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for the benefit of society CENG’s top graduate student is motivated to help others
R
eymil Fernandez lit up the first time he encountered the Human Motion Biomechanics Laboratory.
“When I first walked into that lab, I looked like a happy child,” he recalled. “A happy child — that was my first reaction to it.” His work in the lab helped inspire him to focus his career objectives and eventually pursue a master’s degree at Cal Poly. Before graduating, Fernandez was named the College of Engineering’s Outstanding Graduate Student. In high school, Fernandez enjoyed math, but he wanted to pursue a field that was more practical than theoretical. Engineering, he learned, entailed math but also a lot of hands-on work as well. “You’re applying mathematics and physics concepts in to solving engineering problems,” he said. “I specifically chose mechanical engineering because of its broad aspect.” 10 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
As a first-generation college student, Fernandez transferred to Cal Poly from Bakersfield College as a mechanical engineering student. In 2017, he approached professors Scott Hazelwood and Steve Klisch about working in the Human Motion Biomechanics Lab. At the time, the lab was in the middle of a 3-year study, sponsored by the Department of Defense, looking at how exercise impacts amputees with prosthetics. “One of the biggest challenges is how to integrate man-made materials that can be quite stiff with living, less-stiff biological tissues that have various responses to the objects they are interacting with,” said Scott Hazelwood, a biomedical engineering professor. “The main contribution of my students and myself on these projects was to use the information gathered from the motion analysis experiments to generate whole knee computational models to examine the build-up of pressure on the cartilage on the knee — and, therefore, the risk of arthritis — throughout the motions of these exercises.”
