Around the Quad news from campus

Biomedical engineering major wants to repair the most amazing machine of all

A love for tinkering led Jonathan Hicks into engineering. His heart steered him toward the medical end of the field.

“The body is the most amazing machine,” says Hicks, a sophomore from Cleveland Heights who is majoring in biomedical engineering.

He hopes to design and build a new generation of prosthetics, explaining, “I want to give back to people who lost something.”

First, he needs to pay the tuition bill at the Case School of Engineering. The Case Alumni Association is helping him to meet that challenge. Hicks, who hails from a family of modest means, received a 2018 Junior-Senior Scholarship made possible by alumni donations. The scholarship will complement his work-study income, he said, and help him take advantage of opportunities that still seem boundless. He’s an energetic young man with a happy laugh and a strong sense of obligation. Both of his parents are church pastors. Childhood invention camps sparked his interest in engineering. A campus tour in high school convinced him Case was the place.

“Every day I’m here I’m still going, ‘Oh, wow!’”

He thinks engineering, and the opportunities offered at CWRU, can put him in a position to better many people’s lives. He’s not waiting for the degree.

Last July, when a promising Cleveland high school student was hit by stray bullets in a drive-by shooting and later died, Hicks sprang into action. With classmate Arik Stewart, he started the Michael Chappman Scholarship fund, then delivered the heartening news to the teen’s distraught mother.

The scholarship is intended to help a Cleveland Metropolitan School District student attend college. Both Hicks and Stewart are leaders in the African American Society of CWRU and the fund is sponsored by the student group. Anyone can donate at givebutter.com/N9KYGa.

Meanwhile, Hicks is pursuing his dream of enhancing lives before they are lost, as an engineer who can fix the human body.

To learn more about Junior-Senior Scholarships, and the students they help, contact Janna Greer at janna.greer@casealum.org or call 216-368-3647.

The Jolly Scholar’s new trivia king expands the repertoire

Clark Taylor ’17 wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with his newly minted degree in computer science. Fortunately, the makings of a gap year loomed.

The Jeopardy buff from Kensington, Ohio, had been waiting tables at The Jolly Scholar and co-hosting its popular Tuesday Night Trivia, where teams of students and faculty compete for gift cards and modest acclaim. In May, longtime co-host Erik Miller, PhD, relinquished the microphone to focus on brewing beer and Taylor moved up, becoming the new trivia sage at the campus brewpub.

Taylor brings a passion for technology and engineering to the role. He has twice now staged trivia nights designed for engineering majors, including a special edition for the Case Alumni Association’s Senior Send-Off reception.

A bearded young man who wears the bill to his ball cap up, he stalks the big room like a lounge singer, wireless microphone in hand, throwing out questions that beg for a little thought and often imagination.

“I don’t want people to feel like they’re taking a test,” he explained about his approach. “I want it to be interesting but I want it to be fun.”

See how you do with a few queries from his engineering portfolio. No Googling, but you can consult teammates.

1. In 1844, Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message, “What hath

God wrought?” between which two

U.S. cities?

2. Howard Wolowitz is the only one of the four main male characters on

The Big Bang Theory lacking a PhD.

In what field did he attain his lowly master’s degree? 3. The Three Laws of Robotics were first introduced by this renowned science fiction writer.

4. What does BTU stand for and what does it measure?

5. When the Internet was new, there were only a handful of top-level domain names, including .com.

Can you name five more?

Answers: 1. Baltimore and Washington, D.C.; 2. aerospace engineering; 3. Isaac Asimov; 4. British Thermal Units measure heat; 5. .org, .net, .edu, .gov., .mil.

Myra Dria ’76, PhD, was one of only seven women in her graduating class of 700 from the Case Institute of Technology. The odds didn’t change much on her first job, in the Standard Oil Co.’s play in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. Still, in a field where women remain a rarity, Dria carved out a spectacular career.

She rose through the executive ranks of energy companies before breaking out on her own and becoming one of the busiest drillers in West Texas. This year, she was recognized by Oil and Gas Investor as one of the 25 Most Influential Women in Energy.

Alumnus Myra Dria deemed one of the Most Influential Women in Energy

As founder and CEO of Houston-based Pearl Resources, Dria directs a full-service drilling operation that sells oil and gas directly to pipeline companies. She is also the CEO and co-founder of Ristra Energy, an energy data company, and the former CEO of Opal Resources, which operated in West Texas. Entrepreneurship was her response to an “old boys club” where she never fit in and didn’t care to, she said. She recalls once being denied an equity partner because she wouldn’t join a hunting trip to Montana. Dria credits her success to her technical training at Case, where she majored in polymer engineering, and at the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned her doctorate in petroleum engineering. And she gives some credit to competitive figure skating, which she excelled at as a young woman. Skating taught her how to fall and get back up “and try again until you get it right,” she said, laughing.

A rising star in a risky business

Changes are coming to the oldest engineering discipline, civil engineering. As structures grow bigger and nature more powerful, the field needs people like YeongAe Heo, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the Case School of Engineering.

She’s a specialist in structural performance evaluation. She’s the person you call to find out what forces your deep-sea production platform can withstand, or how your community can better protect the harbor from hurricanes.

Her ability to assess risks to critical infrastructure in an age of climate change makes her a rising star in civil engineering.

Barely three years after joining the faculty, Heo was selected for an early career fellowship by the Gulf Research Program of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine. The award will support her research into minimizing risks of natural and man-made disasters on offshore oil and gas systems.

More recently, she was selected as a 2018 American Society of Civil Engineers ExCEEd Fellow. It comes with an invitation to West Point to attend a workshop on new techniques for teaching civil engineering and preparing students for the field’s changing demands.

“It was my childhood dream to be a great architect” growing up in Korea, she said. “But then I realized, ‘Oh, there’s more important, more interesting engineering— protecting those beautiful structures.”

Heo, who holds three patents for offshore structural systems, was a structure and risk engineer for Samsung Heavy Industries before joining the Case School of Engineering in 2014.

Celebrating 50 years of engineering better health

Imagine healthcare without Engineering and Case Western Reserve ultrasound, pacemakers, MRIs and University School of Medicine. artificial hips and knees. Biomedical “We’re kind of unique,” said engineering, the blending of Robert Kirsch, the department engineering and medicine, gave us chair and the Ford Professor those life-changing devices and of Biomedical Engineering. diagnostic tools and many more. “There are a couple of other

Case Western Reserve schools that do it this way, University helped to create the but it’s very rare.” biomedical engineer, a fact that will From that partnership came be recalled often this year as the many firsts. Case’s Department of BioDepartment of Biomedical Engineering medical Engineering developed the first celebrates its 50th anniversary. spinal cord stimulation for pain relief and

Upon its launch in 1968, the the first respiratory implant. Today, the department was one of the first in the highly regarded department—ranked 15th world to combine medical and best in the nation by U.S. News and World engineering expertise. BME remains a Report—is focused on restoring sensation joint department of the Case School of to people with limb loss and enhancing precision medicine with big data analytics.

Demand for biomedical engineers is expected to continue to grow because the population is aging and people are more aware of what bioengineering can do.

“We’re a very robust program,” Kirsch said. “Everyone cares about their health. Our graduates pretty much work in all aspects of the healthcare industry.”

Anniversary events begin September 6, when Omar Ishrak, the chairman and CEO of Medtronic, will keynote a day-long forum focused on the department’s neuroengineering expertise as part of the Ford Distinguished Lecture Series.

For details on that and other 50th anniversary events, visit the department’s website: engineering.case.edu/ebme/.