News Bytes

Case Quad became a movie set for two days in mid-November as a camera crew shot scenes for Cherry, the upcoming film from the Russo brothers — Anthony and Joseph — the CWRU alums of Captain America fame. The filmmakers hired dozens of students as extras, riveted campus and added to their Cleveland cred.

Said the Russo brothers in a news release: “As Cleveland natives ourselves, it means a lot to us to be able to film in our hometown.”

David Schiraldi, PhD, is retiring after 10 years as chair of the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, but his legacy will live on in the many new faces he brought to science and engineering. Schiraldi founded and championed the Envoys Program, which brings bright teens from under-resourced Cleveland schools to Case for training as scientists.

Since 2006, more than 50 Schiraldi Envoys have gone on to college and many have started STEM careers, one with her PhD.

A week after accepting her master’s degree in engineering and management in May, Cassandra Laios ’18, MEM ’19, won the 2019 NCAA Division III Women's Outdoor Track and Field Championship in the hammer throw. That made her only the 15th NCAA Champion in the 48-year history of CWRU athletics.

Now she’s on to a new arena, as an electrical engineer for Lockheed Martin in upstate New York.

Free pumpkin pie and falling pumpkins drew a throng outside of Strossacker Auditorium on a crisp October day. The occasion was the 22nd annual Pumpkin Drop of the Physics and Astronomy Club, which reenacts Galileo’s Leaning Tower of Pisa experiment by dropping pumpkins off the roof.

As two pumpkins of different mass splattered in synch, one club member declared, “Gravity still works!”

Synchronizing dialogue to moving images is an art, and few are better at it than Jeff Bloom ’70. His London-based firm Synchro Arts won a 2019 Technical and Engineering Emmy Award for the engineering creativity that goes into its audio processing software.

The Columbus native took an unusual route to show business, starting with a physics degree from Case Institute of Technology.

As the new chair of the Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, Gary Wnek, PhD, can be expected to bring some startup fervor to the labs. A renowned polymer researcher, Wnek has championed entrepreneurship and innovation in the curriculum of the Case School of Engineering. His many leadership posts include Faculty Director of Sears think[box].

Beauty and the Bolt, the non-profit launched by Xyla Foxlin ’19 to attract more women into labs, plants and maker spaces, has a new promotional tool for the new year. Its 2020 Princesses with Power Tools Calendar features a dozen women in fairytale dress drilling, designing and calculating.

The princesses include Ailin Yu ’17, who took degrees in Systems and Control, Computer Engineering and Musical Performance to SpaceX, where she’s an avionics software engineer.

The printed word may be disappearing in the real world, but it’s doing just fine on campus. The Observer, CWRU’s student newspaper, celebrated a half century in print in October with a special anniversary issue. Past reporters and editors — many of them science and engineering grads — recalled how producing the news shaped their college years and even their careers.

“The most significant extra-curricular activity that I undertook at CWRU was working for The Observer,” wrote Jason Mitchell ’94, a video game developer at Valve, recalling deadlines and multi-tasking. “Those of us on staff were learning how to be collaborative ‘full stack’ media creators before the word entered the lexicon.”