BU ENGineer - spring 2022

SPRING 2022 THE MAGAZINE OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

LIFT

OFF! HOW A SCRAPPY STUDENT CLUB LAUNCHED DOZENS OF ENG ALUMS INTO THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY

INSIDE NEW ROBOTICS TEACHING LAB, GRADE-SCHOOL GIRLS AND STEM

ENG BY THE NUMBERS 8 RANK IN RESEARCH EXPENDITURES PER FACULTY MEMBER AMONG PRIVATE ENGINEERING SCHOOLS RANKED IN THE TOP 40*

35 125

RANK AMONG ALL 216 GRADUATE ENGINEERING PROGRAMS IN THE US*

$115

TENURED & TENURE-TRACK FACULTY MEMBERS

MILLION FACULTY RESEARCH EXPENDITURES

12 RANK OF BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING GRADUATE PROGRAM NATIONALLY*

18 RESEARCH CENTERS & INSTITUTES

20,448

CREDITS TK

LIVING ALUMNI

*U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT

contents

ENGINEER MAGAZINE SPRING 2022

16 LIFT OFF! COVER STORY

FROM A STUDENT CLUB TO MAJOR ROLES IN AEROSPACE

PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF SPACEX, TOP; SDI PRODUCTIONS/ISTOCK, BOTTOM

DEPARTMENTS 3 Upfront 23 Research

11

14

STEMMING A GRADE-SCHOOL BRAIN DRAIN

25

AN ALUM’S NONPROFIT IS CLOSING THE GENDER GAP

COVER: LAUNCH OF A ROCKET CARRYING SPACEX STARLINK SATELLITES. ARMOR HARRIS (ENG’15) PLAYS A KEY ROLE IN STARLINK (SEE P. 16). COVER PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF SPACEX

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

1

message from the dean

BY DEAN KENNETH R. LUTCHEN

Science and engineering continue to be essential as we navigate the global pandemic. This past year, our students were vaccinated and are back in the classrooms, enjoying experiential activities, studying abroad and engaging in hands-on learning in our laboratories.

We are excited about the future and are starting up the processes to implement a strategic plan that will chart our course for the next decade.

Our plan has three major pillars: creating the Societal Engineer who can impact society; researching at the convergence of multiple disciplines to address societal challenges; and partnering with society.

You will read more about the plan and how we are bringing it to reality in the next issue of ENGineer, but I want to focus on the third pillar here, because we are forging partnerships with industry that are unique and already bearing fruit. These partnerships are advancing

2 BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

addition to our hands-on facilities: the Robotics & Autonomous Systems Teaching & Innovation Center (RASTIC), designed to produce a workforce that will keep Massachusetts a leader in robotics (see page 3). RASTIC is the result of our $4.4 million competitive grant from Mass High Tech. Students will do projects of importance to—and be mentored by—

We have created a successful model that serves our students and their future employers well, and our graduates will make instant impacts in fields like AI, machine learning, advanced manufacturing, digital product design, robotics, and medical and biotechnology. industry, making them valuable to companies immediately upon graduation.

All three of these facilities are used in lab courses and also invite students to come in, play, innovate and develop their own ideas, whether they are part of the formal curriculum or of personal interest. Perhaps these students will even start companies one day. We have created a successful model that serves our students and their future employers well, and our graduates will make instant impacts in fields like AI, machine learning, advanced manufacturing, digital product design, robotics, and medical and biotechnology.

We are finding that companies are excited to work with us, and we are excited to produce the workforce that will serve society for decades to come.

PHOTOGRAPH BY CONOR DOHERTY

Partners in Progress

cutting-edge curricula and supplying employers with graduates ready to take on today’s societal challenges.

Traditionally, faculty create curricula in relative isolation from the corporate world; degree requirements are designated and students subsequently enter the workforce. Employers must then figure out what skills students did not learn in college and train them. We are taking the opposite approach.

We first did that when we created the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC) several years ago. We sought input from a broad array of industry leaders before we began building, and have continued to do so since. We innovated a curriculum with this extraordinary hands-on facility explicitly designed to work in partnership with industry.

EPIC is run in tandem with an industrial advisory board of world-class product developers who advise us on the technical needs and skills most important to them.

They have even mentored students in product design competitions on projects of importance to them.

We leveraged our experience with EPIC to create the Bioengineering Technology & Entrepreneurship Center (BTEC), which opened in 2021. In less than two years, we built an advisory board that includes leaders in biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, therapeutics and medical technology. BTEC insures that our students learn cutting-edge technologies needed by these companies for the development of the next generation of biosensors, cellular and molecular diagnostics and therapeutics, and the application of AI to medicine and biology that could transform healthcare.

You may remember some of the stories in previous issues of this magazine noting the huge growth in robotics and autonomous systems research among our faculty. That drove the creation of a novel master’s degree program, which was designed explicitly for industry. In this issue, you will read about the newest

upfront

5

A FEEL FOR SURGERY

ENG Wins Mass High Tech Grant to Build Robotics Lab for Supporting Educational Programs

T

he Massachusetts High Technology Council has awarded a $4.4 million grant to the College of Engineering to construct a new robotics lab focusing on graduate education at the master’s degree level. Boston University is contributing another $4.4 million, bringing the overall investment to $8.8 million over three years. The grant will fund the development of the Robotics & Autonomous Systems Teaching & Innovation Center (RASTIC), a hands-on robotics teaching facility that is expected to complement the college’s master’s degree program in Robotics & Autonomous Systems and enhance robotics capstone experiences for undergraduate students.

An industry collaborative that aims to support high tech and related industries

in Massachusetts, Mass High Tech chose ENG among many other applicants largely based on the college’s strong partnerships with industry and its ability to supply the workforce with qualified graduates who can make an impact in this rapidly emerging field. Mass High Tech was also attracted by the college’s cutting-edge research in artificial intelligence (AI) for robotics, largely coordinated by the Center for Information & Systems Engineering (CISE), and by the role the new Center for Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) will play in the college’s robotics program.

“The college’s strategic plan emphasizes creating societal engineers who recognize the power of synthesizing perspectives and ideas from multiple disciplines to innovate impactful solutions for societal

12

PUSHING THE LIMITS

challenges,” says Dean Kenneth Lutchen.

“To accomplish this, we recognize the critical need to build cutting-edge facilities informed by our deep partnership with industry to ensure that our graduates have the skills and experiences they need to thrive.”

Lutchen explains that over the past several years, the college has identified Robotics & Autonomous Systems as a core strategic area of strength and created a master of science program in the discipline. In discussions with industry leaders, Lutchen says, it became clear that Massachusetts was emerging as a major hub of robotics, particularly those that integrate machine learning, AI and deep learning, with applications ranging from autonomous cars to warehouses to soft robotics used in medical applications. These leaders also indicated that there is a strong need for engineers to keep the Massachusetts robotics industry at the leading edge.

While the college established a robotics laboratory in the rear of the Engineering Product & Innovation Center several years ago, it was built as a research facility. RASTIC is intended to support the education ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

3

upfront

Blonder Named NAI Fellow

A

n inventor, a mentor and a food lover, BU College of Engineering visiting scholar Greg Blonder has a variety of interests. A scientist by training, Blonder has developed technologies with lasting impact—notably, headphones with built-in speakers and two-factor authentication, a cybersecurity tool regularly used by many companies and internet users. As a testament to his achievements, the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has named Blonder a fellow, “the highest professional distinction accorded solely to academic inventors,” according to the NAI. Blonder, who was also an ENG professor of the practice in mechanical engineering 4 BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Over the past several years, the college has identified Robotics & Autonomous Systems as a core strategic area of strength and created a master of science program in the discipline. one, AI is bound to revolutionize robotics, and we have a critical mass of faculty and large federally funded projects supporting such research. The growth of computing and data sciences on campus will multiply these efforts. Further, our emphasis on soft robotics, with its great potential in medical applications, is on the forefront of the field.

“RASTIC will develop into a fantastic conduit through which cutting-edge research conducted at BU will get translated into

from 2015 to 2021, is one of 164 inventors chosen for the 2021 fellowship, intended to highlight academic inventors who have

Greg Blonder (ME)

projects of interest to the Massachusetts robotics industry, while educating the workforce of tomorrow in the process.”

Associate Provost for Computing & Data Sciences Azer Bestavros noted the University’s commitment to advancing the impact of data science on all aspects of society, as demonstrated by the center’s new 19-story building rising on Commonwealth Avenue and the establishment of the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, which includes many affiliated members from the College of Engineering.

“Clearly, a major application area for CDS is to leverage the strength of the College of Engineering in robotics and systems engineering, specifically focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches that will power the brains of the next generation of autonomous and robotics systems,” says Bestavros. “We also anticipate that new CDS data science degree programs will attract students who can contribute to the robotics industry in Massachusetts, and whose preparation will be greatly enhanced by hands-on projects in RASTIC in collaboration with industry.”

—MICHAEL SEELE

spearheaded or facilitated projects that have had a tangible impact on society and quality of life. An induction ceremony will be held in June in Phoenix.

Blonder says he was born an inventor, someone never quite satisfied with the world as it is. He holds over 100 patents, including for medical devices, green energy technology, and consumer goods. When he isn’t working to democratically rewrite the US Bill of Rights using crowdsourcing data or guiding aspiring entrepreneurs, Blonder writes a food science blog, where he shares his unique food experiments, like a doughnut flavored with peppercorns.

Asked how the NAI fellowship will bolster his work, Blonder says, “It’s easy to become discouraged about the future. By celebrating invention and its positive impact on society, the fellowship can inspire [everyone] to imagine a better world.”

— KAT J. MCALPINE

PHOTOGRAPH BY JACKIE RICCIARDI

of master’s students and offer a makerspace for undergraduates pursuing capstone projects in robotics. Professor Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE, CDS), and Professor Sean Andersson (ME, SE), director of the MS program in Robotics & Autonomous Systems, who together spearheaded the grant application, note that the lab is designed to be flexible and adjust to the developments in technology and evolving industry needs.

The 2,000-square-foot space will feature a robotics “playroom” where experiments with ground and air robots will be conducted; next to that will be a mini-city layout where students can experiment with miniature, self-driving vehicles. RASTIC will also include a build area, where student teams can collaborate to assemble custom devices. An AI space will host powerful servers to develop algorithms that act as the brain center of the deployed robots. A soft robotics area for the development of new devices made from highly flexible materials will be an important part of the lab.

“Two elements make RASTIC unique,” says Paschalidis, who is also director of CISE, which will manage RASTIC. “For

Getting a Feel for Surgery SHEILA RUSSO IS TRAINING TOMORROW’S MEDICAL ROBOTICS PIONEERS

R

obotic-assisted surgery is not new. For two decades, some doctors have been performing surgeries from a console in another room, remotely controlling a robot that puts scalpel to flesh. Surgeons who use the technology say it allows for more precise movements and reduces the risk of infection.

But there’s a drawback: the lack of haptic feel. “You can’t tell if you’re applying too much pressure,” says Assistant Professor Sheila Russo (ME, MSE). “You can’t tell if you’re grasping an organ too hard. It’s like playing a video game with a joystick.”

To solve this problem, students in Russo’s graduate course Medical Robotics develop robotic solutions to restore haptic feedback—sleeves that will squeeze a surgeon’s hands to alert them when it’s time to halt. “When the robot is exerting a force on an organ or tissue, that force will be transmitted onto the forearm or the hand of the surgeon,” says Russo.

Last semester, for example, Sheila Russo (ME, MSE) one team built a haptic feedback robotic sleeve that uses an electro-pneumatic pump to apply pressure to the surgeon’s wrist. The wrist pump is hooked up to a circuit board that is worn on a belt around the doctor’s waist and receives signals from the surgery robot. In addition to the tactile stimulus, the device includes a light that flashes red if too much force is being applied.

Says student team member Franco Julia Wise, “Say you’re performing an endoscopy. To avoid harming tissue, this will provide a multimodal way of receiving feedback: visual as well as touch.”

To fulfill the course assignment, the team focused on making the robot portable, comfortable, easy to use and cheap. “It’s battery-powered, so you could walk around the room wearing this,” says student Nash Elder. “And it’s affordable. All of this would cost something like $50.”

That price would put the device within reach for smaller hospitals, the students point out, thereby spreading the benefits to more surgeons and patients.

In a second hands-on project assignment, students made a cable-driven, soft robotic finger for robotic-assisted rehabilita-

PHOTOGRAPH OF

BY RUSSO BY JOSH ANDRUS

Students are solving a drawback to robotic-assisted surgery: the lack of haptic feel.

Top: Students built portable, robotic solutions to restore haptic feedback during surgical procedures. Bottom: Teams of students designed and fabricated soft-robotic devices using affordable materials.

tion that could be used to reduce mobility impairments and other types of disabilities caused by neurodegenerative diseases, stroke or accidents. In the future, says Russo, the students could use the same principles to build an entire robotic hand or an exoskeleton.

“They’ve become pretty independent,” says Russo. “I’m teaching them to multitask.”

“We really did get experience in everything,” says Elder.

“There’s the coding, the electronics, the mechanical engineering.

These are complex projects.”

In addition to technical skills, students learn how to pitch their own concepts and ideas and apply for funding. “They’re in grad school because they want to join industry or academia,” says Russo, “either way, to do research and development.”

Russo knows a thing or two about R&D. Her latest publication, in Soft Robotics, presents a soft-robotic bronchoscope able to explore deep into the periphery of the lung, finding cancers that currently can go undetected.

Students say that Russo’s class has turned soft robotics for medical applications into a career prospect that is both realistic and appealing.

“Not many people can say they built a medical robotic device in the classroom,” says Wise. “I came to graduate school to change the path I was on and do something with more of a humanitarian focus, and this is exactly the class to do that.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

5

upfront

A proud mother, who flew to Boston from Hawaii the day before the recognition event, bestows a traditional celebration lei on her graduate.

“ That ability to create our own value, even in the face of an uncertain future— that’s what makes us all Societal Engineers.”

—MATT BOUCHER

At Last: Class of 2020 Grads Receive a Live Send-Off

B

ringing some long-delayed closure to an important chapter in their lives, more than 200 graduates of ENG’s Class of 2020 returned to Boston University to don scarlet robes and walk across a stage as their names were called to loud, live cheers, during BU College of Engineering recognition events last fall.

Extraordinary circumstances occasioned the 17-month postponement of this ritual, which doubled as an early reunion for many members of the class, who had their final year at BU disrupted

by COVID-19.

“I wrote a speech last year,” student speaker Matt Boucher told 186 bachelor’s and master’s graduates and their families and friends seated in Metcalf Hall. “I wrote most of it before the events of last spring.”

The topic? “It was about how plans change. It was about adaptability. Little did I know, right?”

6 BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

The belated ceremonies gave the graduates—including 30 PhDs—a “unique opportunity to basically time travel,” said Boucher, who earned his degree in ME. “To share this graduation moment from the perspective of someone who is already over a year past that threshold.”

Boucher guessed that few of his classmates were following their previous plans to the letter. “I’m willing to bet that we see a whole lot of nonlinear paths. But we prepared for that. That Societal Engineer mantra that was the cornerstone of our education was not about entering society as an engineer,” he said. “It was about taking this diverse and varied educational platform and shaping it into a path by which we can eventually impact society in a way that’s meaningful to us.”

Boucher’s classmates learned how to learn as they go, he said. “To discover what drives us toward a positive impact, even if that means doing the steps a little out of order. Many of us might still be putting those pieces together, but that ability to create our own value, even in the face of an uncertain future—that’s what makes us all Societal Engineers.”

Dean Kenneth Lutchen reminded the graduates that they have a responsibility to fill a yawning gap in the leadership of a science-challenged society.

“As we emerge from the pandemic,” Lutchen said, “we can and will need to

turn our attention to another massive threat to humanity,” climate change. “We cannot depend on our politicians nor on our corporate leaders of companies providing fossil fuel energy to lead us in solving this grand challenge. Most of them never majored in STEM.” Instead, Lutchen said, “We will depend on you either to explicitly help design and deploy technologies to solve the challenge, or at the very least, to spread the word of how science and technology works and needs to be respected and resourced to solve the challenge.”

These sobering thoughts were balanced out by the buoyant mood that took hold in the hall once the graduates began filing across the stage, where Lutchen handed each a BU-red folder symbolizing the diplomas they earned in May 2020.

Afterwards, the young engineers and their guests poured outside into the GSU plaza. On a glorious fall day, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, spouses and significant others hugged graduates, snapped photos and shouted congratulations in languages and accents from all corners of the globe.

“After all the adversity,” said MSE graduate Anubhav Wadehra, “it feels good to be celebrated, even if it’s a little late. It feels awesome.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Aimed at better MRI image quality, one of Zhang’s inventions is an array of helical resonators made of a magnetic metamaterial she and colleagues developed.

A Zhang Patent Honored Again

F

PHOTOGRAPHY: CYDNEY SCOTT: ZHANG; JACKIE RICCIARDI: CUTKOSKY, OHN-BAR AND NDAO

or the second year in a row, Professor Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE) was honored at the Boston Patent Law Association’s (BPLA) annual Invented Here! event, celebrating New England innovators and their inventions.

Among the year’s most promising technologies, the 2021 BPLA ceremony featured a new metamaterial Zhang developed that can be shaped to block 94 percent of sound waves from a source of noise, without blocking air flow. Unlike the acoustic baffles seen on highways and in recording studios, Zhang’s apparatus is not a sheer, solid barrier but rather an open ring that lets through air even as it stops noise in its tracks. The structure is mathematically

Three Awarded Career Development Professorships

T

hree ECE assistant professors have earned professorships that recognize future leaders in their fields. Abdoulaye Ndao was named the next Reidy Family Career Development Professor, while Eshed Ohn-Bar and Ashok Cutkosky each garnered a Peter J. Levine Career Development Professorship.

The Reidy and Levine professorships are two of the six Career Development Professorships that BU offers to junior faculty noted for significant potential in their disciplines. A three-year stipend supports research, scholarship and creative work, as well as a portion of their salaries.

designed to catch sound waves and fling them back the way they came.

Zhang is working to advance the technology for a range of applications, from jet engines to drone propeller blades, HVAC systems to hospital equipment.

In 2020, the BPLA honored Zhang and colleagues for her array of helical resonators, made of a magnetic metamaterial they developed. When a patient inside an MRI scanner lies on a slab

containing these resonators, the device temporarily boosts the body’s low-energy emissions, resulting in an improvement in MRI image quality, potentially in less time and at lower cost.

Peter J. Levine (ENG’83), a former BU trustee and a current member of the ENG Dean’s Leadership Advisory Board, created the Peter J. Levine Career Development Professorship to help recruit and develop top-notch junior faculty at the College of Engineering.

Cutkosky, who also has an appointment in Systems Engineering, joined BU in July 2020 after two years as a research scientist at Google Research in Mountain View, California.

His research in hyperparameter tuning aims at developing algorithms that take the guesswork out of building and training machine learning models. Cutkosky earned his PhD in computer science from Stanford University.

Ohn-Bar earned his PhD in electrical engineering from the University of California at San Diego and joined BU last year after two years as a Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. His research seeks to develop societal-scale intelligent systems with seamless real-world interaction. Examples include safety applications for autonomous driving and assisted navigation for people with visual impairments.

The Reidy professorship is supported by a gift from Richard Reidy (Questrom’82), vice chair of the BU Board of Trustees and a member emeritus of the ENG Dean’s Leadership Advisory Board, and his wife Minda Reidy (Questrom’82,’84).

Focusing on light-matter interactions at the nanometer scale, Ndao’s work has implications for digital imaging and medical diagnostics.

Ndao earned his PhD in physics from the University of FrancheComté in France and joined BU in July 2020 after doing postdoctoral work at UC– Berkeley and UC–San Diego.

Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE)

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Ashok Cutkosky (ECE, CS, SE)

Eshed Ohn-Bar (ECE)

Abdoulaye Ndao (ECE, MSE)

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

7

upfront

Greater Than the Sum

The Boston team sweated it out for 72 hours, building a computing cluster and completing seven complex tasks in the SC21 student competition.

STUDENTS HONE SKILLS AND HOLD THEIR OWN IN AN INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF COMPUTING

B

8 BU COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

A cluster is simply a network of server computers that assemble into a larger and more powerful system that can handle data-intensive problems in research, modeling and visualization.

“These computers are for grand challenges,” says Herbordt. They’re used for modeling molecules, nuclear fusion, tsunamis, galaxy formation and more.

Just 10 teams—five from China and five from the United States—made it into the prestigious SC21 student competition this year. Each had 72 hours to build a cluster and complete seven complex tasks—for example, reproducing the results of a scientific paper or running a suite for electronic-structure modeling.

The Boston teammates sweated it out in a BU conference room for three days. They constructed a cluster that was greater than the sum of its parts, and they used every trick they knew (including some learned in Herbordt’s graduate-level class) to coax more power out of the system. When time was up, they had topped the US entrants in one of the benchmarking challenges, high-performance conjugate gradient, and

“ It’s unusual to have this kind of background as an undergrad.”

placed third in benchmarking overall. Their score was 14 times higher than in their previous outing.

More important, the students gained practical —MARTIN experience and HERBORDT (ECE), made industry FACULTY ADVISOR connections. The hiring manager who interviewed Li was impressed that he led a team that had even entered the SC21 competition.

Li feels fortunate to be on the crest of the HPC wave, as the industry is only expected to grow. “In the coming years,” says Li, “high-performance, cloud cluster computing is going to become a lot more important to our daily lives.” — PATRICK L. KENNEDY

PHOTOGRAPH BY

en Li (ENG’22) says he had “no clue” what high-performance computing (HPC) was when he was a freshman.

Nevertheless, as a senior this past fall, Li served as president of the BU HighPerformance Computing club, led his team to a strong finish in an international HPC competition and landed a job offer as an HPC engineer at a major cloud computing company.

“It’s unusual to have this kind of background as an undergrad,” says Professor Martin Herbordt (ECE), the club’s faculty advisor. For a little-understood, somewhat niche field, high-performance computing has a tremendous impact, fueling data insights in medicine, climate science, finance and other industries.

That’s why BU has long played a prominent role in educating HPC engineers, says Herbordt. Key to engaging students in the field is sending them to the kind of international collegiate competition the Boston squad did so well in this year. At SC21, the Massachusetts Green Team—consisting of Li, fellow ENG student Carlton Knox (ENG’23), two other BU students, and one each from Boston College and UMass– Lowell—earned the highest score of the American collegiate teams in one category, HPCG, and scored third-highest overall in benchmarking.

While he had little idea what HPC was as a freshman, Li can explain it now.

“All the COVID simulations that helped us get the vaccine so quickly are based on high-performance computing,” says Li. “Medical companies, financial companies— they’ll have a bunch of data they need to do analysis on, or numbers they need to be crunched. They ask a cloud company, ‘Can you spin up a cluster for us, run our program, and give us the results?’”

Where You Bring Ideas into Reality

W

ith a broad vision for the hightech manufacturing and design space at the heart of Boston University’s campus, Professor of the Practice Anna Thornton (ME) has taken the reins as the new director of the Engineering Product Innovation Center (EPIC). Spreading the word that EPIC isn’t just a machine shop but a center where faculty, staff and industry work together to teach students how to bring their ideas and theory into reality will be a top priority.

The center’s 15,000 square feet of space is filled with cutting-edge manufacturing equipment, from CNC mills and lathes to the latest model 3D-printers—and everything in between. “These are precise, expensive, very capable tools,” says Thornton. “These are the kinds of manufacturing methods that ENG students are going to see and use in industry.” The space is staffed by five highly trained lab supervisors who have extensive experience in machining, design, electronics and education.

Students from across ENG departments learn how to use these machines to build prototypes. “EPIC is a resource for solving problems,” says Thornton. Designs and ideas rarely work on the first try. Students learn how to debug their designs, work with experts to review their concepts and continue to improve their ideas.

More than that, EPIC is a bridge between engineering theory and practice.

“In order to create a product, you have to actually physically substantiate your theory,” Thornton says. “And this is where that happens.”

Thornton knows all about that intersection between plans and production. Over two decades as a consultant and practicing engineer, she has helped scores of companies launch products in industries ranging from aerospace and railroads to sports

Anna Thornton (ME)

EPIC is more than a machine shop.

“It’s a resource for solving problems.”

—ANNA THORNTON (ME)

equipment and medical devices. She joined BU in 2017 and has taught courses such as ME 537 Product Realization and the undergraduate ME 358 Manufacturing Processes.

The new EPIC director came by her interest naturally; her father was a chemical engineer and her grandfather ran manufacturing for International Harvester. As a teenager, she got to tinker with tractors and use the equipment in her father’s workshop.

To this day, Thornton builds furniture in her spare time. As a mother, she helped her then-11-year-old daughter figure out how to 3D-print a model of a virus.

“But not everybody had that exposure” to the tools and principles of manufacturing, Thornton points out. “Though I feel very comfortable walking the factory floor, I get that it can be intimidating to walk into a big, noisy room full of big equipment.”

Indeed, most incoming ENG students don’t have hands-on manufacturing experience, she says, let alone the Sargent and CFA students who come to build new assistive devices or art installations.

That’s why Thornton is launching a series of initiatives aimed at educating the BU student body on what EPIC offers and making it easier for aspiring product developers to get started. To aid in this effort, the EPIC website hosts how-to videos for all the equipment. Inside the shop, moveable “means boards” provide diagrams, specs and physical samples showing, for example, how to mount bearings. The center is hosting a range of tours and short courses on everything from sketching to 3D-printing to machining.

Ultimately, Thornton says, the hands-on experience students acquire in EPIC shows them “how the theory they learn in the classroom translates into something they can build.” — PATRICK L. KENNEDY EPIC’s new, moveable “means boards” provide diagrams, specs and physical samples showing, for example, how to mount bearings.

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

9

Newly Named Allen Distinguished Investigators Aim to Recreate Lungs

T

he Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group has awarded funding to a trio of BU faculty for a bold, early-stage project aimed at lab-grown lungs that mimic the real organ in all its fractal complexity.

The proposal of Associate Professor Wilson Wong (BME), Professor Christopher Chen (BME, MSE) and School of Medicine Professor Darrell Kotton has earned each the designation of Allen Distinguished Investigator, in the Mammalian Synthetic Development cohort.

Grant to Fund Summer STEM Program for Underserved Teens

T

he AMETEK Foundation has awarded the Boston University College of Engineering $20,000 to host a summer program aimed at empowering underserved teenagers by exposing them to engineering concepts and experience.

Assistant Dean for Outreach & Diversity Wynter Duncanson visited the Wilmington, Massachusetts, headquarters of

10 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

Established by late Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen, the Allen Distinguished Investigators program awards grants of $1.3 million over three years to support nontraditional, ambitious research in biology and medicine.

“It’s risky because we have to build a lot of things from scratch,” says Wong. “But that’s what we do in synthetic biology.”

Wong is a pioneer in programming cellular circuits. Chen is the founding director of the Biological Design Center and a key player in the engineering of cellular microenvironments to learn how cells build tissues. Kotton is director of the Center for Regenerative Medicine. The project was initially proposed by postdoctoral scholar Ian Kinstlinger.

The team’s focus is on the human lung, with the long-term goal of regenerating tissue to treat pulmonary diseases such as asthma and lung cancer. The potential exists to replace diseased and dysfunctional tissue with fresh tissue grown using human cells and bioactive materials. But standing in the way of such treatment is our shrouded understanding of how the lung naturally develops its intricate network of ever-smaller tubes.

“The lung’s branching fractal structure is very energetically efficient for delivering oxygen,” says Wong.

“The question is, how do the cells decide to form tubes and then keep branching into Christopher Chen (BME, MSE) tinier tubes?”

Applying different theories to that question, the BU team will attempt to engineer cells that automatically generate those fractal patterns. “This is the famous physicist Richard Feynman’s Wilson Wong (BME) philosophy—we can’t understand what we cannot build,” says Wong. “Even if we fail, the project will add to our understanding of the lung.” And if the team succeeds, the fruits of their research will be a boon to regenerative medicine and to people suffering from pulmonary diseases. — PATRICK L. KENNEDY

AMETEK in December to accept a check on behalf of ENG. Duncanson runs the Technology Innovation Scholars Program (TISP) with a mission to inspire, excite and prepare the next generation of engineers. A diverse group of ENG students serve as TISP Inspiration Ambassadors, visiting urban schools and guiding hands-on engineering activities.

This summer, with the support of the AMETEK Foundation and in partnership with the Calculus Project, TISP Inspiration Ambassadors will lead 20 Black and Hispanic high school juniors and seniors through a weeklong program of research, learning and projects that incorporate biotechnology, cybersecurity, robotics, 3D-printing, synthetic biology, microfluidics and more.

On one day of the program, the students will visit the Wilmington facility of AMETEK, a leading manufacturer of electronic instruments and electromechanical devices.

The teens will get their first up-close look

at engineers in action—in this case, those engaged in aviation, aerospace and defense projects—and have an opportunity to ask them questions about their work.

AMETEK’s Elaine O’Neill (’92) presents Wynter Duncanson with a check for the TISP summer program.

PHOTOGRAPHY: CHITOSE SUZUKI: CHEN; KELLY DAVIDSON: WONG

upfront

Griffin building the device in her home workshop.

BU Duo’s Wearable Wins BMES Design Award

T

wo recent ENG grads garnered a top award in the 2021 Biomedical Engineers Society (BMES) Design Competition for a bracelet that helps regulate breathing in premature infants with apnea. Out of 35 teams that submitted designs in four categories, Leen Arnaout and Meghan Griffin, both ENG’21, finished first in the mechanical/electrical track of the competition, which was sponsored

by Medtronic.

One of the most common complications in babies born before 30 weeks is irregular breathing, or apnea of prematurity (AOP).

Marked by pauses of more than 10 seconds between breaths, AOP causes a drop in oxygen level, which in turn can cause brain injury or developmental delays.

When apnea occurs in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), nurses will manually prod infants to restart their breathing, or they administer caffeine, which stimulates the brain’s respiratory center. The research is inconclusive as to whether the caffeine carries any risks, but there is a population of babies whom it doesn’t even help. Moreover, NICU nurses are often dealing with multiple crises simultaneously, making it difficult to apply these treatments consistently.

Building upon research by their advisor, Professor Béla Suki (BME, MSE), and his former student Dean Zeldich (ENG’18), Arnaout and Griffin developed a wearable solution to AOP as their senior design project, testing their technology in animal models and building a prototype that would fit human infants. The bracelet earned them ENG’s 2021 award for Outstanding Senior Design Project in biomedical engineering, and Suki encouraged them to enter it in the BMES competition as well.

As students, Arnaout and Griffin designed a medical device that would alert NICU nurses when a premature baby’s breathing becomes irregular.

“ I was blown away by how prepared they were.”

“The beauty of this wearable is that it’s noninvasive, compared to the caffeine,” says Suki.

“It’s just a little bracelet you can put on either the —BÉLA SUKI wrist or the ankle, (BME,MSE), and one of the great FACULTY ADVISOR things Leen and Meghan did was to make it automated— it would detect the problem and then respond to the problem.”

The bracelet continually monitors blood oxygen with a pulse oximeter sensor. If the oxygen level is too low, a tiny disk motor vibrates on the baby’s wrist, stimulating the respiratory nervous center. When the child resumes breathing and oxygen levels return

to normal, the device ceases stimulation and continues monitoring.

Suki is proud of his students’ win, but not surprised. “I like to get involved in every senior project down to the details,” he says, especially in the early stages. “But Leen and Meghan got up to speed very quickly, becoming quite independent by the end of the first semester, which is not typical.” As they refined their presentation for the fall BMES meeting, Suki adds, “I was blown away by how prepared they were.”

Medtronic and the BMES awarded the pair $2,500 and an engraved trophy. They are working with Suki and the BU Technology Development office to eventually bring the device to market. Meanwhile, both alumnae are pursuing PhDs, Griffin at University of Minnesota–Twin Cities and Arnaout at University of California– Berkeley. — PATRICK L. KENNEDY ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

11

upfront

I

n 2018, BU Trustee Rajen Kilachand (Questrom’74, Hon.’14) made a historic gift of $115 million to Boston University, $100 million of which established the Rajen Kilachand Fund for Integrated Life Sciences and Engineering, supporting interdisciplinary research and solutions to some of today’s biggest challenges in the life sciences. This year, four BU research teams that include ENG faculty have received Kilachand Fund awards.

Understanding Sleep and Neurodegenerative Disorders The length and quality of sleep declines across a person’s life span. Since sleep plays a critical role in brain health, that decline is linked to neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Anna Devor and Laura Lewis, both associate professors of BME, hypothesize that specific blood flow patterns in the brain during sleep are critical for clearing waste and protecting against neurodegeneration.

Their team will test this hypothesis through rodent models, investigating how the brain’s blood vessels control clearance during sleep and whether enhancing these vascular patterns can improve brain health.

Metamaterials for Low-Cost, Portable MRI Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a mainstay among the diagnostic imaging tools available in modern healthcare, but the technology remains limited by the huge size of the superconducting magnets needed for powerful imaging.

Professor Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE), Professor Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE, CDS) and a School of Medicine colleague will develop an ultra-low field (ULF) MRI system with much smaller magnets, crafting a metamaterial-enhanced hardware to physically boost the signal received by the imaging system.

12 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

Their proposed ULF-MRI technology would lead to low-cost technology that is readily portable and mobile and could mitigate financial constraints that prevent MRI from being used widely in developing countries.

Dynamic Protein Sequencing Proteins are the cell’s primary molecules for performing biochemical processes.

Select proteins within living cells can be studied with fluorescent microscopy. But there are thousands of proteins inside a human cell, making this painstaking technique impractical.

Professor David Boas (BME) and colleagues intend to develop a new technique for targeting and imaging multiple proteins at the same time.

They call their approach PRISM (PRotein Identification by Super-spectral Microscopy), and say it allows for the simultaneous identification, quantification and localization of thousands of different protein molecules inside individual human cells through a “fingerprinting” process using spectral light.

Discovering the Mechanisms of Evolution All living organisms are under constant selective pressure to evolve new traits.

Whether it’s a virus or a tumor cell, interactions with the environment shape organisms’ genomes to improve their ability to survive and reproduce. However, little is known about the precise molecular mechanisms that underlie the process of adding beneficial mutations into the genome.

Associate Professor Mo Khalil (BME) and colleagues hypothesize that microRNAs (miRNAs), a family of small regulatory RNAs that repress gene expression, allow organisms to explore the evolutionary space efficiently because the effect of these miRNAs is reversible. That’s in stark contrast to random genetic mutations, which are affixed.

The project seeks to understand the molecular basis underlying animal evolution using a systematic, unbiased approach that will provide the framework for understanding miRNAs and how they contribute to cancer and chemotherapy resistance in certain tumors. — CHUCK LEDDY

Anna Devor (BME)

Laura Lewis (BME)

Xin Zhang (ME, ECE, BME, MSE)

Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE, CDS)

David Boas (BME)

Mo Khalil (BME)

PHOTOGRAPHY: CYDNEY SCOTT: LEWIS, ZHANG, PASCHALIDIS; SCOTT NOBLES: BOAS; DAN AQUIRRE: KHALIL

Pushing the Limits of Science

NEWS BYTES

THREE ENG FACULTY PROMOTED

Three ENG faculty members have been promoted to the rank of associate professor with tenure. Manuel Egele (ECE) specializes in systems security, with an emphasis on software security, web security and security and privacy on mobile systems and online social networks. A recent recipient of ENG’s Early Career Research Excellence Award, he leads BU’s Secure Systems Lab. His research into malware and the protection of computing platforms is supported by multiple large grants from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and Sandia National Laboratories.

Francesco Orabona (ECE, SE, CS) bridges the mathematical foundations of learning theory and data science with applications to scientific, societal and real-world engineering problems. His efforts have led to the development of autonomous online learning algorithms that require minimal human supervision—first-of-its-kind work that is now part of Microsoft’s machine learning tool kit. He is the past recipient of a Google Research Award, and a Data Science Faculty Research Fellow at BU’s Hariri Institute.

Sahar Sharifzadeh (ECE, MSE) uses first-principles electronic structure methods to understand and predict the electronic, magnetic and structural properties of materials with the goal of designing resilient new materials for computational and semiconductor use. A recipient of the US Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Award, she is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society.

FIRST RED HAT AWARDEES NAMED

The Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering: Red Hat Collaboratory has announced the first recipients of the Red Hat Collaboratory Research Incubation Award. Projects funded through this award are open source and focus on problems of distributed, operating, security or network systems whose solutions show promise for advancing their fields and impacting the tech industry.

Nine of the 16 BU professors who received the Red Hat award are ENG faculty members. Professor Ayse Coskun (ECE), Assistant Professor Alan Liu (ECE, CS) and Assistant Professor Gianluca Stringhini (ECE) and collaborators will build, apply and scale AI frameworks to improve performance, management, security, compliance and resilience problems in the cloud.

Distinguished Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) will take part in a project to create a global, open research platform where researchers can collaborate to define a link between well-being and eco-smart cities.

Professor Martin Herbordt (ECE) will collaborate on an open-source tool for reducing application development effort and turnaround time for field programmable gate arrays, and on a generic operating system and firmware for reconfigurable hardware called Dynamic Infrastructure Services Layer.

Associate Professor Ajay Joshi (ECE) will work on privacy-preserving cloud computing using homomorphic encryption; Assistant Professor Renato Mancuso (CS, ECE) will create a hardware-software codesign paradigm for data systems that implements near-memory processing; Assistant Professor Eshed Ohn-Bar’s (ECE) project is open-source, multiorganizational collaborative training for societal-scale AI systems; and David Starobinski’s (ECE, SE) is intelligent data synchronization for hybrid clouds.

LUCE SCHOLARS PRESENT PROJECTS AT UROP SYMPOSIUM

Three ENG winners of the 2021 Clare Boothe Luce Scholar Award presented their research during the 24th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium, sponsored by BU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

More than 275 undergrads earned UROP funding and faculty mentoring to complete research projects last summer. Out of those, just six earned the Luce award, three of whom are ENG mechanical engineering students.

Sophie Caplan (ENG’23) worked with Assistant Professor William Boley (ME, MSE) to develop a slicer that improves the print path in the 4D-printing process, a newer form of additive manufacturing in which the printed object is programmed to shape-shift over time. Caplan and Boley’s slicer system makes it less tedious to design and program such objects.

Kiran Gomatham (ENG’23) worked with Assistant Professor Tomasso Ranzani (ME, MSE, BME). She helped design and optimize the manufacturing process of a major component of a new soft robotic arm for minimally invasive heart surgery. The arm features greater freedom of movement and vertical expansion and contraction for better maneuverability.

Taylor Janke (ENG’22) worked on another soft robotic device with medical applications. Under the guidance of Assistant Professor Sheila Russo (ME, MSE), Janke used a laser cutter and heat press to manufacture an expandable needle deployment mechanism aimed at a safer, simpler and cheaper lung biopsy process.

TWO AWARDS FOR BU SHPE

For the third year in a row, the BU student chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE) won the Society’s Blue Chip Award. And for the first time, the chapter won the SHPE Student Chapter of the Year Award for Region 4, which covers 50 chapters in the Northeast as well as Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. The awards recognize the students’ work in promoting the professional development of SHPE chapter members and of their contributions to the community. Chapter activities include professional speakers—for example, hosting Hispanic executives from Microsoft and Texas Instruments to share their life journeys and answer career questions—and technical skills workshops, as well as social and cultural events. In addition, the chapter organizes donations and volunteering activities at local nonprofits, such as the Greater Boston Food Bank and Entre Familia, a Boston Public Health Commission program that aids pregnant and postpartum women who have histories of substance abuse.

ALUM WINS TWO PATENTS

Ziad El-Jamous (ENG’08) has been awarded two US patents in the past two years. His invention patented in 2021 is a system for detecting bots on social media. The system distinguishes human users from automated programs by assigning a likelihood score computed from statistical, temporal and text features in a user’s profile. In 2020, El-Jamous won a patent for another social media innovation, a system of generating graph structures and text features that can be used for developing and testing new social media analytics or for generating or analyzing social bot network behavior and campaigns in social media, and for sharing test data without raising privacy concerns.

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

13

STEMMING A GRADE-SCHOOL

WITH NONPROFIT AND BOOK, ALUMNA SEEKS TO HOOK GIRLS ON STEM FIELDS

BY PATRICK L. KENNEDY

14 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

PHOTOGRAPH BYJENNA PERFETTE, TOP; SDI PRODUCTIONS/ISTOCK, BOTTOM; ICONS: NOUN PROJECT PHOTOGRAPHY:

BRAIN DRAIN

ALUMNI PROFILE

Sarah Foster (ENG’05)

PHOTOGRAPH BY KACEY L. B AXTER, ACORN STUDIOS

T The group hosts half-day workshops where girls, along with their parents or other caregivers, take part in hands-on activities, learn about the design process and meet female STEM mentors.

he girls raised their hands to ask and answer questions when Sarah Foster (ENG’05) visited her sons’ second- and third-grade classrooms as a volunteer, running engineering activities. Evidently, both boys and girls were curious about science, technology, engineering and math, and they participated equally.

But when her sons reached fourth and fifth grades, Foster noticed an unfortunate trend: The girls were keeping their hands down. As if they’d already concluded they weren’t welcome in STEM discussions. “I was surprised to see that gender gap happening at such a young age.”

That’s when Foster decided to launch STEM Like a Girl, a nonprofit education program with a mission to excite and empower girls with knowledge and confidence in the STEM fields. Recently, she published a book. STEM Like a Girl: Empowering Knowledge and Confidence to Lead, Innovate, and Create is a collection of experiments—culled from Foster’s many workshops—that kids can do with ordinary household goods. “I wanted to create a resource that shows girls you don’t have to be a famous scientist. You can do this.”

As a child, Foster enjoyed and excelled in science and math. In high school, her teachers recognized that aptitude and were encouraging, but only in one or two directions, she recalls. “They said, ‘Why don’t you be either a doctor or a science teacher?’”

So, she enrolled in Bucknell University as a premed major. “It wasn’t until then that a professor said to me, ‘Have you thought about engineering?’ That’s when I got into chemical engineering and really found my interest.”

After doing a summer internship in BU’s Biomedical Engineering Department, Foster realized she wanted to do research. “Really, I’m an engineer by nature,” she says. “I have a very analytical thought process, and I loved the idea of planning out experiments, seeing what worked, what didn’t work and adjusting from there. So, I liked the whole methodology of experimentation.”

That experience led her to enroll in the BME master’s degree program. “I liked that I could be doing projects that were helping people; that had a direct impact on people’s lives,” she says.

At ENG, Foster was inspired by mentors such as Professor Joyce Wong (BME, MSE). “Seeing these strong women in their careers and families was important for me and shaped what I ultimately went on to do.”

After earning her master’s, Foster was hired as an R&D engineer for Genzyme (now Sanofi Genzyme), where she worked on hydrogel technology for implantable devices.

After several years, Foster, her husband and their two young boys moved to Portland, Oregon.

That’s where she was volunteering in her sons’ elementary school and discovered the STEM gender gap rearing its head earlier than she’d expected.

She launched STEM Like a Girl in 2017 with a volunteer board drawn from Portland’s female engineer community. The group hosts half-day workshops where girls, along with their parents or other caregivers, take part in hands-on activities, learn about the design process and meet female STEM mentors.

The inclusion of parents in the activities is intended to reach families in which there’s no STEM role model. “We’ve heard from a lot of parents who weren’t trained in a STEM background, so they’re not comfortable with it themselves. This is a chance for them to share in their daughter’s excitement and try things together.”

Examples of experiments in the workshops and in the book include making an air cannon out of a paper cup and a bag; making a fizzy bath bomb with baking soda, citric acid, Epsom salt and corn starch; and making a rocket out of a drinking straw and construction paper.

“One of my favorites is when they get to isolate DNA from a strawberry,” says Foster. “That can be a little messy, but it’s a lot of fun. We take strawberries and mash them up and extract out the chromosomal DNA from the strawberry. You can actually see it separating in the liquid that you use, and you pull out this glob of DNA.” Foster and her colleagues tie these kitchen experiments to their real-world applications, and they stress that experiments rarely go right the first time.

“STEM teaches us so much about life in general,” says Foster. “We can learn leadership skills, confidence, problem-solving techniques. And it’s important for girls, especially, to build that confidence and see that these are careers you can do. A lot of girls want to go into careers where they can help people—and there are so many opportunities in STEM for that.”

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

15

LIFT

OFF!

HOW A SCRAPPY STUDENT CLUB LAUNCHED DOZENS OF ENG ALUMS INTO THE AEROSPACE INDUSTRY

BY AP TRICK L. KENNEDY

16 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

SpaceX’s Dragon rocket is changing the future of flight. The rocket’s lead propulsion engineer is Joe Beaupre (ENG’17), one of many ENG alums in the industry.

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

17

IF PREVIOUS PAGES: IMAGE COURTESY OF SPACEX

18 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

fire department, you might want to leave that incident off your résumé. That is, unless you were an undergrad engaged in rocketry, where failure is an integral part of the process.

In 2012, the Boston University Rocket Propulsion Group (BURPG) hatched a bold plan to launch a 35-foot rocket called Starscraper more than 62 miles into the sky, becoming the first student club to crack the Karman line, sending a vehicle into outer space. In 2015, the rocket blew up during a test.

The group’s efforts—and the venture’s fiery exclamation point—made a splash in Hub news.

For example, a Boston Globe article from January 2015 featured the director, Armor Harris (ENG’15), and led with a photo (right) of Doug Lescarbeau (ENG’18), Mehmet Akbulut (ENG’16), Joe Beaupre (ENG’17) and Jeremy Pedro (ENG’17) checking a rocket motor’s nozzle.

That was a few months before Starscraper burst and burned, dashing the students’ dreams. And that was seven years ago.

So where are they now? Mostly, working in rocketry.

Harris is director of engineering for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite bus.

Lescarbeau also works on Starlink, as a mechanical design engineer in development. Beaupre is a launch engineer on SpaceX’s Dragon rocket. Pedro is lead propulsion engineer on SpaceX’s Falcon rocket.

And that’s just a handful. Most of the core group from that era of BURPG found work in the aerospace industry. Indeed, scores of BURPG alumni— ranging from its 2002 founding to the present—are employed not only in big

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAT GREENHOUSE/ BOSTON GLOBE/GETTY

YOU ERRED AS AN UNDERGRAD AND A HALF-TON, FLAMMABLE-FUEL-FILLED METAL CANISTER EXPLODED as a result, requiring the services of the local

companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Boeing, but also in ABL Space Systems and other start-ups that specialize in satellite launch vehicles, rocket parts and other aerospace essentials.

It’s an impressive showing for a club that doesn’t enjoy access to launch sites in remote areas, or warm winters, as some other collegiate rocketry clubs do. But maybe those headwinds—and the mishaps—helped make the BU rocketeers better engineers.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF LUKE COLBY

THE PIONEER Luke Colby (ENG’03) founded the BU Rocket Team—now known as BURPG—in 2002. Colby had wanted to work on rockets since age two and had built and tested a rocket engine in high school.

He relished the challenge of turning those dreams into mathematically airtight, three-dimensional metal vessels with thousands of working parts. He wasn’t afraid to slog through the requisite stages, crafting a stable combustion chamber, high-pressure fuel tanks, an aerodynamic vehicle and a parachute system to bring it safely back to Earth.

“One thing that makes it so difficult is the level of perfection that’s required,” says Colby. “Ninety-nine percent would be plenty good enough for a car; it’s not with what we do.”

At BU, Colby and his new rocket club garnered industry funding and built a solid fuel motor and a 12-foot-long rocket. For red-tape reasons, the students had to install a commercially available engine in the rocket rather than use their own experimental motor, but doing that allowed them to launch the vehicle from the airfield of a local amateur rocketry club.

The rocket flew 3,000 feet in the air—not the altitude the BU-designed engine would have achieved, Colby confides, “but it was still a thrill.”

After graduation, Colby moved to California to work for Scaled Composites, serving as technical lead on SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s suborbital space plane. Over the next few years, several other BU Rocket Team alumni joined then-fledgling private space companies such as SpaceX. Meanwhile, the BU rocket club carried on—for a time with Luke Colby’s younger brother, Aaron Colby (ENG’08), at the helm. However, the club had to limit its ambitions once the amateur club with the airfield closed. The next nearest launch site was in Virginia.

That’s been an ongoing struggle for the BU club, says Master Lecturer Caleb Farny (ME), associate chair for undergraduate programs and the club’s faculty advisor. Never mind a launch site—even a place to hold a stationary fire test is hard to come by in the densely inhabited Boston area. After much searching, Farny was able to locate a test site in Sudbury, Massachusetts.

At about this time, Harris arrived in Boston with a grand vision.

A FIRE LIT Harris caught the rocket bug at age six. “I got a model rocket, thought it was the coolest thing ever and away we went,” he says. As a teenager in eastern Oregon, “I would work a summer job to make some funds, use those funds to build a project for that year, then go out in the desert the next summer to try to launch it.”

As a sophomore mechanical engineering major at BU, Harris took over as director of the team, which he renamed BURPG. He proposed an ambitious plan to build a rocket every year for three years, culminating in the 35-foot Starscraper. After testing

Left, Luke Colby (ENG’03) in the Triton workshop. His start-up manufactures rocket components for major aerospace companies.

Above, Armor Harris (ENG’15) of SpaceX.

“ ONE THING THAT MAKES IT SO DIFFICULT IS THE LEVEL OF PERFECTION REQUIRED. NINETY-NINE PERCENT WOULD BE PLENTY GOOD ENOUGH FOR A CAR; IT’S NOT WITH WHAT WE DO.” —­L UKE COLBY (ENG’03)

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

19

NOT A QUESTION OF IF To build a rocket capable of flight, the student team had to gain a mastery of structural engineering, flight dynamics, avionics and fluid dynamics. They had to solve a host of unique problems, like the fact that the fuel weighs many factors more than the rocket itself.

Besides the technical challenges, they took on myriad management and administrative tasks, like fundraising, insurance and regulatory paperwork—plus grunt work, like digging the foundation for a test stand.

Oftentimes, after the students rented a U-Haul van, drove to Sudbury, and spent hours setting up the rocket, some technical glitch would scotch the whole test.

That’s what Lescarbeau thought was happening on the day of Starscraper’s last fire test, in May 2015. “The initial start sequence failed, and we knew we had to abort the test,” he says. “It was kinda, ‘Aw, this is anticlimactic.’

“And then it exploded, and it was, ‘Well, that was climactic!’”

Yet such failures are not a bug but a feature of the iterative engineering process.

“It’s a little heartbreaking to spend a thousand hours on a thing and then watch it explode,” says Lescarbeau. “But it happens. You can make another one.”

20 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

Thompson Cragwell (ENG’18), above, is a spacecraft mechanical engineer at Millennium Space Systems, a subsidiary of Boeing Space and Launch.

“That’s one thing I don’t think is highlighted enough in engineering,” says Kelley. “You are going to fail. It’s not a question of if, it’s when.

But there are a lot of positives that you can take away from failure.”

INTO THE FUTURE Some of those positives? Experience that was directly applicable to their careers, and the networking and internships that enabled them to launch those careers.

“They learned along the way, made connections and put their engineering education to work,” says Farny. “That, to me, is the real purpose of the team.”

Harris directs the engineering of what he calls a “ridiculously ambitious” project at SpaceX. Starlink is a network of small satellites—currently numbering 1,600, with thousands more planned— in low Earth orbit, aiming to provide internet service in remote regions all around the globe, closing the digital divide.

Kelley works at Blue Origin, leading the avionics team for the Blue Moon lander program, the first step in Blue Origin’s long-term vision: “We’re focused on what it would take to preserve Earth—for example, moving heavy industry off planet. That really resonates with me and with the idea of the Societal Engineer.”

Lescarbeau works on Starlink with Harris. “He’s my boss’s boss,” says Lescarbeau, who has been working to dim the brightness of Starlink satellites in the night sky.

Doug Lescarbeau’s sister Elysse Lescarbeau (ENG’21) joined him at SpaceX. The siblings overlapped at BURPG when Doug was a senior and director of the club and Elysse was starting at ENG as a LEAP graduate student.

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF THOMPSON CRAGWELL AND ELYSSE LESCARBEAU

it in Sudbury, if all went well, the students hoped they would travel to the Nevada desert in 2015, launch the rocket, and make history.

“It was just a blast,” Harris says, recalling those efforts. “We were fortunate to get a really talented group of students together.

I think the talent exists with ENG students every year; you’ve just got to ignite it. We probably had 20 people who for the better part of three years spent every waking hour on this.”

Drew Kelley (ENG’14) remembers the excitement and camaraderie of a multidisciplinary team stretching themselves as they strove toward an impossible goal. A computer engineering major, Kelley handled avionics. “I wrote all of the software we used to operate the vehicle,” Kelley says. “So, the data acquisition software, the sequencing software—all of the stuff we would use to conduct hot fire tests.”

The appeal of rocketry is twofold, says Kelley. “Initially, rocket engines are loud,” he laughs. “There’s just something about hearing one start up and knowing that you were responsible for making that happen.”

More than that, though, Kelley realized, “What folks do in the space industry is solve technical problems you don’t experience anywhere else.”

Lescarbeau was also drawn to rocketry by its technically challenging and viscerally exciting aspects. A mechanical engineering major, he joined BURPG as a freshman, when Harris was a senior.

“We’d go out to this sandpit and fire a rocket engine,” Lescarbeau recalls. “As an 18-year-old, it makes a big impression on you: ‘Oh, my God, it’s a large fireball, and it’s very loud!’”

Elysse Lescarbeau (ENG’21), below, worked on SpaceX’s Merlin engine.

Successful BURPG alums, she says, are those “who want to do big things and advance humanity in whatever way they can.”

“ The Blue Moon lander is the first step in Blue Origin’s long-term mission to preserve Earth by moving heavy industry off planet,” says Kelley.

Drew Kelley (ENG’14), above, leads avionics for Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander program.

“ YOU ARE GOING TO FAIL. IT’S NOT A QUESTION OF IF, IT’S WHEN. BUT THERE ARE A LOT OF POSITIVES THAT YOU CAN TAKE AWAY FROM FAILURE.” —­D REW KELLEY (ENG’14)

IMAGES COURTESY OF DREW KELLEY, SPACEX AND BLUE ORIGIN

Seth McKeen (’10) is senior propulsion development engineer on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Capsule.

Later, working as a propulsion development engineer on SpaceX’s Merlin rocket engine, Elysse was responsible for increasing the life span of the thrust chamber assembly. One of her motivations for getting into the field was to be a woman in engineering. “I think it’s super important to have those diverse perspectives and get more badass ladies into rocketry,” she says.

Not all BURPG alumni who land in the aerospace industry work for the big companies. Justin Fiaschetti (ENG’21) and Austin Briggs (ENG’21) cofounded Inversion Space, with the goal of building the first high-cadence return spacecraft for the commercial and defense industries. The start-up raised $10 million in seed funding last fall to develop their reentry capsule.

“Being treasurer and then vice director [of BURPG] taught me how to manage teams, which was good training for the start-up world,” says Fiaschetti. “It’s really about inspiring people and finding how to get the best out of everyone.”

Thompson Cragwell (ENG’18) works for a small company within a larger corporation. He’s a spacecraft mechanical engineer at Millennium Space Systems, a subsidiary of Boeing Space and Launch. Like Kelley, Cragwell was involved in both BURPG and the BU Satellite Program, which recently launched a satellite to monitor the Earth’s magnetosphere. (See p. 28.)

“I spent a lot of time machining parts in EPIC,” says Cragwell.

“It gave me a good sense of design practice and feasibility in manufacturing. Because you can design a perfect shape in the computer world, but it has to be built in the real world.”

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

21

Justin Fiaschetti (ENG’21) and Austin Briggs (ENG’21), cofounders of Inversion Space.

A rocket valve designed and manufactured at Triton, the Woburn, Massachusetts, company founded

by BU rocket club pioneer Luke Colby (ENG’03).

Armor Harris (ENG’15), center, meets with Jack Sullivan (ENG’23), at left, and other BURPG students to review the club’s current rocket designs.

FULL CIRCLE Colby says that’s the value to students of hands-on projects. “In a world where we increasingly just sit in front of a computer all day, the opportunity for kids to actually get to work on something physical and build and test it is very important.”

After ten years in California, Colby returned to Massachusetts and founded his own advanced manufacturing start-up, Triton Space Technologies, supplying complex valves and other components to “all the big companies you’ve heard of,” he says.

Colby also donated a valve to BURPG for its Starscraper rocket, and he is one of several alumni who often return to review the designs of current BURPG projects. “I’m very proud of them and pleased to see that 20 years later, they’re still going,” says Colby.

Last fall, Harris visited the BURPG workshop to look over designs and parts for the students’ planned Pursuit rocket. Harris suggested the team use less expensive materials, making future failures more economically palatable, recalls Jack Sullivan (ENG’23), this year’s BURPG student director.

“We are taking that advice,” says Sullivan, who adds that Harris provided a morale boost by helping them reframe their notion of a test failure. “As Armor put it, SpaceX blows up engines all the time, and they’re professionals with way more money and way more time than us.”

During his visit to campus, Harris also guest-lectured a mechanical engineering class and took questions. One student asked, “What experiences or things did you learn from the BU rocket club that you’ve found applicable to your work at SpaceX?” 22 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

“Everything,” replied Harris. “The thing you learn in classrooms is how to think like an engineer, how to deductively solve problems, how to break things down and think your way through them. That is what stays with you.

“But all of the real engineering skills come from doing projects,” he added. “Design, build and test as many things as you can while you’re in school, because that’s the stuff that directly translates to how successful you’re going to be.”

Kelley said he draws on his BURPG experience “all the time” at Blue Origin. “Electrical and computer engineers don’t generally get a whole lot of exposure to how fluid systems work or how rocket engines work. But it’s really important for someone in my field to be able to go have that conversation with the people designing our landing engines or the people designing our propellant management systems.”

Lescarbeau brings it back to the setbacks that rocket engineers suffer with painful regularity on their way Interested in to success. sponsoring the “Learning to cope with probBU Rocket lems is maybe the best lesson that Propulsion Group? came out of [BURPG],” he said.

Visit burpg.org “Physics is the real world and crazy things can happen, and you’ve got to roll with the punches. If you let the difficulties break you, then you can’t make forward progress.”

research Going from Gauzy to Granular ANNA DEVOR AND COLLABORATORS AIM TO EXTRACT NEURONAL CIRCUIT ACTIVITY FROM fMRI, OPENING DOOR FOR CLINICAL APPLICATIONS

W

hen you’re paying attention to a lecture, your brain releases a chemical called acetylcholine.

When you wake up to a morning alarm and gather your thoughts, your brain releases norepinephrine.

Such chemicals are neuromodulators.

They orchestrate our brain rhythms—the patterns of neuronal circuit activity that vary in space and time across different behaviors, arousal level and sleep states.

But just as a computer circuit is broken when a component goes missing, says Associate Professor Anna Devor (BME), a neuronal circuit malfunctions when it loses a neuromodulator.

The result can be mental illness.

“Something is wrong with the way information is being processed,” says Devor.

Acetylcholine shortage has been implicated in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and some dementias. And yet, says Devor, “There’s no test for it.”

Devor and her team think an existing technology could detect warning signs, such as reduced or dysfunctional neuromodulation. The team, which includes Associate Professors Laura Lewis and Michael Economo (BME) and Lei Tian (ECE, BME), have received a large NIH BRAIN Initiative award to develop a method for extracting information about neuronal circuit activity from fMRI scans.

With this grant, the team will conduct a multiyear, multi-institution effort combining parallel human and animal studies, as well as computational modeling.

“The point is to be able to take noninvasive imaging,” says Devor, referring to

25

A LOOPY IDEA THAT WORKS

fMRI scans, “and infer something about the underlying neuronal circuits, which currently is not possible.” fMRI is used to map fast brain activity by measuring the relatively slow flow of blood to its different regions. Researchers can look at synchronicity in the fluctuations of fMRI signals across brain regions, but “this is kind of where the analysis ends,” Devor says. The underlying picture of what’s happening with the neurons and circuits remains blurry.

However, blood flow is linked to— indeed, driven by—neurons. As neurons pulse, the cerebral arteries dilate. That rhythmic activity is slow enough to be detected with fMRI. Devor and collaborators seek a quantitative understanding of the relationship between brain rhythms, the release of neuromodulators and the resulting fluctuations in fMRI signals across the brain. Their hope is to make that blurry picture of blood flow resolve into a crystal-clear image of neuronal circuits.

How? Thankfully, researchers can see neurons, neuromodulators and blood vessels in action, in fine detail, in model organisms such as mice using in vivo optical microscopy. The team will study

27

THE LINGERING PROBLEM WITH MALWARE

mice while they’re performing tasks that require concentration, triggering the release of acetylcholine.

Then, similar studies will be conducted with mice but using fMRI instead. “This gives us an important stepping-stone to get from the microscopic measurements in mice to something that can be directly translated to humans, because now we’re comparing fMRI to fMRI,” says Devor.

In parallel, the team will conduct fMRI studies with human volunteers performing cognitive tasks. By providing a link across species, the human fMRI studies will allow noninvasive measurement of these important aspects of brain state and neuromodulatory chemiAnna Devor (BME) cals in humans.

Ultimately, Devor hopes, that stepping-stone will give clinicians a kind of calculus they can use to fill in the blanks—a way to deduce granular, cellular-level, circuit-specific data from the blood-flow-level fMRI results of any human patient. — PATRICK L. KENNEDY

An image of a human brain’s hemodynamics, or the flow of blood to different brain regions. An NIH grant will empower a BU team to derive more detailed information from such images.

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

23

research

Singling Out a Sound

“ The ability to solve the cocktail party problem is one of the most impressive examples of sensory perception by the brain,” said Kamal Sen.

I

t’s called the “cocktail party problem,” and it’s not about picking the right outfit or juggling stuffed mushrooms and a wine glass. Arising in all manner of busy settings, from coffee shops to subway stations, the phenomenon that has puzzled neuroscientists for decades is this: How does your brain tune out all the other conversations and background noise and focus on the one speaker you’re paying attention to? Conversely, for those who struggle to hear that speaker, what is the brain not doing?

Associate Professor Kamal Sen (BME) and colleagues have pinpointed a neuron type that helps perform this sound-isolating task, and their findings might someday be used to improve hearing aids and other assistive technology. Sen presented the results of his team’s study as part of Neuroscience 2021, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Sen is director of the BU Natural Sounds and Neural Coding Laboratory. Through the Neurophotonics Center, Sen and collaborators including Associate Professor Xue Han (BME) and graduate student Jio Nocon studied a cognitive process that has been poorly understood to date.

“The ability to solve the cocktail party problem is one of the most impressive examples of sensory perception by the brain,” Sen said in the conference. But while people with normal hearing accomplish this with relative ease, the problem is thornier for the hearing impaired as well as many with autism or ADHD. “Such humans feel socially and psychologically isolated, leading to severe hardships in life,” said Sen. Also, voice recognition programs such as SIRI can be confused in cocktail-party-like settings.

The team integrated theoretical and computational tools developed in Sen’s lab with optogenetics, a revolutionary technique pioneered by Han, to probe the audi-

24 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

tory cortex in mice in a cocktail-party-like environment, with competing sounds emanating from multiple speakers. The team used light to suppress a specific group of cells in the cortex called PV neurons, and found that the ability of the cortex to distinguish a target sound from background noise decreased due to degraded timing in the cortical responses.

Their findings suggest that PV neurons, when they’re operating normally, aid the brain’s sound-selection performance by enhancing the timing of cortical responses, just like “a good dance partner can improve your timing on the dance floor,” said Sen. “This newly discovered mechanism may improve treatments and assistive devices.”

At the conference, Sen represented one of four international teams invited to share their research on the mechanisms of perception. Sponsored largely by the NIH, the studies all explored how our perception and interpretation of sights, sounds and touch are shaped by cognitive processes such as attention and memory. — PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Kamal Sen (BME)

Xue Han (BME)

Sen studied how the cortex responds to noisy environments.

PHOTOGRAPH BYPAWEL CZERWINSKI, TOP; SCOTT NOBLES: HAN PHOTOGRAPHS:

BU RESEARCHERS SHED NEW LIGHT ON A MYSTERY OF SENSORY PROCESSING

It Looks Loopy, but It Works LOOPS OF STRING MAKE ROCK PILES STAND TALL IN STUDY BY HOLMES AND GUERRA

S

ay a missile or an earthquake has just damaged your apartment building.

Stone rubble litters the street. Must you wait for the Army Corps of Engineers to arrive, clear away the rubble, and rebuild the blasted wall? Or, like MacGyver, could you make use of that rubble, and some twine, to erect a temporary wall?

That’s the scenario that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had in mind, and they wanted Associate Professor Douglas Holmes (ME, MSE) to work it out. Holmes, along with doctoral student Arman Guerra, determined that it is possible to build freestanding, load-bearing structures using only rocks and loops of string—if the rocks are rough enough, the string is stiff enough and the loops are spaced just right.

Holmes and Guerra’s new study, in Soft Matter, is called “Emergence of structure in columns of grains and elastic loops.” When Holmes and Guerra say “elastic loops,” they don’t mean rubber bands, but rather rope, or any slender, ribbon-like fibers. And by “grains,” they mean not wheat but rocks—or maybe peanut M&Ms, or any assemblage of spheroids that together can act as a fluid.

You might not expect a bunch of rocks to behave like a fluid. But picture a landslide.

The rocks flow downhill. Unlike water, though, rocks can form their own hill if you dump them in one place—and if the rocks are sufficiently ridged. In other words, depending on the rocks’ frictional properties. The tiny bumps on their surfaces make the rocks stick together, up to a point.

Holmes and Guerra have figured out a formula for turning that loose pile into a practical, temporary column that can withstand an impressive amount of compressive force. Their method is to loop string around the pile (which they build up layer by layer) in such a way that the string “jams” the rocks, turning them into one big rock.

When many rocks are jammed together, they can serve as one big column of rock. Even a small, jammed rock column can hold the weight of a human, in this case ENG grad student Arman Guerra.

“An example of jamming is a vacuumpacked container of coffee beans,” says Holmes. “It’s like a brick. Jamming is what happens when you restrict a bunch of grains that flow like a liquid, so that they behave like a solid.” The loops of string restrict the rocks by adding points of contact, preventing the rocks from moving.

The loops can be spaced quite far apart, if the grains are coarse. “That critical spacing can actually be a bit bigger than the size of the rocks,” says Holmes. “Because there’s friction helping to keep them in place, along with the loops. Our formula is based on how flexible the string is and what the frictional properties of the grains are.”

Eventually, Holmes would like to see this minimalist technology applied to more

ambitious temporary structures, shoring up roads or seawalls in ways that don’t butt heads with nature.

Instead of ropes, Holmes says, “Maybe Doug Holmes we should use the (ME, MSE) roots of growing materials to stabilize structures to prevent erosion, from wind or water. To have some natural component that could help them be self-healing and adaptable to changes in the land. There are a ton of ways we could make these temporary structures permanent, but I think that harmonious approach is more compelling.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

25

research

The Universal Decoder That Works in One Microsecond

A

ssistant Professor Rabia Yazicigil (ECE) and colleagues have developed the first silicon chip that can decode any error-correcting code—even codes that don’t yet exist— potentially leading to faster and more efficient 5G networks and connected devices. “This could change the way we communicate and store information,” says Yazicigil, who presented the results of the chip measurements at a recent IEEE conference.

An error-correcting code is not something used in espionage. It’s what protects the data you send—be it text message or video file— from random electromagnetic interference as it travels across the globe, passing through waves of competing signals from cell towers, solar radiation and other noise. Those disturbances can corrupt the signal by flipping bits—from a 1 to a 0 or vice versa.

For decades, communication engineers have worked around this problem by adding code to the data—a redundant string of bits (or “hash”) at the end of each message. Algorithms enable the receiver to use that code to determine what errors occurred, if any, and to reconstruct the original message.

The drawback is that each code is designed for one of several commercially agreedupon codebooks, each of which requires a separate chip or other hardware.

Yazicigil’s colleague at MIT, Muriel Médard, has co-developed an algorithm called Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) as a powerful alternative. And Yazicigil’s team at BU has developed the first hardware realization of the GRAND algorithm.

“As compared to the traditional decoders, the GRAND decoder uses an entirely different approach, independent of the code structure, that will revolutionize communication systems,” says Yazicigil.

26 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

Arslan Riaz and Rabia Yazicigil (ECE) , left to right, demonstrating the GRAND chip.

Below: The Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding (GRAND) chip.

With students Arslan Riaz and Vaibhav Bansal, Yazicigil successfully designed the chip in 40-nanometer CMOS technology, eliminating the need for code-specific decoders and enabling universal decoding of any data with little lag time.

“Instead of using code-specific hashes to decode the message, we intelligently guess the noise in the channel, then check whether the data is correctly retrieved to deduce the original message,” says Yazicigil.

“That’s why GRAND is a universal decoder— because the noise in the channel affects the transmitted messages independently of what codebook you’re using.”

The GRAND chip “guesses” the noise by rapidly cycling through all possible noise patterns, from the most likely to the least. “Typically, you have zero errors, so that’s the most likely noise sequence; then the next most likely is to have one bit flipped,” says Yazicigil. “Then two bits, and so on.” GRAND subtracts the result from the received data to reveal the original

“ This could change the way we communicate and store information.”

message. Then to verify the result, the chip checks it against a codebook. (The chip supports multiple codebooks and can load two of them at a time, switching seam—RABIA YAZICIGIL (ECE) lessly from one to the next.)

The whole process takes roughly a microsecond on average and consumes only 30.6 pJ energy per decoded bit, with a 3.75-milliwatt of average power from a 1.1V supply voltage. The team demonstrated that the GRAND chip could decode any moderate redundancy code up to 128 bits in length with good decoding performance when compared to any standard code-specific decoder.

These findings have implications for data storage, connected devices, remote gaming, movie streaming, and any forthcoming improvements in the world’s communication networks, says Yazicigil: GRAND is adaptable to “5G, 6G or whatever comes next.” — PATRICK L. KENNEDY

Malware Apps Linger on Market for Weeks, Stringhini Finds

PHOTOGRAPH OF

BY STRINGHINI BY CYDNEY SCOTT

E

ven after being flagged as malicious software, malware persists on the Google Play app store for an average of 77 days, Assistant Professor Gianluca Stringhini (ECE) and colleagues found in an unprecedented study of millions of mobile app downloads in 201 countries.

And it isn’t just Google. Malware apps— ranging from criminal attempts at stealing credit card numbers to nuisance apps that display too many ads—stick around on alternative marketplaces for an average of 34 days after being identified as malware.

Even individual users fail to delete such apps from their phone for about 20 days after receiving alerts.

Google Play has the biggest problem, simply because it’s the biggest player in the Android ecosystem, says Stringhini. Google developed the Android operating system, which runs on more than 70 percent of smart phones globally.

“Google Play actually targets and takes down more malware than any of the other markets,” says Stringhini. “But the sheer amount of apps they deal with is way higher. Even if just a small fraction of malefactors get through, they can cause a lot of damage.”

For their study, Stringhini and collaborators from Norton Research Group combed anonymized data for 8.8 million daily detections of malware on Android phones in 2019 and 2020, affecting 11.7 million customers of Norton security software. The Norton program detected potentially harmful apps and sent alerts to Google Play and other app stores, as well as to the phone users.

However, that’s all the security program can do. It doesn’t delete the apps; that’s up to the stores and the users. Obviously, the stores can’t keep up, especially not Google Play. “It’s hard to get everything out of your platform when you’re the biggest target,” says Stringhini.

So, why don’t we ordinary phone users respond to the alerts more promptly? That’s less clear. “It could be alert fatigue,” says Stringhini. “If you receive 10 alerts a day about potentially harmful apps, you stop caring. Maybe people don’t really understand what the threat is; maybe the malware doesn’t do anything obvious.”

In a separate paper, Stringhini and Norton colleague Yun Shen propose a solution.

“What if we could predict what kind of malware applications you’ll encounter in the near future,” asks Stringhini, “and warn you ahead of time?”

This warning system would exploit the same element of app stores that the bad guys do: the predictive software that generates app suggestions. Based on a customer’s previous installations, a store will often unwittingly suggest malware apps posing as legitimate apps. (This happens in that 34-to-77-day period before the malicious apps are taken down.)

Shen and Stringhini’s system, which they call ANDRUSPEX, would use your installation history in a different way. If users with profiles similar to yours have tended to buy the same suspect apps, ANDRUSPEX would suggest these apps to

Gianluca Stringhini (ECE)

“ Even if just a small fraction of malefactors get through, they can cause a lot of damage.” you as ones to avoid. The researchers tested their system and presented the results at a recent IEEE symposium.

In the meantime, what can you do to protect your phone from malware in disguise? Exercise caution, says Stringhini.

Make sure you’re not being offered something too good to be true.

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

27

research

Tiny Satellite Will Take Widest Ever Images of Magnetic Fields Colliding

CuPID is capturing images of solar particles striking the Earth’s magnetic field.

IMAGES CAPTURED BY THE BU-BUILT PROBE COULD REVEAL NEW INSIGHTS INTO RADIATION THAT IMPACTS SATELLITES, ASTRONAUTS

28 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

the boundary between the Earth and the sun’s magnetic fields using much bigger, more comprehensive images.

“CuPID will image the invisible,” Walsh says. “For decades, scientists have studied a process called magnetic reconnection.” As charged particles emitted by the sun collide with Earth’s atmosphere, electrons are exchanged and X-rays are given off. During periods of high solar activity, charged particles can leak into the Earth’s atmosphere, potentially putting satellites and astronauts in harm’s way.

“The more we roam and observe our universe, the more we see [magnetic reconnection] occurring and controlling phenomena everywhere from the surface of the sun to the black holes to the ‘magnetic bubble,’ or magnetosphere, surrounding the Earth,” Walsh says. “It has been studied routinely through pinpoint measurements . . . but we’ve never been able to image the process as a whole with a zoomed-out view.” He adds that CuPID will help scientists “answer a fundamental question: Under what conditions does reconnection occur in explosive bursts versus a steady continuous hum?”

For the imaging power it contains, CuPID is remarkably small. It’s about as big as a shoebox, whereas other X-ray telescopes tend to be closer to the size of a school bus.

Brian Walsh (ME)

Known as Cusp Plasma Imaging Detector (CuPID), the satellite is designed to capture images that will help scientists learn more about the way energy from the sun is transferred into the near-Earth space environment.

PHOTOGRAPH OF WALSH BY CYDNEY SCOTT

A

first-of-its-kind satellite, designed and built by BU engineers, hitched a ride last fall aboard a NASA rocket launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Over the next five to six years in orbit, about 340 miles above our planet’s surface, the shoebox-size satellite containing an X-ray telescope will capture images of where the magnetic fields of the Earth and the sun meet in space.

Known as Cusp Plasma Imaging Detector (CuPID), the satellite is designed to capture images that will help scientists learn more about the way energy from the sun is transferred into the near-Earth space environment. The team behind the satellite’s development has been led by Brian Walsh (ME) and supported by a $2.4 million, fouryear NASA grant. In addition to BU engineers, the team includes collaborators from NASA, Johns Hopkins University, Drexel University and Merrimack College.

“It’s not every day that the hardware you have been working on for four years, the software you have written, the computer you have been talking to every day, is closed up in its launch vehicle going somewhere so you’ll never see it again,” says Emil Atz, one of Walsh’s grad students.

X-ray imaging is not a new technology for observing Earth and space phenomena.

But previous orbiting telescopes have been limited by their field of view, capturing images of specific areas one by one. CuPID is the first such satellite to have a wide field of view, which will allow scientists to study

A rocket lifts off carrying BU’s CuPID satellite.

Below: Brian Walsh and Emil Atz, working with collaborators, developed the Cusp Plasma Imaging Detector (CuPID) satellite, which uses a new kind of optical technology to enable wide-field X-ray imaging of magnetic fields from inside a shoebox-size package.

“X-rays are notoriously hard to focus onto a detector,” Walsh says. “They just pass through or get absorbed by the types of lenses we wear in our glasses. For several decades, researchers have used a [so-called] Wolter focusing technique . . . [which] can provide a great image but is large, heavy and produces a narrow field of view, a fraction of a degree in the sky.”

To capture and focus wide-field images from its tiny package, CuPID employs a new type of imaging element called lobster-eye optics.

“This technique uses a slumped piece of thin glass with tiny pores, each roughly the size of a human hair,” says Walsh. “Each pore has the ability to focus an X-ray coming through. The technique is similar to how the eye of a lobster works with many pores.”

The lobster-eye lens allows CuPID to make wide-field-of-view X-ray images at a fraction of the size and weight of traditional focusing tools, Walsh says.

To make sure that CuPID withstands the violent and bumpy launch, and its journey in orbit, the BU team put the satellite through rigorous testing.

“Vibration testing is pretty exciting, but you never want an exciting result,” says Atz. “The best result is when nothing happens. We were required to shake CuPID extremely hard. When you shake things that

hard, they make this noise that you can’t unhear. It’s like the satellite is screaming.”

Fortunately for CuPID and its engineers, the vibration test mimicking the bumpy ride to space didn’t result in any damage to the satellite. To see how CuPID would fare in orbit required a different approach.

“We use a vacuum chamber that reaches high vacuum, nearly the vacuum of space,” Atz says. “In the chamber, we test our instruments with energetic particles created by either radioactive sources, or an

X-ray generator. These help us to calibrate the instruments to what they will see in orbit. That chamber is our workhorse of the lab. When we are running tests, that chamber will be running for months at a time.”

For Atz, the experience of working on CuPID has shaped where he wants his career to go. “I just want to build satellites,” he says with a smile. “I think the future has many, many more satellites with my initials hidden somewhere on the hardware or in the software.” — KAT J. MCALPINE

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

29

research

AHA Moment: Lejeune Awarded Funding for Heart Cell Data Work

W

ith a promising technology aimed at combating heart disease, Assistant Professor Emma Lejeune (ME) has earned the American Heart Association (AHA) Career Development Award. Lejeune’s software and computational methods have the potential to empower future researchers to develop medicine and artificial tissue that will cure cases of cardiac disease—the leading cause of death the world over.

“We’re developing open-source software for analyzing images and movies of heart cells,” says Lejeune, whose career goal is to lead the field in computational discovery for cardiovascular research.

“It’s a technology that could enable all sorts of other technologies that have real applications, and it’s very cool that the American Heart Association is funding that process.”

Lejeune’s “Sarc-Graph” software platform will be useful to researchers working with lab-grown heart cells that are Emma Lejeune (ME) derived safely from human patients—for example, sampled from the blood or the skin. “They can take cells from humans in a very noninvasive manner, take them to the lab, reprogram them into stem cells, and then differentiate them into cardiomyocytes, which are heart muscle cells,” Lejeune explains.

These engineered cells (known as hiPSC-CMs) can be used to create artificial heart tissue or to test new drugs. But they turn out to have irregular internal structures, making them difficult to analyze.

That’s where Lejeune’s work comes in. “The initial step is not artificial intelligence,” she says. “This work is mainly computational methods that are a step before it’d be appropriate to apply AI.” The program that Lejeune and colleagues in her lab have developed, and that they hope to improve with the AHA funding, analyzes video of hiPSC-CMs beating.

The Sarc-Graph software makes it possible to quantify properties such as the amount and direction of beating cell contraction, Lejeune notes, or variation in behavior across different parts of the cell.

“The software will allow you to process movies to subsequently make comparisons between different cells or interface with a machine learning algorithm and get results that are interpretable,” she says. “Interpretable from both a scientific perspective and a high-stakes applications perspective,” in the sense that decisions about patient care could be based on the output of the software.

“One of the big questions is: Are the things you observe in these cells ultimately relevant to the way things actually behave in the body? For example, some drugs that treat other diseases, such as cancer, can cause the heart to stop beating in a regular rhythm. So, can we observe something in these [hiPSC-CMs] cells that will predict the heart’s behavior in the body? And really, the software we’re working on would enable that kind of discovery.”

Lejeune’s colleagues in the study that formed the basis for her AHA Career Development research include Professor Christopher Chen (BME, MSE), ME MS student Bill Zhao and then-PhD student Kehan Zhang (ENG’20), now a postdoc at MIT. “We’re able to bring together expertise in computational modeling and biomedical engineering,” says Lejeune.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do the work we’ve done without access to the research community at BU, and now this [AHA] funding will help us develop this open-source software to the benefit of the broader research community.”

— PATRICK L. KENNEDY

An illustration of some of the outputs of Emma Lejeune’s Sarc-Graph software, which analyzes images of heart cells grown in the lab.

30 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

Balancing Electricity Demands and Costs of HighPerformance Computing

S

ome computational problems are so complex that they require many times more calculations than a typical laptop can handle. High-performance computing (HPC) combines a number of computer servers to carry out these largescale computations that often operate on massive data sets. But data centers for HPC require immense amounts of power, and limiting power consumption, though beneficial for the environment and cost, can lead to undesirable performance.

Hariri Institute Research Fellows Ayse Coskun (ECE) and Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, BME, SE, CDS) are working to help data centers create programs that prioritize performance while responding to power demands for HPC and keeping electricity costs low. Their findings were published recently in the IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Computing. Here, Coskun and grad

student Daniel Wilson discuss sustainable computing.

Why does HPC require so much electricity?

The processors in a data center can compute a lot of numbers in a small amount of time, and that’s not everything that draws power in a data center! Those computations have additional effects beyond the computing servers, like demanding more power from data servers, networking equipment and cooling infrastructure.

What are the benefits to regulating data center power consumption locally, nationally and globally?

By adjusting power consumption of a data center or a collection of centers, we can address challenges in the power grid. For example, renewable power generation resources may not be equally available in high capacities at all places and that creates challenges in matching supply and demand.

Data centers can regulate their power (or one can transmit loads to other centers, if possible) to absorb this volatility. As a result, you can enable wider adoption of green energy. In addition, in this way, we can increase the cost-efficiency of data centers and save on energy costs.

How are you working to reduce the electricity cost of data centers?

Our paper addresses challenges in constraining undesirable performance impacts that result from limiting power consump-

Ayse Coskun (ECE)

tion in a data center. One of our goals is to help data centers participate in “demand response” programs, which allow an electricity consumer to respond to requests from the power operator (and in this way, consumers get better contracts for their electricity usage). Through demand response programs, a consumer can spend less money on energy, and power operators can more reliably supply enough energy for a stable electrical grid. Solving the performance impact on user workloads of such programs is essential for any practical adoption of data center demand response.

Does using less energy come at a computational cost?

It depends, but that’s not always bad news!

Servers offer a high degree of control over their power consumption. Some workloads running on a server are more sensitive to power management than other workloads, so a careful application of power limits will reduce energy consumption with only minor impacts to computational performance.

Are the data center energy management methods in development broadly applicable? Even to countries with less computing power?

While not all electricity markets offer demand response options, data centers may still have other reasons to care about performance-aware power budgeting.

Our methods aim to make controlled tradeoffs between performance and power, which could also be helpful in related challenges such as responding to variable energy pricing and respecting commitments to a power contract.

— GINA MANTICA ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

31

research

Vehicular Innovation TWO DRIVERLESS CAR PROJECTS LED BY ENG FACULTY

S

elf-driving cars are powered by machine-learning algorithms that require vast amounts of driving data in order to function safely. But if self-driving cars could learn to drive the way babies learn to walk—by watching adults and mimicking their movements— they would require far less data. Associate Professor Eshed Ohn-Bar (ECE) has developed an efficient, safe and collaborative paradigm for watching and predicting other cars’ actions to train autonomous vehicles.

The world’s largest car companies keep their vast data private to prevent competition. Ohn-Bar suggests that sharing driving data could help companies produce safe autonomous vehicles faster, benefiting society at large.

Ohn-Bar’s proposed algorithm leverages data from other cars. The algorithm estimates the viewpoints and blind spots of other cars in the area to create a map with a bird’s-eye view of its surroundings. These maps help self-driving cars detect obstacles and can be used to understand how the other cars turn and yield without crashing. A self-driving neural network is then

trained by translating the actions of nearby cars into the autonomous vehicle’s own frame of reference. These other cars may be human-driven vehicles without any sensors, or another company’s auto-piloted vehicles.

Since observations from all cars in a scene are central to the algorithm’s training, this “learning by watching” paradigm encourages data sharing, and consequently safer autonomous vehicles.

P

NO DRIVER, NO HEADLIGHTS

rofessor Vivek Goyal (ECE) and colleagues at BU and MIT are working with DARPA’s Invisible Headlights program to use passive thermal emissions as a primary data source for autonomous vehicle navigation.

Objects on Earth emit light constantly; an example within human perception is when we Vivek Goyal (ECE)

see a hot object glowing. When objects are less warm, they still emit light, but mostly at wavelengths humans cannot see.

Nature provides an example of navigation using passive thermal emissions not visible to humans: pit vipers. These snakes can see prey, even in the dark, because their vision extends to much longer wavelengths. Goyal’s team is trying to do something similar.

Goyal hopes to discover what is possible within the realm of headlight-less autonomous navigation, then develop detectors enabling thermal emission navigation.

The MIT team has been developing technologies within the family of superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors.

Goyal believes that the most evident application for this technology once developed is defense systems. The ability for unmanned vehicles to navigate themselves discreetly without any sort of headlights would be especially useful for military activity. “Due to the cost and complexity of implementing this sort of technology, it is likely it would be far from mainstream usage,” Goyal said.

Taking a step back, advanced sensors like this could be applied to a plethora of industries, such as environmental monitoring. The distinct accuracy of these sensors could render them useful in detecting chemical pollutants from factories or tracking changes in greenhouse gas compositions that could enable scientists to further understand climate change. — GINA MANTICA AND EMMA SILVA Left: Professor Goyal is working with MIT and other collaborators to develop single-photon detectors capable of recognizing passive thermal emissions.

The innovation would allow autonomous navigation in darkness and underground.

32 B U C O L L E G E O F E N G I N E E R I N G

PHOTOGRAPH OF GOYAL BY NAN-WEI GONG; ISTOCK, TOP

SELF-TAUGHT SELF-DRIVING

THE MAGAZINE OF BOSTON UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

STAY CONNECTED TO THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

dean’s leadership advisory board John Abele Founder & Director, Boston Scientific Jill Albertelli ’91 President, Military Engines Pratt & Whitney Omar Ali ’96 Director of Operations, Petra Engineering Industries Co.

Joseph Healey ’88 Senior Managing Director, HealthCor Management LP Jon Hirshtick General Manager, Onshape and Atlas Parametric Technology Corporation William Huyett CFO, Cyclerion

Adel Al-Saleh ’87 CEO, T-Systems Board Member, Deutsch Telekom

Dean Kamen, Hon.’06 President & Founder, DEKA Research & Development Corp.

Tye Brady ’90 Chief Technologist, Amazon Robotics

Anand Krishnamurthy ’92,’96 President and CEO, Affirmed Networks

Deborah Caplan ’90 Executive VP, Human Resources & Corporate Services, NextEra Energy

Ezra Kucharz ’90 Chief Business Officer, DraftKings Inc.

Roger Dorf ’70 Former VP and GM, Wireless Group, Cisco Systems Brian Dunkin ’85 Chief Medical Officer, Boston Scientific Endoscopy Global Vanessa Feliberti ’93 Corporate VP, M365 Services Platform Engineering, Microsoft Joseph Frassica, MED’88 Chief Medical Officer and Head of Research, the Americas, Philips Healthcare Ron Garriques ’86 CEO and Chairman, Gee Holdings LLC

Abhijit Kulkarni ’93,’97 Vice President, Research and Technology, Medtronic, Inc. Antoinette Leatherberry ’85 Principal (Retired), Deloitte Consulting Trustee, Boston University Nick Lippis ’84,’89 President, Lippis Enterprises Inc. Andy Marsh ’83 Chief Operating Officer, Dynavac Kathleen McLaughlin ’87 Chief Sustainability Officer, Walmart Inc. President, Walmart Foundation Manuel Mendez ’91 CEO, Quotient Limited

Rao Mulpuri ’92,’96 CEO, View Inc. Girish Navani ’91 Co-Founder and CEO, eClinicalWorks Anton Papp ’90 Vice President & Head of Corporate Development, Ping Identity Liam Quinn ’90 Senior Vice President, Senior Fellow Dell Technologies Sharad Rastogi ’91 Chief Product Officer, JLL Kimberly Samaha ’89 CEO, Born Global LLC George M. Savage, MD ’81 Former Chief Medical Officer & Co-Founder, Proteus Digital Health Inc. Binoy K. Singh, MD ’89 Associate Chief of Cardiology, Northwell Health

E

John Tegan ’88 President, CEO, Communication Technology Services

facebook.com/ BUCollegeofENG

Francis Troise ’87 Co-CEO, Pico Quantitative William Weiss ’83,’97 Vice President of Manufacturing and Logistics, General Dynamics Mission Systems

Michele Iacovone ’89 Vice President, Chief Architect, Intuit

Bettina Briz-Himes ’86 Senior Director, Strategic Alliances, GoPro Inc.

Tyler Kohn ’98 Co-Founder & CTO, Continual

Chris Brousseau ’91 Partner, IBM Cognitive Process Services

Yitao Liao ’10,’11 Former Chief Technology Officer, RayVio Corp.

Gregory Cordrey ’88 Partner, Jeffer Mangles Butler & Mitchell, LLP

Martin Lynch ’82 Chief Operating Officer, FreeWire

Richard Fuller, PhD ‘88 Senior Principal Engineer-Systems, Semtech Corporation

Daniel Maneval ’82 Chief Science Officer, January Therapeutics

Kent Hughes ’79 Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff, Verizon

Beatriz Mendez-Lora ’88 President, M-P Consultants Xu Ning ’08,’09 Engineering Manager, Uber, Inc.

senior associate dean for finance and administration

PHOTOGRAPH BY

Wynter Duncanson

Anthony “Tony” Pecore ’95 Vice President, Portfolio Manager, Franklin Templeton Investments

John Scaramuzzo ’87 Chief Operating Officer, Nyriad Limited Greg Seiden ’80 Former Vice President, Oracle Corporation Dylan Steeg ’95 Vice President of Business Development, Aible Francis “Frank” Tiernan ’70 Former President, Anritsu Company

Phone: 617-353-2800 Michael Seele

editor

assistant dean for outreach & diversity

Patrick L. Kennedy

dean

Solomon R. Eisenberg

Lisa Drake

Chuck Leddy, Gina Mantica, Kat J. McAlpine, Emma Silva

senior associate dean for academic programs

assistant dean for development & alumni relations

Elise Morgan

ENGINEER is produced for the alumni and

interim associate dean for educational initiatives

youtube.com/ BUCollegeofENG

Sanjay Prasad ’86,’87 Principal, Prasad IP, PC

Kenneth R. Lutchen

Ayse Coskun

@BUCollegeofENG

Sandip “Sonny” Patidar, MD ‘90 Founder and Managing Partner, Titanium Capital Partners

Richard Lally

associate dean for research and faculty development

D M

Claudia Arango Dunsby ’92 Vice President, Operations, Hybridge IT

Mark Hilderbrand ’87 Managing Director, Housatonic Partners

Post, tag, tweet, ask questions, reconnect with alumni and learn about networking opportunities, job fairs, seminars and other news and events.

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan ’00 Senior Director, Product, LinkedIn Former CEO & Founder, Drawbridge

west coast alumni leadership council

Tim Gardner ’00 Founder/CEO, Riffyn Inc.

Join the ENG online community!

friends of the Boston University College of Engineering.

Please direct any questions or comments to Michael Seele, Boston University College of Engineering, 44 Cummington Mall, Boston, MA 02215.

managing editor

contributing writers

Boston University Creative Services

design & production

College of Engineering, except where indicated

photography Please recycle

ENGINEER SPRING 2022

BU.EDU/ENG

3

Boston University College of Engineering

Boston University College of Engineering

College of Engineering

Support our Summer Term Alumni Research Scholars (STARS) with a gift to the College of Engineering Fund.

Visit bu.edu/eng/alumni/give to make your gift.

The STARS program provides housing stipends for outstanding engineering undergraduates doing research with faculty mentors on campus.

NONPROFIT US POSTAGE PAID BOSTON MA PERMIT NO. 1839