction.

Once the craft is properly oriented, it will be ready to start flashing its beacons. They’re programmed to flash three times in quick succession every minute when the satellite is in the dark. People on the ground will have between nine and 18 sighting opportunities during a nighttime pass. People will be able to track viewing opportunities online, while amateur radio operators will be able receive detailed telemetry and status information.

As the launch window draws near and the goal of putting a satellite in space gets closer to reality, Ray says he thinks a lot about the magnitude of what the team has accomplished.

“Fifty years ago, the colossal resources of the U.S. government were necessary to get some-thing to work in space,” he said. “Now as undergraduates, we’re able to build something that will interface with the space station on a shoestring budget. I just wonder what students will be building 50 years from now.”

- Kevin Stacey

Yoel Zaid ’19 (left) works with Noah Joseph ’18, CAD lead, on laying out pieces for EQUiSat in the Brown Design Workshop.


After creating, then earning, his Renewable Energy Innovation de-gree last spring, Cliff Weitzman ’16 still had more to accomplish on College Hill. He describes his independent concentration as a mix of physics, computer science and engineering, creating his own major and course of study under the guidance of faculty advisor and en-gineering Associate Professor Domenico Pacifici. An offer from his former entrepreneurship professor, and Executive Director Danny Warshay to stay on as a Peer Entrepreneur-in-Residence (PEIR) for the Jonathan M. Nelson ’77 Center for Entrepreneurship’s inaugural year seemed like a good plan for the recent grad who still had a few startup ideas of his own that he wanted to be heard.

Just a few months later, Weitzman was named to Forbes Magazine’s 2017 list of 30 under 30 top change-makers and innovators in the country. A Google student ambassador and TEDx speaker, Weitzman was honored as the founder of Speechify, a software program that translates text to speech, making reading accessible for those who are dyslexic (like him), have difficulty with vision, or who are English as a second language learners. The Forbes’ naming in the Education category tops off a resume that includes winning first place at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s and Stanford University’s global startup pitch competitions. At 22, Weitzman is one of the youngest people on the list by far, sharing the honor with mostly 27-29 year olds. He built Speechify with help from his team and fellow Brown students, Jared Siskin ’19 and Noah Picard ’18.

“My goal now is that every dyslexic kid in the world has access to Speechify,” he said. “It started off as a product to help me do my work. But every time I showed it to someone else, they asked for a copy. Eventually, I made a YouTube video, teaching people in general how to use text-to-speech. Forty thousand people watched it and about 200 people left comments saying things like, ‘I am liter-ally crying. This changed my nine-year-old’s life.’”

The Speechify app has not yet launched publicly; it is currently being tested and de-bugged with help from the Hamilton School at Wheeler. Hamilton is a “school-within-a-school” contained inside the Wheeler School in Providence, and serves children from Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts with language-based learn-ing differences. Many Hamilton students have been diagnosed with

dyslexia, attention-deficit disorder, executive function deficits and/or specific language impairments.

Weitzman plans for a product launch soon, when the app will be made available to the public in app stores online. In the meantime, curious supporters can watch his video online at https://getspeechify.com.

“Ever since I met Cliff, I knew he had the potential to change the world,” Pacifici said. “And now I’m glad to see he’s doing that one step at a time.” It was in Pacifici’s lab that Weitzman finalized the details for his concen-tration designed to introduce students to concepts and skills that allow them to innovate in the field of Renewable Energy. It requires students to first gain an understanding of the technologies involved: photovoltaic solar, concentrated solar, nuclear, hydro, wind, etc., and then learn more about the basics of the science that makes these technologies possible. This initial learning is drawn from classes in engineering, physics, geology, chemistry, economics, and computer science. Under Pacifici’s guidance, Weitzman built a working solar cell from scratch as part of a class project.

“Entrepreneurship and start-ups at Brown have exploded over the past four years,” Weitzman said. “And I believe there are three main reasons.”

First, he cites the Nelson Center. “Danny, Liz (Malone) and Jonas (Clark) are doing great work,” he said. The center was established to build on Brown’s significant strengths and competencies in entre-preneurship research and teaching, strong alumni networks, and the growing interest in and need for creative approaches to address local and global challenges. The center enables teaching, programming and collaboration among members of the Brown community engaged in entrepreneurial activities, applicable to any student regardless of their field of study.

Cliff Weitzman ’16 Makes Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List

Thanks to a software app that is close to his own heart, Cliff Weitzman ’16 lands on top of change-maker list.

ALUMNI MAKING A DIFFERENCE ALUMNI MAKING A DIFFERENCE

“My goal now is that every dyslexic kid in the world has access to Speechify,” he said. “It started off as a product

to help me do my work. But every time I showed it to someone else, they asked for a copy.”

Text-to-Speech: Nelson Center Executive Director Danny Warshay and Cliff Weitzman '16 tweak the newest version of Weitzman's Speechify app.

Continued on page 31

The story of Marielena Gamboa Castro ’15 cannot be told without weaving in connections she made during her time on the Brown University campus. Recently awarded a highly prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, she has every intention of enlarging that circle of contacts.

The biomedical engineering concentrator, honored with the 2015 George H. Main prize (awarded for her diligence and devotion to stud-ies, and holding promise of success in her field), worked in Assistant Professor Ian Wong’s lab as an undergrad. As one of the first under-graduates to join the Wong Lab, she had previously done some work with image analysis, making her a positive addition to Wong’s cancer cell research team.

Wong, who had just arrived on campus in 2013, was exploring how cancer cells transition to malignant behaviors such as invasion and drug resistance. Gamboa Castro spent two years examining how mix-tures of benign and malignant cells coordinate their migratory behav-iors. Early on, she, Wong, and others close to the project realized there was something here worth sharing. It was not going to be complete by graduation, however, so when the opportunity came to stay around for another year as a researcher, she took it. This allowed her time to finish the project, ultimately leading to the publication of her research.

Her first authored paper, “Clustering and Jamming in Epithelial-Mesenchymal Co-Cultures,” was published last September in the journal Soft Matter. The paper revealed that cancer cell migration is influenced by the density and type of neighboring cells, analogous to how cars get stuck in traffic. To quantify these behaviors, Gamboa-Castro, Ph.D. candidate Susan Leggett and Wong tracked thousands

of cells and developed methods to analyze intercellular interactions. They found that epithelial cell types, which typically form sheet-like tissues in the body, can aggregate together to arrest their motion, known as a “jamming” transition. Instead, mesenchymal cells, which are typically individually dispersed in connective tissues, tend to remain mobile and unattached. Unexpectedly, mixtures of these two cell types with even a small fraction of mesenchymal cells remained “unjammed” with highly fluid cellular motions. This work suggests that tumors that include mesenchymal cells can rapidly transition to malignant invasion. These mesenchymal cells thus represent a promis-ing therapeutic target.

“I believe this work has important implications to cancer research, and I strongly felt that it deserved to be completed,” Gamboa Castro said. “And working as a research assistant gave me time to focus on applying to graduate school, and figure out where I wanted to go.”

Where she ended up is the joint Georgia Tech/Emory University biomedical engineering program, working with advisor Gabe Kwong, who had recently started his new lab as an assistant professor. Kwong previously completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Professor Sangeeta Bhatia ’90, a mem-ber of the Brown Corporation. Bhatia is a cancer researcher, MIT professor, and biotech entrepreneur who works to adapt technologies developed in the computer industry for medical innovation. Bhatia’s laboratory leverages “tiny technologies” of miniaturization tools used in semiconductor manufacturing to yield inventions with new applications in tissue regeneration, stem cell differentiation, medical diagnostics, and drug delivery. In addition to her ground-breaking research, Bhatia is a passionate advocate for diversity in science and engineering.

This connection is not lost on Gamboa Castro.

Her current work, under the tutelage of Kwong, will be similar in spirit to the Wong Lab at Brown, harnessing the power of the intersection of engineering and biology to fight cancer. And she is making sure the circle of mentorship, and Brown connections, doesn’t stop with her.

“Professor Wong is an amazing mentor,” Gamboa Castro said. “When I started there, I remember he sat me down, and said simply, ‘What do you want to do? What resources do you need, and how I can help you get there?’ I had never thought about it in those terms before, and didn’t even know I needed that mentorship.”

Her own route to Brown wasn’t typical. She applied through the Questbridge program, a national organization that connects the na-tion’s brightest students from low-income backgrounds with leading institutions of higher education. “As a first-generation immigrant, Brown University just wasn’t on my radar. I didn’t know much about it.

NSF Fellowship, Brown Connections Lead Marielena Gamboa Castro ’15 to Cancer Research

Continued on page 31

Merging engineering and biomedicine to target cancer by reprogramming the immune system, Gamboa Castro ’15 has received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Intersecting Engineering and Biology: Marielena Gamboa Castro ’15 harvests bacteria carrying genetic circuits that will be used to reprogram immune cells. Photo: Yumiko Sakurai


A symbiotic partnership between Cognex Machine Systems and en-gineering and computer science professors Gabriel Taubin and Pedro Felzenszwalb began five years ago when the established company was looking for research related to three-dimensional vision. The coop-erative agreement has expanded into a mutually beneficial collabora-tion between the two entities, giving Cognex a unique opportunity to work with Brown faculty and gain valuable resources and technolo-gies, while at the same time providing real-world educational and research opportunities to both faculty and students on campus.

Cognex Corporation, in Natick, Mass., is a leading provider of vision systems, vision software, vision sensors and industrial ID readers used in manufacturing automation. The company designs, develops, manufactures, and markets a range of products that incorporate sophisticated machine vision technology that gives them the ability to “see,” including barcode readers, machine vision sensors, and machine vision systems. During a 2012 recruiting event, Cognex’s President and CEO Rob Willett ’89 traveled back to his alma mater, and decided it was time to start working with the engineering talent on College Hill. “Rob and I felt that Professor Taubin’s laboratory was developing interesting technology in the field of 3D vision,” said Dr. David Michael, Cognex’s Director of Core Vision Tool Development. “So we began a collaboration including financial support. Two years later we added support for a second lab, that of Professor Felzenszwalb.

“Daniel Moreno was the graduate student in Professor Taubin’s lab that we worked most closely with. We encouraged and were

impressed by his work pushing the envelope of 3D cameras,” Michael said. “He later did an internship at Cognex. Daniel’s ability to think, question and solve problems make him an ideal Cognoid – that’s how we refer to ourselves at Cognex. We wanted that talent on our team, so I hired him in February just a few months after he defended his Ph.D. dissertation.”

Moreno’s research at Brown centered on techniques in scanning, in-cluding how to capture the 3D shape of an object from images. Moreno and Taubin are especially interested in exploring the different aspects of super resolution, using low cost components. Among several patented applications, is a system and method to capture the surface geometry of a three-dimensional object in a scene using unsynchro-nized structured lighting. The method includes a pattern projector arranged to project a sequence of image patterns onto the scene at a pattern frame rate; a camera arranged to capture a sequence of unsyn-chronized image patterns of the scene at an image capture rate; and a processor configured and arranged to synthesize a sequence of syn-chronized image frames from the unsynchronized image patterns of the scene, with each of the synchronized image frames corresponding to one image pattern of the sequence of image patterns. Because the pattern projector and cameras like those on smartphones, webcams, point-and-shoot digital cameras, and camcorders are used, significant cost savings can be achieved.

Willett and Moreno are not the only Brown students who have become Cognoids. New hire Julie Lym ’17 (electrical engineering) will begin her Cognex career by taking part in a new 24-month rotational training program for recent college graduates which aims to give new recruits a strong foundation in both technology and business.

“It seems trite to describe the collaboration between Cognex and Brown as a win-win situation, but that’s truly the case,” Michael said. “This association is important for Cognex because it gives us insight into quality student researchers and approaches that are germane to our business of applying machine vision technology to robotics and automation. For Brown, it provides unrestricted gift funds to faculty

- and through them to students — that can be used to further their research.”

Taubin agrees that the relationship has pros-pered with the exchange of technology and compelling real-world computer vision prob-lems to use as case studies, offering practi-cal applications in specific fields of study. “Cognex’s support for research has enabled us to file several patent applications and pro-duce many publications. Our research cor-relates with their product development and commercialization, so we can travel along the same paths,” he said. “Now we have a new proposed project, with new funding for this year. We hope our collaboration continues for the foreseeable future.”

Felzenszwalb, who has also been the benefi-ciary of Cognex’s support, concurred. “The sponsorship is useful to purchase needed equipment to do experiments. My lab has an ongoing project to restore images under low light, using the statistics of natural images to ‘clean the picture’,” he said. Felzenszwalb’s research focuses on computer vision, ar-tificial intelligence, machine learning and discrete algorithms, and with Cognex’s help, he was able to support an undergraduate in his lab during the school year.

Michael added, “As a Boston-based leader in the field of machine vision, which is a branch of artificial intelligence, Cognex is always searching the academic community for the best and brightest students and researchers. I have been in this field for over 30 years and have long been impressed by the quality of thinkers and ideas that come out of Brown University and Brown Engineering. There’s also a strong cultural alignment between Cognex and Brown that truly makes our collaboration work – we both value, encour-age and celebrate talented and motivated individuals who approach their work with enthusiasm and integrity and persevere until the task is done exceedingly well.”

- Beth James

A partnership between Brown Engineering and the Cognex Corporation supports students, equipment purchases, and research breakthroughs such as more affordable and accessible 3D scanning.

Professors Gabriel Taubin (left) and Pedro Felzenszwalb have research interests in computer vision, audio/visual signal processing algorithms and applications, and pattern recognition, making the Cognex Corporation an ideal collaborator with their Brown University labs.

“It seems trite to describe the collaboration between Cognex and Brown as a win-win situation, but that’s truly the case,” Michael said. “This association is important for

Cognex because it gives us insight into quality student researchers and approaches that are germane to our

business of applying machine vision technology to robotics and automation.”

CORPORATE CONNECTIONS

“Second, Brown CS continues to kill it,” Weitzman said. “When I came here, our Computer Science department was the third best program in the country, and it just keeps getting better.” Weitzman lists the Hack@Brown event and improvements in, and collaboration with engineering in the Brown Design Workshop as examples of how the concentration meets the needs of its students.

And his third reason for the success of recent Brown startups? The Brown Entrepreneurship Program. “Brown EP, under outgoing co-Presidents Valentin Perez ’18 and Ali Paul ’18, has doubled its budget and gotten ten times the number of people involved.” For more than two decades, Brown EP has facilitated a wide array of activities on campus, including Startup@Brown (founded by Perez), an annual conference that is one part startup career fair and one part mentoring experience for budding student entrepreneurs.

“When I first came to campus, most of the programs for student funding were for social initia-tives. Now with the Nelson Center, there is more support for student startups as well. But there is still room to grow in seed investments for well-developed student projects,” Weitzman said.

He would know. In his first year, he founded BoardBrake, a patented attachable brake for longboards and skateboards. He followed that with CellArmor (a device that blocks cell phone radiation from affecting user’s reproductive organs), Direct Boost (a transdermal delivery sys-tem for branch chain amino acids), StarterPack (an app downloaded more than 70,000 times), and Find Me Scholarships (a website which actually grew out of his final project for a software engineering class, and is aimed at cultivating a targeted list of scholarships for eligible students).

“I want to create as much value as I can in the world. I love learning, ask a lot of questions, and am always inventing and building,” Weitzman said.

- Beth James

Continued from page 28 (Cliff Weitzman ’16 Makes Forbes’ 30 Under 30 List)

Continued from page 29 (Connections Lead Marielena Gamboa Castro ’15 to Cancer Research)

Cognex - Brown Collaboration Advances Research

“Once I got here, I quickly realized it was one of the best decisions I ever made, and then I wanted to give back. I now help high school students through the college application process, helping them understand that financial aid packages may make a top university more afford-able than they realize.”

She is also involved in other outreach programs, serving as an essay coach for high school students, helping them tell their own story in a clear, concise and compelling way. “I found that mentoring these students while I was applying to graduate school helped me as well,” she said. “And I’m currently teaching middle school students about biomedical engineering through a Georgia Tech summer camp.

“(Wong) has been a very supportive advisor who has been instrumental in helping me get where I am today. He allowed me to network, talk to professors at Brown and other schools, and was key in helping me figure out my path. He also entrusted a lot to a few of us as undergrads. By act-ing almost as graduate students, we were able to transition early on from students to scientists and independent researchers.”

“Lena has everything it takes to be an exceptional scientist,” Wong said. “She can tackle prob-lems using highly innovative engineering tools as well as beautiful biological experiments. She’s also a natural leader and a great team member. Her story, to me, is very Brown. ”

Gamboa Castro’s trajectory took another upward turn at Campus Dance 2016, when boyfriend, former Brown football tight end, and electrical engineer Alex Viox ’15 asked her to marry him. The two are currently living in Atlanta, planning their wedding for the summer of 2018.

- Beth James

ALUMNI MAKING A DIFFERENCE


Dan Leibholz ’86 Sc.M.’88VP, Embedded Systems Products and Tech GroupAnalog Devices, Inc.Norwood, MARyan Ross (CAB Chair)Director of Software Engineering Arista NetworksBoston, MARob Markey ’86 P’18Partner Bain & CompanyChicago, ILJeff Trauberman, JD ’76VP, Space, Intelligence and Missile Defense for Government OpsBoeingArlington, VAAxel zur Loye Ph.D. ’81Chief Engineer (dual fuel engines)CumminsColumbus, INJoyce Mullen ’84 P’13 P’13VP/GM, OEM Sales Solutions DellRound Rock, TXChris YuDirector of Research and Development/Education Office DirectorDraper LaboratoryCambridge, MAPaul Bechta ’87 Sc.M.’88Senior Director, Global ServicesEMCHopkinton, MALou Hector, Jr., Ph.D.Technical Fellow, Research and Development General MotorsWarren, MIH. B. Siegel ’83Chief Technology OfficerIMDbSeattle, WATim Denison, Ph.D. Director of Core Technology, Neuromodulation MedtronicMinneapolis, MNLou DiPalma Sc.M. ’89 P’08Chief Engineer - Undersea SystemsRaytheonPortsmouth, RIColin Mercer, Ph.D.VP Research & DevelopmentSimuliaProvidence, RIJosh BrumbergerChief Commercial OfficerUtilidataProvidence, RI Michael PereiraSenior Vice President, Technology & OperationsximedicaProvidence, RI

CORPOR ATE AFFILIATES BOARD

Corporate Affiliates Board Members

The School of Engineering CAB was developed to ensure that the growth and evolution of the School accords with industry needs, and that the School will be guided and supported by robust industry involvement.A main purpose of the CAB is to mutually benefit industry partners and the School. This is accom-plished by developing relationships that enhance both student internship and employment opportu-nities, and exploring ways for faculty to partner with industry in performing high-impact research. The CAB will provide the Dean with guidance on the School’s educational program – including its quality and relevance to state-of-the-art engineering challenges, together with the preparedness of its graduates.

BROWN SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING 32 33 WINTER 2015

The School of Engineering’s Corporate Affiliates Board met for their annual spring meeting on April 26th. The meeting was led by Chair Ryan Ross of Arista Networks and Jennifer Casasanto, Associate Dean for Programs and Planning. Topics at this CAB meeting included updates on master’s degree programs, the search for an Executive Director of Corporate Relations, and the international student climate.Professor Anubhav Tripathi, Executive Academic Director, EMSTL shared information on the composition of the first cohort of the Executive Masters in

Science, Technology, Leadership, and some assessment feedback from students on the curriculum. Marisa Quinn, Chief of Staff in the Office of the Provost, then shared the planning and progress on the search for the newly created University position of Executive Director of Corporate Relations. The CAB discussed academic relations in their organizations and advised on the overall priorities and focus for this position, and intended impact in the creation of this position. A faculty research presentation was then given by Pedro Felzenszwalb, Professor of Engineering. He discussed his innovative approaches to computer vision and image processing, the challenges, and where he anticipated the research and applications may be in the future. Over the past year, the School of Engineering has been in planning with RISD around a potential new Masters in Engineering Design. Chris Bull, Senior Lecturer in Engineering and Director of Brown Design Workshop, presented a program overview, outline of curriculum, educational outcomes, and a positioning analysis. The CAB advised on training needs in industry and workforce demand in these areas. Casasanto then led a discussion on the current international student climate and indicators of a decline in international applicants, University actions to better support these populations, and workforce alignment and hiring trends to better understand if some sectors are sponsoring less visas. The CAB members then engaged in a special career path mentoring and advising session. They met with engineering undergrad and graduate students and advised on themes submitted by students that they did not easily have an understanding of, such as:

• How are engineering organizations structured? • What are job areas of highest demand, what are most competitive areas?• How to think about getting from entry level positions to your dream work?• What do you think the 10-year outlook is for your sector – what areas of focus are growing in importance? The CAB members met with over 50 students and the feedback was that there was tremendous value for the students who were able to participate.

(members listed alphabetically by company)


Engineering Advisory Council Mission

Provide support and advice in the development, execution, and attainment of the School of Engineering’s strategic goals.Ensure the School of Engineering is providing the highest quality educational experi-ence for its students, and is embarking on the highest impact, highest quality, research programs.Coordinate with the Engineering Development Committee to ensure that our strategic and financial initiatives are achieved.Work with campus leadership to ensure their continued support of the School of En-gineering, and recognition of the key role Engineering plays in the vitality of the entire Brown community.

Anish Bhimani ’91Managing Director and Chief Information Risk OfficerJP Morgan Chase & Co.New York, NY

Seth Coe-Sullivan ’99 Chief Technology Officer QD VisionLexington, MA

D. Oscar Groomes ’82 P’15Metallurgical Engineer, Physicist and Materials Scientist Groomes Business SolutionsCharlotte, NC

Deirdre Hanford ’83 - ChairSenior Vice President, Global Technical ServicesSynopsys, Inc.Mountain View, CA

David Hibbitt Ph.D.’72 PMAT’96Co-Founder Hibbitt, Karlsson and Sorensen Inc.Providence, RI

Fazle Husain ’87Managing Director Metalmark CapitalNew York, NY

Mary Lou Jepsen ’87 Ph.D.’97Head of Display DivisionFacebook/OculusMenlo Park, CA

Alejandro Knoepffler ’82 P’16PrincipalCipher Investment Management Co.Coral Gables, FL

Peter Lauro ’78 P’11PartnerSaul Ewing, LLPBoston, MA

John Lawrence, M.D. ’79Vice President, Cardiovascular Global Clinical ResearchBristol-Myers Squibb CompanyPrinceton, NJ

Andrew Marcuvitz ’71 P’06Founder, ChairmanAlpond Capital, LLCLincoln, MA

Deb Mills-Scofield ’82PartnerGlengary LLCBeachwood, OH

James R. Moody ’58 Sc.M.’65 P’97Co-FounderCo-Planar, Inc.Denville, NJ

James B. RobertoAssociate Laboratory DirectorOak Ridge National LaboratoryOak Ridge, TN

John Sinnott ’80 P’16Vice PresidentGilbane Building CompanyProvidence, RI

Paul Sorensen ’71 Sc.M.’75 Ph.D.’77 P’06 P’06Co-FounderHibbitt, Karlsson and Sorensen Inc.Providence, RI

Ted Tracy ’81 P’14Vice President of EngineeringBlueJeansMountain View, CA

James E. Warne, III ’78President WTI, Inc. Phoenix, AZ

Engineering Advisory Council Members

Engineering Development CommitteeCharlie Giancarlo ’79 P’08 P’11Managing DirectorSilver Lake PartnersMenlo Park, CA

Theresia Gouw ’90Co-FounderAspect VenturesPalo Alto, CA

Steven Price ’84Chairman and CEOTownsquare MediaGreenwich, CT

Joan Wernig Sorensen ’72 P’06 P’06Providence, RI

Paul Sorensen ’71 Sc.M.’75 Ph.D.’77 P’06 P’06Co-FounderHibbitt, Karlsson and Sorensen Inc.Providence, RI

The EAC meets in October and February to provide critical support and advice on the School as well as important feedback to the Dean, Provost, and President.

CORPORATE AFFILIATES BOARD ADVISORY COUNCIL/DEVELOPMENT COMMITTEE

Corporate Affiliates Board Mission


Building a LegacyIt probably wasn’t the advice he was expecting.

When Ching-i Hsu came to Brown from Taiwan in the late 60s in search of an ad-vanced engineering education, his graduate advisor was Professor Gerald (Jerry) Heller, a “rainmaker” and director of the Materials Research Laboratory, which received considerable government funds.

“Heller told me, ‘Just keep doing whatever you think is right.’ That might not have worked for some people. But I found it to be great; it gave me the freedom to try a variety of things.”

Balancing out the supportive but “hands-free” approach by Heller was the mentor-ship of Brown engineering’s iconic Professor (now emeritus) Barrett Hazeltine. “He was so generous with his time,” remembered Dr. Hsu. “A great teacher, he shared his wisdom, knowledge, and guidance. He’s a very admirable person.”

That freedom—including the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them—combined with the knowledge gained from supportive mentorship became two keys to his future success. In 1985 Dr. Hsu, along with his wife, Esther, founded Raritan Computer in their home. He later developed one of the world's first elec-tronic switches to control multiple PCs and servers, using only one monitor and keyboard (prior to the popularity of the mouse). From this single invention, he helped create a new industry.

Today KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switches can be found in any data center in the world and Dr. Hsu is recognized by many as one of the fathers of this technol-ogy. He remained Raritan’s CEO until 2015, when it was sold to the French indus-trial group Legrand. Raritan’s Data Center Infrastructure Management software business then spun off into Sunbird Software, with Dr. Hsu as its Chairman.

At about the same time, he reconnected with Brown. “I had been thinking about it for many years,” he said. “A graduate research assistantship supported my time on campus. And the work I did through Brown engineering provided a great back-ground, great training for thinking and problem solving. I had always hoped that one day I would be in a position to offer similar help to others.”

Not surprisingly, Dr. Hsu’s philanthropy included the establishment of an endowed fellowship. And in gratitude for funds given to the now nearly com-pleted School of Engineering’s new research building, two graduate collaborative spaces—totaling 4,000 square feet—on the third floor will bear his name. The stra-tegically placed, light-filled rooms will accommodate postdoctoral and graduate students who will be writing up the results of research conducted in adjacent labs.

In addition, the spaces “hold the promise of cutting-edge research and innova-tions, which will shape a next generation of engineers and will drive technologies that make the world a better place for everyone,” said Larry Larson, Sorensen Family Dean of Engineering. Thanks to the conjunction of his gifts, reflected Dr. Hsu, he will be supporting a student who will walk those same floors someday.

“It’s exciting to see it all coming together,” said Dr. Hsu after a safety-goggles-and-hard-hat tour of the building in April. “The back walls of the graduate spaces are there and the supporting structure is being built out. You can visualize it. To see it in person was very fulfilling.

“I am not the sort of person who seeks publicity. But I am hoping that my engagement with Brown—and in particular with Brown engineer-ing—may prove to be an inspiration to others. Something good is going to be done there.”

Ching-i Hsu earned a master of science in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1974, both in engineering. He is the father of a Brown graduate.- Catharine Beattie

DONOR PERSPECTIVE

Above: Ching-i Hsu ScM’70 PhD’74, P’98 (left), tours the graduate student collaborative spaces that will bear his name in the new School of Engineering building with project manager John Cooke (center) and Director of Development for SOE Rick Marshall ’71, P’10.

Below: Hsu discusses lab spaces with Cooke.

Brown University School of Engineering has awarded its 2017 Brown Engineering Alumni Medal (BEAM) to David J. DiGiovanni ’82, Sc.M.’84, Sc.M. ’86, Ph.D.’87. The presentation of the medal took place on Saturday, May 27, at the annual engineering awards dinner.

DiGiovanni earned his bachelor of science degree in mechanical en-gineering, magna cum laude and with honors, from Brown in 1982. His senior project on laser-induced thermophoresis led to a Ph.D. program in Professor Ted Morse’s group on mechanisms of dopant incorporation in the glass-formation process used to make optical fiber. He earned his master’s degree in engineering in 1984, another in applied mathematics in 1986, and a Ph.D. in 1987, all from Brown University.

Shortly after graduation, DiGiovanni began his career with a post-doctoral position in the Optical Fiber Research Department at Bell Laboratories, studying various phenomena related to optical fiber design, fabrication and applications, making notable contributions to the development of erbium-doped fiber for optical amplifiers, Raman amplification, high power lasers, and several optical compo-nents used in telecommunications. He enabled the transfer of many of these technologies from the research lab to new products and was appointed director of fiber research at Bell Labs in 1999.

David DiGiovanni ’82, Sc.M.’84, Sc.M. ’86, Ph.D.’87 Awarded Brown Engineering Alumni Medal

When Lucent Technologies sold its optical fiber and cable division in 2001, DiGiovanni became President of OFS Laboratories, the central research division of OFS Fitel, the second largest manufacturer of optical fiber and cable worldwide. In 2005, he was appointed chief technical officer.

The author of many technical publications, including chapters on fiber design and fabrication in several books, DiGiovanni has taught courses on Specialty Optical Fiber at international conferences for many years. He has been granted over 80 patents, including a Lucent Patent Recognition Award in 2000 for his work on an optical amplifier.

DiGiovanni has served as Associate Editor of IEEE Photonics Technology Letters, received the Bell Laboratories President’s award, and is both a member of IEEE and a Fellow of the The Optical Society (OSA).

The BEAM award was established in 1997 as part of the celebration of 150 years of teaching engineering at Brown. It is awarded to Brown Engineering graduates, recognizing exceptional records of accom-plishment in their engineering careers. A committee, comprised of faculty members and previously chosen medalists, select the new medalist each year. DiGiovanni joins a prestigious list of BEAM awardees, including recent recipients Ayanna Howard ’93 (2016), Tejal A. Desai ’94 (2015) and Andrea I. Razzaghi ’82 (2014).

ALUMNI NEWS

David DiGiovanni recently accepted the 68th Annual National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ Technical Emmy® Award for “Pioneering Invention and Deployment of Fiber Optic Cable.”

FAM/LY TIESConrad Herrmann ‘82

Even over the phone you can tell it’s a cherished story.

“When I was in high school, my dad, who graduated in 1950, would go to Brown football games with former classmates, sometimes bringing me,” says Conrad Herrmann. “They’d

tailgate and everything. One time my dad asked why didn’t the University upgrade the stadium? It’s so run-down. The person next to him turned and said it doesn’t just happen, it

requires people to become involved. Why don’t you get involved?”

And so Lacy Herrmann did, working with the alumni network and instituting Operation Pride, which raised the funds necessary for the installation of new stadium seats in 1978—the 100th

anniversary of Brown football.

It’s a lesson not lost on his son, Conrad, a 1982 Brown graduate who also gives of his time and treasure. “I experimented a lot, choosing classes by checking who the noted professors were

in the University at that time,” he says. He studied under Tom Banchoff, now professor emeritus in mathematics, who had a fascination with the fourth dimension; and with Andy Van Dam, the

present Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science “in the early stages of computer sciences as a discipline. My favorite professor,

though, was Dean Hazeltine: I took ENGN 9 and ENGN 90 and later became one of his TAs.”

And Hazeltine, who was instrumental in Conrad going for an MBA at Harvard, also taught and mentored his daughter, Christine Herrmann—a 2016 Brown graduate who herself served as an engineering TA.

“I give to the University because of my personal connections and because I believe that the commitment of the University to the School of Engineering is valid,” says Conrad. “Scientific concentrations in general

are important for America and for the world at large. The new research building, for example, is a huge undertaking and very exciting. So, too, is the integration of different disciplines. Think about it: if you need

a new kidney, there may come a time when you will be able to produce one from your own stem cells and generate it using 3D-printing technology. That’s fascinating, both as an individual and as an investor in Brown.

“Dean Larry Larson has done a fabulous job. I met him when he committed to becoming a dean, so to watch his progress over the years has been a delight.”

Conrad recently took a retirement package from Franklin Templeton, where he had worked as a portfolio manager for 27 years. Travel plans, new and ongoing volunteer

commitments, and time to reflect on the next phase of his life have all figured strongly since then. Judging by the sound

of his voice, however, the highlight has been being present for Christine—particularly her participation in

building and then competing with Brown’s Formula SAE race car at Michigan International Speedway in

April and her graduation in May.

During last year’s Family Weekend, Conrad and Christine walked to the stadium that Lacy had helped restore so many years before. There, on the

wall, was a plaque engraved with her late grandfather’s name, commemorating

his fundraising efforts. A lesson in commitment and

philanthropy that, one suspects, will not be

lost on her, either.

- Catharine Beattie

DONOR PERSPECTIVE

Giving OpportunitiesNew Engineering Facilities

School of Engineering Building Fund starting at $100,000New and renovated space on College Hill for education, collaboration and research including classrooms, research labs, cleanrooms, etc.

Brown Design Workshop in Prince Lab $10-15 millionThe focus of collaborative “making” and experiential learning for the campus

Faculty SupportEndowed Professorships $5 millionProviding faculty support plus start-up funds for research and infrastructure needs

Endowed Visiting Professorships $2 millionBringing new perspectives and real-world experience

Endowed Post-Doctoral Scholars $1.5 millionTraining the next generation of leading faculty

Graduate Student SupportEndowed Graduate Fellowships in Engineering Support for transformative research $750,000

Transforming Undergraduate EducationEndowed First-Year Seminar Fund $500,000 Provides funding for one first-year seminar each year

First-Year Seminar Fund $50,000 Provides funding for one first-year seminar

Endowed Department/Program Fund $250,000 Used broadly to help build the profile of School of Engineering programs

Endowed Technology Investment Fund $250,000 Support for enhanced classroom technology and new and upgraded state-of-the-art instructional equipment for labs

Dean’s Fund for Engineering Excellence All amountsSupport investment in novel research and curriculum innovations, and the creation of new educational ventures

CAMPAIGN FOR ENG/NEERING

“I have gotten to know Dean Larry Larson over the past few years as a member of the Engineering Advisory Council and have seen that he has a strong vision for engineering at Brown, and has provided great leadership at an important time. There is important work to be done to support the demand for engineering edu-cation and research, including growing our graduate programs, recruiting new faculty, and completing the new research building. Please join my wife Blair and me in support of the School of Engineering. Together we can ensure that the next generation of Brown students has the resources they need to prepare themselves to address the grand challenges facing 21st century engineers.” - M. Fazle Husain ’87, Engineering Development Committee

$160 M$134.1 M as of June 30, 2017

Campaign goal

School of EngineeringBox D184 Hope StreetProvidence, RI 02912

UNLIM/TED OPPORTUNITIES / TRANSFORMAT/ONAL iMPACT

In recognition of your collective investment, the names of all School of Engineering donors who contribute $10,000 or more in gifts before December 31, 2017 will be displayed publicly in the new Engineering Research Center.

All donors to the School of Engineering campaign will be invited to join us to celebrate the public building dedication on May 24, 2018.

Please consider this opportunity as we establish the new Engineering Research Center and strengthen the School’s ongoing efforts to educate future leaders in the fundamentals of engineering in a world-class research environment.

Contact: Rick Marshall, Director of Development for the School of Engineering, [email protected] Tel: +1 (401)863-9877.

http://brown.edu/go/engineering-building

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