MechE Student News - October 2020

Before his internship with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kyle McDonnell didn't know cost engineering was a career path. He said his internship gave him a taste of what working at the Corps and the construction field would be like. 

When Wesley Schumacher thinks of engineering, he thinks of people’s lives and believes it’s essential to recognize that our advancement in technology is not simply for our own benefit but largely for the people around us and society’s improvement.

Ahmed Ferjani was gearing up for an in-person internship at L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York. When the pandemic had other plans, he took it as an opportunity to prove to future employers that he's nimble and up for anything. 

Duane Chesley (MechEngr’58) valued education because of how it impacted his life, taking him from humble beginnings to full colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves. After his passing, we honor his support of mechanical engineering students. 

Alumna Carlye Lauff shares that she envisions a future where everyone considers themself part “designer” and where they have access to design tools to improve the world around them. 

A CU-Boulder research team of scientists and musicians seek to find out how musical ensembles around the world can continue to safely perform music together during the pandemic.

Diseases of the blood have traditionally taken a full day, tedious lab work and expensive equipment to diagnose, but researchers have developed a way to diagnose these conditions with greater precision in only one minute. 

Researchers are developing tattoo inks that do more than make pretty colors. Some can sense chemicals, temperature and UV radiation, setting the stage for tattoos that diagnose health problems.

A peer-reviewed study of a March choir rehearsal which became one of the nation's first superspreading events confirms that singing indoors, unmasked can swiftly spread COVID-19 via microscopic airborne particles known as aerosols. 

Seeking to understand how animals follow scent, a team of scientists won a grant to peer deeply inside the brain using a powerful microscope as the process takes place.

CU Boulder will play a major role in ASPIRE, a new center focused on developing infrastructure and systems that facilitate the widespread adoption of electric vehicles. 

Spinout company Aspero Medical was recently awarded $225,000 through the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. This award will allow the company to further technologies in the field of gastroenterology. 

Though the pandemic has made the semester more challenging, faculty and staff have been daily innovating to make their courses as hands-on as possible. 

Undergraduate researchers share their experiences as participants in ME SPUR, a program that enabled undergraduate students to work with mechanical engineering faculty on research that could be conducted remotely.