BMED Pulse

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Biomedical Engineering Department • Cal Poly College of Engineering • Spring 2021

A Culture of Research Kristen Cardinal’s students create blood vessels for medical device testing See Page 10

BMEDPulse COVER STORY Professor Kristen Cardinal’s lab teaches students how to create and grow blood vessels which can enable companies to develop better medical devices. See story on Page 10.

Message from the Chair —————————————————

Lily Laiho

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ffering yet another reminder of how science can offer solutions to global challenges, recently approved vaccinations have provided desperately needed hope to a world devastated by the pandemic.

As we remain optimistic for a safer new year and a return to normalcy, our department also strives to improve health and quality of life through the specific science of biomedical engineering.

In this newsletter, for instance, you’ll read about our regenerative medicine graduate program, which is part of a rapidly growing field that might one day cure diabetes or create organs for transplants. One of the great things about that program is how students are actively involved in research projects, including required off-site internships.

In the BMED Department, Cal Poly’s Learn by Doing ethos is especially important — and can lead to life-changing innovations. As one of these stories notes, what began several years ago as a senior project to save the lives of new mothers was recently approved for the market.

ON THE COVER Biomedical engineering student Cami Dozois works with professor Kristen Cardinal on growing blood vessels in the lab in 2019.

If our students can have such a remarkable impact while still in college, imagine what they will do in their careers. That’s why support like the Hannah-Forbes Project Fund — which has provided money for senior projects the past decade — is so important.

Donor support like that creates so many possibilities for our gifted students. It’s exciting to think about the possibilities of Professor Kristen Cardinal’s work creating and growing blood vessels, which can help companies design and develop better medical devices. As you’ll see here, that work has also involved many students, offering them an incredible jump-start for their careers.

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Our students get further experience through Earn by Doing assistantships, which provide paid opportunities to acquire training on industry-relevant equipment while helping other students with their projects.

Of course, in order to continue offering these opportunities, we need to keep pace with technology. That’s why we’re remodeling our design lab. Senior design — the culmination of undergraduate experience and hands-on, real world projects — connects the theoretical side of engineering with the actual application. A remodeled design lab will feature additional work stations and a small meeting space for the kinds of collaborations that are conducive to innovation.

We’re also hoping to invest in a fluorescence microscope for studying biological systems. The study of biological systems on the molecular, cellular and tissue level is another growing field. And while we have four separate facilities to grow and culture cells and tissues, we only have one upright widefield fluorescence microscope for routine observation of those systems.

In addition to those specific needs, we also welcome support for our discretionary fund, which can cover a broader range of essentials, such as computing resources and lab equipment.

As you know, biomedical engineering is a field that not only has done remarkable things but also has incredible potential to do so much more. With your help, we will prepare our students to be at the forefront of those exciting breakthroughs. n

Scott Hazelwood Honored as Distinguished Scholar

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fter working in the aerospace industry for five years, Scott Hazelwood decided to return to school so he could apply his engineering skills to the human body.

Once he earned his doctorate in biomedical engineering, Hazelwood became an educator and researcher, specializing in biomechanics and the mechanobiological processes of bone remodeling.

Scott Hazelwood, who specializes in biomechanics, bone remodeling and orthopaedic biomechanics, was recently named one of three Cal Poly Distinguished Scholars. Pictured above, Hazelwood works with BMED students Elizabeth Heyde and Nate Nyberg in the Human Motion Lab in 2019.

His research and teaching were recently recognized by the university, which named him a Cal Poly Distinguished Scholar. Each year, three faculty members are chosen by the Academic Senate for the Distinguished Scholarship Award, which recognizes achievement in scholarship and creative activity across a range of disciplines.

“I have been inspired by past winners of the Distinguished Scholarship Award to continue furthering my research and to continue to involve students in research projects,” Hazelwood said. “By receiving

this award I hope to contribute to the inspiration of other faculty to strive to further their own research.”

Hazelwood, featured in the current issue of Engineering Advantage, aims to improve the quality of life for many with physical challenges, including a recent study of individuals with lower limb amputations, a group at high risk for arthritis. His research has also allowed numerous students to get valuable hands-on experience, often working directly with those who might benefit from the research.

“In biomedical engineering, it is common to design and build a medical device without coming into contact with the individuals who ultimately may use it,” Hazelwood said. “Many of the students working on our projects have the opportunity to perform experiments on the specific groups of individuals who may benefit from the results. This allows them to see a direct connection between the research they are doing and those who may benefit from it.” n BMED.CALPOLY.EDU | 3

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Helping the Hands-on For 10 years, the Hannah-Forbes fund has helped BMED students do more with their senior projects

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tanding in front of a packed classroom, a team of three students introduces an A-shaped wooden frame, which they refer to as their impact delivering device. Two ropes are wrapped around the top of the frame — one attached to a hanging 5-pound weight, the other a Cal Poly football helmet.

The helmet has been modified.

“We have an accelerometer attached that can measure impacts and the magnitude of those impacts on the helmet and can calculate the concussion probability for each impact,” Eric Shechter explains to fellow students and the two faculty advisors in the room.

When he pulls the weight back and releases it, the pendulum crashes into the helmet. Teammate Taylor O’Donoghue grabs the fast-swinging headgear while Isabel Jellen looks at a nearby laptop, which is displaying data from impact of the collision.

Their concussion indication device, designed so coaches and players could recognize impacts that might require medical assistance, was a senior project in 2019 — and one of more than 150 senior projects that have been funded by Hannah-Forbes Project Fund. Now in its 11th year, the grants offer up to $500 to senior projects like the concussion indication device.

“The projects are a keystone of our education . . . and the funding makes the hands-on part possible,” said Kristen Cardinal, a biomedical engineering professor who played a vital role in establishing the fund.

A decade ago, Jo Ellen Hose, who taught BMED classes, noticed that many students didn’t have enough funding to conduct hands-on senior projects.

“That’s when I saw the need,” Hose told Engineering Advantage in 2013. “A paper project just isn’t what an engineer should be doing.”

Her husband, Jim Hannah, agreed. And the couple recruited their neighbors — major Cal Poly supporters Bert and Candee Forbes — to help establish the fund. Through the years, the two couples have occasionally boosted the fund. And in 2014, another generous donor, the late Philip Heintz, stepped in to sustain it.

Through the years, the funds have helped support a variety of 4 | CAL POLY BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

projects — including a device to help Parkinson’s patients overcome a debilitating condition known as “freezing of gait,” a hand hygiene compliance system for hospitals and a device to help those with diabetic foot ulcers.

Seniors are invited to apply for the grant once they have spent a couple of weeks with their project and are in the process of forming a finalized budget and project plan, said Chris Heylman, a BMED professor who now oversees the Hannah-Forbes fund.

“If they can effectively make their case for additional funding in their application, the Hannah-Forbes fund allows them to build more and better prototypes,” Heylman said, “It also allows them to do additional testing to further validate and refine their designs.”

In BMED, senior projects have practical goals that offer students real-world experience.

Isabel Jellen adjusts an accelerometer her senior project team installed in a Cal Poly football helmet in 2019. Their project was one of several to receive funding from the HannahForbes Project Fund, which supports BMED senior projects.

SUPPORT

To help support this fund, please visit Cal Poly Giving’s Hannah-Forbes page (HERE) or contact Brigette Olmos-Arreola, director of development for the College of Engineering, by email at bolmosar@ calpoly.edu or by phone at 805-540-0408.

“We seek out senior projects from clinicians, medical device companies and faculty who have identified a need in some sort of biomedical context,” Heylman said. “The students then design, build and test and prototype a device to fill this need.”

The concussion project was suggested by a sports medicine physician who came to the department with the idea of developing a helmet-bound device to quantify collisions between football players. After applying for the mini-grant, members of the concussion team purchased an accelerometer to measure head movement, plus equipment for their frame and weights.

“This helmet is intended to prevent chronic traumatic encephalopathy in football players resulting from the additive impact of multiple undetected concussions,” the students wrote. “Since contact football players at all skill levels are at

risk of developing head injuries, there is a large population that could benefit from the use of this technology.”

The project, Shechter said, mimicked how a product is developed in industry using design controls — the process of documenting the design-and-refine process.

Now Shechter, a Cal Poly graduate student, is culling from that experience as a research and development engineering intern with ViaCyte Inc., a San Diego-based regenerative medicine company that advances therapies to treat diabetes.

“Design controls are an essential part of the company’s quality system to ensure that our product will be safe and effective when implanted into patients,” he said. “So I basically got a nice head start learning about the design control framework before I started work.” n BMED.CALPOLY.EDU | 5

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A Senior Project that Saves Lives Davis Carlin helped create the concept and design for a device that treats women experiencing postpartum hemorrhaging, a potentially fatal side effect of the baby delivery process. The device he and Alex Norred conceptualized and designed is now owned by Alydia Health.

Student invention designed to treat postpartum hemorrhaging receives FDA approval

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ine years after he began a senior project that sought to treat post-partum hemorrhaging, Davis Carlin recently learned that his device had been cleared by the Food and Drug Administration, a crucial step that could save the lives of tens of thousands of women worldwide.

“The whole experience, especially with the recent FDA clearance, has been surreal,” said Carlin, who earned his degree in biomedical engineering in 2012. “I didn’t originally come to Cal Poly thinking I would help start a company or that I would get to be a part of something with the potential to have this kind of impact.”

Postpartum hemorrhaging is excessive bleeding following the birth of a baby, which occurs when the uterus doesn’t contract enough. Excessive and rapid blood loss can cause a severe drop in the mother’s blood pressure and may lead to shock and death if not treated, according to the Mayo Clinic.

“It’s the leading direct cause of maternal death in the world,” said Sara Della Ripa, a lecturer in the Biomedical Engineering Department who also worked on Carlin’s device when she was a student intern.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of reported pregnancy-related deaths in the United States in 2016 was 16.9 deaths per 100,000 live births, which increased from from 7.2 deaths per 100,000 live births in 1987. From 2011 to 2014, the pregnancy-related 6 | CAL POLY BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

mortality ratios for Black women were more than three times higher than for white women.

“Worldwide, women experience PPH in 10.8% of all deliveries, causing 186,500 deaths per year,” said Colby Holtshouse, chief operating officer of Alydia Health, which now owns the device. “And here in the U.S., we have the worst rate of maternal deaths in the developed world.”

In 2011, Carlin and fellow senior Alex Norred began working on a senior project to address the problem.

“We were working with PATH, a non-profit global health organization based in Seattle, to develop a low-cost option for treating postpartum hemorrhage,” Carlin said. “The concept for this device was one of multiple pitches to Path as part of our design team process, and Path ultimately asked us to go a different route. Alex and I felt like the idea still had a lot of potential, so we decided to pursue it separately, with Path’s permission.”

Norred developed the initial concept, and the two students worked with worked with obstetrician-gynecologists to refine it. The system is a thin silicone tube that is placed in the uterus that creates a gentle vacuum to induce the postpartum contraction that normally occurs after childbirth.

“What was so brilliant about Alex’s original concept was how both novel and counterintuitive it was,” Carlin said.

The device that two seniors concepted and designed eventually led to a startup named InPress, which eventually became Alydia Health.

Here, from left, Nathan Bair, Jim Verhulst, Jessie Becker and Amelia Degelkolb work at the SLO HotHouse during the InPress days. The latter two are Cal Poly alumna.

So the device created by Carlin and Norred helped the uterus perform its normal function, Della Ripa said.

“It works with the physiology instead of against it,” she said.

Eventually, Carlin sought help from then-business student Jessie Becker and Nathan Bair, a medical device engineer based in San Luis Obispo, to form a company, which would initially be called InPress Technologies.

The device that began as a Cal Poly senior project concept became the focus of a startup.

The device, named Jada, is pictured here. (Photo courtesy of Alydia Health)

Their idea was presented at the Innovation Quest, and they eventually worked out of the Cal Poly Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’s SLO HotHouse, which works with Cal Poly students and members of the public who have ideas for startups.

After Carlin and Norred graduated and began their careers, other students, including Della Ripa, continued to work on advancing the device so it could be used on a wider scale.

Della Ripa, who would later perform fieldwork in Uganda, knew the device could make a difference.

“Up to 94 percent of deaths from postpartum hemorrhaging could have been prevented,” she said.

Eventually, others took up the cause, and Alydia Health was formed. The company, now based in Menlo Park, named the device Jada and secured funding from investors while seeking FDA approval.

“There was always the question of, ‘But will this actually work?’ ” Carlin said. “And, thankfully, the clinical trials of the last several years have borne that out.”

“Using a suction to stop the bleeding. Yet, if you thought about it, in terms of what the uterus needs to do to stop the bleeding, it also made complete sense.”

At the time, postpartum hemorrhaging was often treated with a device called uterine balloon tamponade, which inflates within the uterus.

“In their research process, the engineers came to understand this balloon was working in opposition to the natural and needed contraction of the uterus that occurs after childbirth,” Holtshouse said. “They conceived of vacuum as a gentle and physiologic method to contract the uterus and control bleeding.”

After successful initial testing in Indonesia, further clinical testing of Jada took place in the United States.

“The study enrolled 107 women at 12 leading hospitals across the United States, and bleeding was controlled in 94 percent of the cases, with a median time to bleeding control being three minutes after initiation of vacuum,” Holtshouse said.

The results were published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

“I personally think (JADA) is going to make such a big difference in the world,” said Della Ripa, who is working with a medical device company for her own invention, which detects symptoms for postpartum hemorrhaging. n BMED.CALPOLY.EDU | 7

BMEDPulse

The Many Hats of Educator, researcher and former BMED chair is now an Army colonel

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anny Griffin can’t compel his Cal Poly students to do pushups. But, as an Army officer, he can order the West Point cadets he teaches to drop for 20.

“I try not to exert any undue influence,” Griffin said with a chuckle. “But, yeah, I could. I think more often than not, you’re trying to be a sage on a stage. You bring perspective, humility, and wisdom from years of experience.”

Griffin’s status with the Army Reserves got a milestone boost Aug. 10, 2020, when he was promoted to colonel — the highest ranking of any officer after generals, whose authority is designated by the number of stars on their uniform.

While Griffin’s promotion reflects 40 years of service to the military, he has also dedicated nearly a quarter century to Cal Poly, where he was instrumental in the formation of the Biomedical Engineering Department and where he has shared important military research projects with students and faculty.

“A lot of medicine has been advanced because of military medicine,” he said, citing treatment of burns as an example.

“Because of advancements made in the treatment of burns — a result of the military’s experience with it in wartime — a person who has up to 80 percent of their body burned has a good chance of survival.”

Griffin, who grew up in Colorado, began his education at the University of Wyoming in 1981. But he dropped out after a year.

“I was lacking direction and decided I wasn’t ready for college at that point,” he said.

make better hip replacements. Later, while pursuing a master’s degree at UC Davis, someone asked if he might take it further, exploring bone mechanics. He later went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering.

Today, he’s an internationally recognized researcher on the topic.

After earning a doctorate at Davis, where he met future Cal Poly colleagues Scott Hazelwood and Joe Mello, Griffen joined the faculty at Cal Poly, initially as a materials engineering professor. Eventually, with Dan Walsh and Bob Crockett, he would co-create the Biomedical Engineering Department, which he would chair for a time. Meanwhile, he continued his reserve duties, and, in 2005, he was asked to teach at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy formed in 1802. As a professor of mechanical engineering there, he has spent several semesters on the East Coast, filling in for other faculty who were deployed or on other operational assignments.

While Cal Poly students and the West Point cadets are both naturally curious, there are differences, Griffin said. The cadets tend to be more diverse and their environment is different.

“They spend four years where they have to do a complete set of military requirements in addition to their academic program,” he said.

“And then their life is very structured. Not everybody wants to live in that kind of structured environment.”

“During that time, I gained a little insight,” he said. “My life took a different turn.”

After schooling, the cadets have to serve, possibly in combat. Despite that life-threatening potential, West Point carries a prestige being among the top producing U.S. institutions of Rhodes scholars, whose alumni includes famous generals, including Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur, who have led the country to legendary victories on the battlefield.

After the Army, he continued to serve in the reserves as he worked as an administrative assistant for a Christian organization. Eventually, he returned to college as a full-time engineering student in 1989.

“The students from Cal Poly do life-changing things as well,” said Griffin, a former Distinguished Scholar at Cal Poly. “They start companies, they invent life-changing technologies, they wind up as astronauts, to name a few.”

“I like fixing stuff,” he said. “I like mechanical and electrical things.”

Griffin is grateful to have also had an impact, both as a researcher and an educator on two separate coasts.

While studying at Cal Poly, he developed an interest in composites and began to wonder how they might be used to

“I’ve been given the opportunity to influence the lives of people,” he said. “And I am grateful for that.” n

Previously an Army Reservist, he enlisted full-time, serving as an infantryman in Hawaii.

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f Lanny Griffin

“A lot of medicine has been advanced because of military medicine. Now because of advancements made in the treatment of burns — because of the military’s experience with it in wartime — a person who has up to 80 percent of their body burned has a good chance of survival.”

— Lanny Griffin, former BMED Chair and U.S. Army Reserves Colonel

Lanny Griffin teaches one of his classes at West Point. Griffin, who has also taught at Cal Poly for more than 20 years, was promoted in August of 2020 to colonel in the Army Reserves.

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BMEDPulse

A Culture of Research Kristen Cardinal’s students create blood vessels for medical device testing

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sing cells from discarded umbilical cords, Kristen Cardinal’s students are creating and growing blood vessels that can help companies design and develop better medical devices while also reducing reliance on animal testing.

“My lab uses tissue engineering techniques, which means we start by making a polymer tube — I call them, “fancy straws,” since they are about the same diameter as a straw — and then we culture and deposit cells from the inner lining of blood vessels into those tubes to create our own simple blood vessels,” Cardinal said.

While growing blood vessels to use as models for device testing has been Cardinal’s area of focus and expertise for 15 years, her recent publication in Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine focuses on efforts to grow blood vessels with different sizes and shapes of aneurysms that could be used for neurovascular device testing.

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Biomedical engineering student Alyssa McCulloch worked with Kristen Cardinal on her Summer Undergraduate Research Program project in 2019.

Professor Kristen Cardinal works with biomedical engineering students Cami Dozois , left, and Ben Dennis, at right, in Cardinal’s lab in 2019.

An aneurysm is a bulge in the wall of an artery, according to WebMD. It occurs when the pressure of blood passing through has forced a weakened part of the artery to balloon outward.

Aneurysms can occur in the brain, heart, legs and spleen. As aneurysms grow, so too does the risk of a rupture, which would cause uncontrollable bleeding.

Devices designed to treat the symptom might restrict and divert blood from the aneurysm, preventing it from growing. By using lab-grown blood vessels, researchers can study how such devices might work before having to test them on humans or animals.

Umbilical cords — commonly discarded after childbirth — contain arteries and veins lined with endothelial cells, that can be harvested and used for research projects.

“The more testing that can be done in early stages of device development, and the more similarities that the testing models can have to humans, the better the results from the testing will be,” Cardinal said.

While creating lab-grown vessels can save time and money, they also offer the ethical advantage of sparing animals that might otherwise be needed for testing.

The recent publication, “Custom Tissue Engineered Aneurysm Models with Varying Neck Size and Height for Early Stage In Vitro Testing of Flow Diverters,” details a continuation of previous efforts to create the aneurysm shapes in polymer tubes, which was detailed in Neuroradiology in March, 2019.

While Cardinal’s work can lead to significant health care innovations, it also benefits students, who acquire meaningful experience.

“This is an ongoing area of active research in my lab, and my team of 10 to 15 students is fully involved with every step,” she

said. “They are the ones doing the actual hands-on work while I lead the work, make sure everyone is trained, help plan the experiments and studies, etc.”

Students working with Cardinal specialize in specific areas, such as making polymer tubes, growing cells and vessels, and imaging.

“My lab has a very team-based dynamic, where different students get good at different parts of the process,” Cardinal said. “And then we all work together to get the results.”n

“The more testing that can be done in early stages of device development, and the more similarities that the testing models can have to humans, the better the results from the testing will be.” — Kristen Cardinal BMED.CALPOLY.EDU | 11

BMEDPulse

The Future of Cal Poly’s graduate regenerative medicine program prepares students for a field with lofty goals

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hen Kristina Bishard was diagnosed with diabetes at age 11, doctors detailed her therapeutic options, which included insulin shots and pumps.

“They were also saying there’s this stem cell research that has the possibility to cure it,” Bishard remembered. “They said ‘It’s pretty far off,’ but I remember that.”

Even as a child, learning how her body reacted to the disease led Bishard to have an interest in biology. And years later it helped drive her decision to pursue a degree in Cal Poly’s master’s-level regenerative medicine program, which focuses on the type of science her doctors had described.

The regenerative medicine field, featuring cell and biologic therapies, has experienced substantial growth — anecdotally proven by the fact that all ten 2020 graduates from Cal Poly’s program landed jobs before graduation. After years of promise, the field is just now beginning to realize its potential, also evidenced by the large number of clinical trials currently taking place for cell- and tissue-engineered therapies.

“The most grand possibilities are effective cell-based cures for cancer, safe and effective gene therapies for monogenic diseases and enough tissue-engineered organs to eliminate the transplant wait list,” said Trevor Cardinal, director of the master’s program.

While the latter two of those goals are more long term, voter support of stem cell research recently approved funding for another 20 years, which is expected to further advance the field and possibly transform once theoretical ideas into scientific breakthroughs. Cal Poly’s interdisciplinary master’s degree program, created in 2009, prepares graduates for careers in the field through coursework and a 9-month internship, which is sponsored by state money and matching funds.

While Bishard was drawn to the field through her own personal experience, Isobelle Espiritu learned about stem cell research during a community college speech class.

“I feel like I’ve been nudged in this direction most of my college life,” she said.

As an undergraduate biomedical engineering major and later a grad student in the regenerative medicine program, she worked with Cardinal performing research on mice. Specifically, she would perform four to six surgeries a week to help improve blood flow.

“I would go home and tell my parents I was doing more mouse surgery,” she said.

Those procedures, which entailed stem cell isolations and transplantation, required lab coats and sterilized gloves.

“It felt really official,” she said.

The work had an important real-life application: Those mouse surgeries replicated efforts to minimize blockage in human leg vessels.

Each master’s class is capped at 10 students, who bond during their studies. While Bishard helped the biology students with mouse surgeries, her counterparts help her with biologyrelated components.

“Everybody has their own strength,” she said. “And that would really come out in certain classes.”

While the classes offered hands-on learning, the ninemonth off-site internship offered even more relevant experience.

“The most grand possibilities are effective cell-based cures for cancer, safe and effective gene therapies for monogenic diseases and enough tissueengineered organs to eliminate the transplant wait list.” — Trevor Cardinal 12 | CAL POLY BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

f Medicine Bishard, who once considered going to medical school, said nine months was enough time to actually get things done.

“With the nine months, I feel like I really contributed to something significant,” said Bishard, who interned with Organovo Inc., known for its ability to 3-D bioprint tissues that mimic key aspects of human biology and disease.

Her fiancé, whom she met during a previous internship in Belgium, eventually led her to accept a job with Mimetas, which creates organ-on-a-chip tissue models in the Netherlands. Her Cal Poly experience, she said, provided her confidence to pursue that job, where she works as a process development manager for cell-based products.

“I think it makes you feel really prepared going into the new world,” Bishard said.

While much of field’s best work is yet to come, the real breakthrough, Cardinal said, will occur in the manufacturing of cells and tissues.

“A group in Texas ... can already tissueengineer a human heart — the holy grail of regenerative medicine,” he said.

The technology can’t be performed at the clinical or commercial scale just yet.

But the potential to create organs would save countless lives.

Meanwhile, Bishard still uses an insulin pump and wonders when her field might change the lives of diabetes patients like herself.

“I still really believe in it,” she said. “But I think there’s still work to do.” n Mahvish Syed, a recent graduate of the regenerative medicine master’s degree program, examines a slide containing mouse kidney cells.

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Are Students Really Learning From Failure?

Paper suggests engineering programs can do more

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n a flight to a Washington, D.C., innovator conference, Tom Katona began thinking about Cal Poly student startups that have failed.

Some of the young entrepreneurs, he knew, were able to adapt from their failure and move on to other ventures. But others, he said, simply fell off the entrepreneurial radar.

“We sort of take it for granted that if you’re going to fail, you’re going to learn from it,” said Katona, assistant professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, who works both in the Biomedical Engineering Department and the Orfalea College of Business. “Maybe not. You might be really upset and not want to take risks again.”

A recently published paper that resulted from that flight explores whether engineering educators are actually teaching students to learn from failure — or if it’s just talk.

“We talk about learning from failure all the time,” Katona said. “The question is: What are we really doing for our students to have that effect?”

After discussing the topic with peers at the VentureWell Conference, Katona began researching the topic with Sarah Zappe, from Penn State University, and Joe Tranquillo, from Bucknell University. Their paper, “A Systemic Review of Student Entrepreneurial Failure in Engineering Education,” was published in June 2020 for the 12th American Society for Engineering Education conference.

For all the talk of failure’s lessons, the paper concludes that there’s little research to show that failure is actually being incorporated into engineering curriculum.

“This suggests a need that student entrepreneurial failure should be studied in the engineering entrepreneurship context,” the paper concludes.

One problem is that there’s not even a consensus on what constitutes failure. But Katona and his team decided it occurs when a venture exists for a while — at least six months — and is no longer in existence.

“We’re really looking for people who would have gotten their venture to a point where it was heavily tied to their identity,” said Katona, a veteran of several startups.

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Tom Katona, a professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department and the Orfalea College of Business, recently found that there’s little research to show that startup failure is actually being incorporated into engineering curriculum.

But even with that definition, the team of researchers could not find a body of literature that focused on best practices and research related to how to help students learn from failure.

The need to learn from failure is often mentioned. How to do it is not.

“You don’t always learn from failure,” Katona said. “You have to be intentional about helping people learn how to do that.”

The team is now considering interviewing students who have failed with their startups as a first step toward the process. With that information, Katona thinks educators can prepare students even before a failure — and provide support systems after one. Some business researchers have even discussed having students explore death literature for discussions on grief.

“I found that pretty fascinating,” Katona said, noting that psychologists who specialize in trauma could become involved.

As research on failure continues, Katona hopes the phrase “You can learn from your failures” won’t just be a platitude.

“This is something we can be a little more intentional about in the classroom.” n

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