Engineering Highlights 2020-2021, Harvey Mudd College

I ENG ffl NEERING ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Update from the Department Well, it’s been quite a year for us all! I think it’s probably difficult for you all to imagine the HMC experience being entirely remote, but we managed to pull it off! Despite the difficulties, our community of students, faculty and staff pulled together to provide the best experience that we could to our students. We shipped a lot of hardware all over the world for students to A Liz Orwin get some hands-on experiences, set up at-home labs and experiments (safely of course!) to make sure Clinic projects got done, and spent a lot of time with iPads and Zoom rooms and other things to maintain the close contact with faculty. We even sent special graduation boxes to all our seniors to open at our senior reception!

I’m really proud of this community and how we navigated this difficult year. We had students back on campus this summer doing research and preparing the new machine shops and new makerspace for reopening this fall. I think the year away made us appreciate our time together even more, and it was a fantastic summer working together in person again.

As some of you have no doubt heard, I accepted a position as dean of the School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, and I left HMC at the end of July. It was my great honor to serve on this faculty and as chair of this department. I learned so much, and I loved being part of this team and the opportunity to help you shape the past few years in this department. This department also taught me to be a lifelong learner, to seek new challenges and, at the end of the day, to go out and make a difference. And this opportunity gives me the chance to do all of that.

I know this is a surprise. It’s a surprise to me, too. I didn’t know I could ever connect with or get excited by anything that isn’t HMC Engineering, but this place surprised me, and I’m excited about the opportunity to help them grow into what they want to be. I’m not sure I’d be happy with myself if I didn’t try. It’s going to be a lot of fun for me and a new adventure for my family. And sometimes you just know in your gut it’s the right thing to do. I know the engineering department is in a strong place—Nancy Lape will be stepping into the interim chair role—so you all are in excellent hands!

It is impossibly hard for me to walk away from HMC. Our students (now alumni) are the reason we’re all here, and you have driven me to work hard to make this department the best it can be. Your energy and excitement for learning is infectious, and it keeps all of us going here on campus. I know I’ll continue to collaborate with my colleagues here, and I will always be an HMC alum.

It is my honor to step back into the interim chair position and do my best to pick up where Liz Orwin left off. During her tenure as department chair, Liz led the department through a review and major revision of our Core offering, worked tirelessly to bring a state-of-the-art makerspace to HMC and brought the department together to develop A Nancy Lape two major initiatives, the Engineering Leadership Program and Prototyping Mindset Program, among many other things. She continuously worked to ensure that the department could continue to support our program to the highest level and to improve an already-supportive culture for students, faculty and staff.

It is also worth noting here that she started this newsletter! “Prof. O” has set us up extremely well for success, and while we will definitely miss her strong leadership and positive energy, we wish her the best in her new position. The University of the Pacific is a lucky institution!

It is so exciting to have students back on campus returning to hands-on work, working closely in teams and enjoying our new makerspace. Faculty and students can once again engage in those small but important exchanges during class or office hours—the type of interactions that are key not only to helping students understand course material, but also to making them feel that they are truly part of the HMC community. E4 students are back in the machine shop building ocarinas and hammers, E79 students are watching the underwater robots they built respond to step inputs in the tank, students in E86 (materials engineering) are hitting coupons with hammers to examine ductile/brittle transitions, and students in Professor David Harris’s new class, Introduction to Aviation, are building an airplane. There really is nothing like the energy of the students all together in person or being able to catch up with colleagues in the hallway.

I hope you will enjoy reading about all of fascinating projects our faculty, staff and students have been working on this past year.

I’d also like to note something that doesn’t show up in this newsletter: how considerate and compassionate our students, faculty and staff were toward each other throughout this challenging time. This caring community combined with our diversity of technical excellence continue to make Harvey Mudd Engineering a fabulous place to be.

NEWS BRIEFS

HMC Engineering Course Offered Worldwide The Department of Engineering offered Digital Design and Computer Architecture (E85), as a massive open online course (MOOC) through EdX during spring 2021. It provides an introduction to elements of digital design, followed by an introduction to computer architecture.

The course complements a new edition of the textbook by the same name, coauthored by engineering professors David Harris and University of Nevada, Las Vegas, professor Sarah Harris (past HMC engineering professor; no relation). Developed by David Harris, Sarah Harris and HMC engineering professor Josh Brake, the course was offered during fall 2020 as a beta test and was offered broadly in spring to include high school students interested in engineering and to students in the developing world with less access to experiential learning. David Harris says, “We hope that the MOOC will be able to make the beauty and joy of digital systems accessible to unconventional audiences.

Engineering Program Earns High Ranking

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Harvey Mudd College ranked No. 2 for undergraduate engineering programs in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges 2021, maintaining the same spot as last year. The College has tied for No. 1 with Rose-Hulman three out of the past six years.

The engineering department was also recognized in the “Best in the Specialties” section, coming in at No. 2 for mechanical engineering, No. 3 for electrical/electronic/communications engineering, No. 4 for civil engineering and No. 4 in computer engineering.

Faculty Promotions Promotions and tenure appointments for engineering faculty approved by the board of trustees (effective July 1, 2020): Kash Gokli was granted tenure and awarded the

Albert Dato received tenure and was promoted

Oliver C. Field Professorship of Manufacturing and Engineering Economics. Since arriving at Harvey Mudd, he has mentored teams for case competitions sponsored by the Association for Supply Chain Management with great success.

to associate professor. He researches the synthesis and applications of nanomaterials.

Gordon Krauss was promoted to full professor.

Matthew Spencer received tenure and promotion to associate professor. He researches circuit design, with an emphasis on microelectromechanical (MEM) switches and ultrasound transducers.

Serving as the Fletcher Jones Professor of Engineering Design, he studies design research and tribology, the study of friction, wear and lubrication.

Two engineering professors were appointed for second, two-year terms as assistant professor.

Timothy Tsai pursues research that lies at the intersection of signal processing, machine learning and music.

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Werner Zorman, holder of the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Chair in Leadership, is a leadership development expert and entrepreneur.

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NEWS BRIEFS

Spencer Featured in Digital Engineering Magazine

In Memoriam

In a podcast and accompanying article by Digital Engineering magazine, Matthew Spencer describes how he shifted his hands-on classes from in-person to remote learning. Using online instruction, chat rooms and office hours, he was able to continue to focus on the core learning of the courses. Listen to the podcast interview: https://bit.ly/de21-spencer

Virginia Field Bruno passed away

on Aug. 12, 2020. She was a friend of Iris Critchell and the Bates Program, and she supported the establishment of the Oliver C. Field Professorship in Engineering Economics.

NSF GRANT

Is That Online Video Real?

When scrolling through the news in your favorite app, you probably have a method of determining whether the content you’re seeing is legitimate or fake. What’s the source of the story? Who benefits from the story being shared? Are there obvious factual errors?

Sometimes, it’s not even necessary to read past the headline because you know, for example, that there’s enough evidence to prove the Earth is, indeed, round.

But how can you tell if the video you’re watching or the audio you’re hearing is illegitimate when it looks and sounds like the real thing?

Enter engineering professor TJ Tsai, who has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for “A Cross-Verification Approach for Identifying Tampered Audio.” He’s seeking ways to identify fake or tampered audio, such as synthetic recordings generated by deep fake technology.

Though it’s relatively new, deep fake technology is prevalent, and “there’s definitely concern that bad actors could use this technology in a very destructive way,” says Tsai.

Indeed, one system can modify videos in a photorealistic manner to lip-sync to unrelated audio recordings. Another can allow a source actor to control the facial expressions and head movements of a person in a target video.

Recent advances in speech synthesis have enabled systems to learn and imitate the characteristics of a person’s voice with very limited training data.

Tsai says, “Rather than approaching this problem from a computer science-centric perspective: ‘Is this video a deep fake?’, this proposal approaches the problem from

a history-centric perspective: ‘Is this video a historically verifiable event?’ Historians have a very robust methodology for answering this question, and we can apply this methodology to audio and video data. In the same way that a historian tests a historical claim by crosschecking against all other primary sources of information, we can test the authenticity of an audiovisual recording by cross-checking against all other primary sources of audiovisual information.”

The idea for the project came to Tsai as he was listening to a sermon at church.

“The speaker was talking about how we can know whether a historical event actually happened,” Tsai says. “Historians have wellestablished tools for determining historical truth, and one of the primary mechanisms is cross-verifying a historical claim against other primary sources. If something is true, it will be internally consistent. If it is false, it will contradict other eyewitness accounts. At the time, I had been thinking about the problem

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

of detecting fake or tampered videos, and it occurred to me that all of the work I had seen was focused on scrutinizing the video itself to determine if it was genuine or not. I thought it would be interesting to approach the problem from the perspective of verifying a historical claim by cross-checking against other recordings of the same event.”

With the help of six student researchers over two summers, Tsai will develop methods to cross-verify audio data in two different scenarios: cross-verifying with trusted data and cross-verifying with untrusted data.

“The proposal develops tools to counteract the spread of false audiovisual information,” Tsai says. “In particular, it focuses on protecting world leaders from fake videos that might cause instability or unrest at a national level. These same tools establish the reliability of true audiovisual information. Beyond simply detecting fake videos, it provides a quantitative way to measure the reliability of audiovisual data concerning public matters.”

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NEWS BRIEFS

More NSF Grants The National Science Foundation also funded these projects by Harvey Mudd engineering professors during 2020.

“Monitoring of Marine Life Coastal Habitats via Autonomous Robot Systems,” Chris Clark, professor of engineering “The project builds from our previous shark-tracking projects as well as our cross-cultural International Computer Engineering eXperience (ICEX) program,” says Clark.

Researchers: In collaboration with biology

students from Cal State University Long Beach and the University of Costa Rica, a team of Harvey Mudd College engineering/computer science students. Each summer for three years, a new cohort of HMC and CSU Long Beach students will travel to Costa Rica for up to six weeks to work with hosts/professors Mario Espinoza and Maike Heidemeyer and their students.

Goal: Researchers are seeking to extend the development of AUV

technology and apply it to a marine life monitoring study, which tracks nurse sharks and sea turtles within their habitat in Bahia Santa Elena, Costa Rica. Researchers will develop new robot tracking technology that can be applied to other applications (coast guard surveillance, for example) and develop new data that will increase the understanding of how sharks and sea turtles migrate along the coast.

Experiential and cross-cultural learning: In addition to learning

about underwater robotics and marine biology, students will gain extensive professional training in topics outside their field of study but still highly relevant for research progress. “The cross-cultural learning activities associated with the program have potential to provide once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for the students involved, including potential for engagement with local NGO leaders, school children, fishers and researchers from Costa Rica,” Clark says.

Potential outcomes: “The development of a multi-AUV system

that uses single hydrophone receivers for active tracking of marine life will itself generate new objective function formulations, new algorithms to optimize such objective functions, new approaches to decentralize the algorithms across multiple AUVs and new methods of systems integration. With respect to contributions this work will make to marine biology, the fine-scale movement patterns of both the nurse sharks and sea turtles in Costa Rica are largely unknown.

Also, their habitats have never been mapped. Combining these two new data sets, motion patterns and habitat maps, will answer some of the most basic but unanswered questions regarding how these species use their habitats.”

Work during the pandemic: “Despite our inability to travel,

we are having our colleagues setup equipment and track sea turtles and sharks. This will allow us to start getting static receiver data, providing us with a baseline understanding of animal movements.”

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“Understanding the Process-Structure-Property Relationships in Polymer Nanocomposites Reinforced with Gas-Phase-Synthesized Graphene,” Albert Dato, associate professor of “This Faculty Early Career Development engineering (CAREER) grant will reveal new strengthening and thermal transport mechanisms in nanocomposites that will transform knowledge of graphene and advance fundamental understanding of composite materials,” says Dato.

Researchers: Recently published research by Dato and his students Kevin Nakahara ’20, Jacob Knego ’18, Taylor Sloop ’20, Chance Bisquera ’19 and Nicole Subler ’16 demonstrates that GSG-based nanocomposites exhibit significant enhancements in both strength and strain at break. Dato also plans to involve high school students in scientific research and near-peer mentoring via HMC’s Upward Bound program.

Goal: The multidisciplinary research focuses on the scalable and

sustainable manufacturing of nanocomposites containing gas-phasesynthesized graphene (GSG). The objective of Dato’s project is to test the hypothesis that high-strength multifunctional nanocomposites can be created by reinforcing polymers with GSG. “We initially predicted that incorporating GSG into polymers would enhance strength. We were surprised to discover that our nanocomposites have both increased strength and the ability to stretch further than pure polymer specimens. Normally, those are trade-off properties in polymers containing graphene.”

Experiential learning: “The students’ discovery was groundbreaking

because the results cannot be explained by the current knowledge of graphene-based nanocomposites. The property enhancements in our specimens are also much higher than what has been reported in literature.

Potential outcomes: The many potential applications for graphene-

based nanocomposites include safer vehicles with increased fuel efficiency, impact-resistant electronics with improved heat dissipation, and lightweight wind turbine blades capable of generating larger amounts of renewable energy. “The manufacturing of these applications requires graphene that is highly ordered, effectively disperses in polymers, resists aggregation and is environmentally friendly to produce. GSG meets these requirements. The CAREER award will also enable Dato to create and disseminate a new nanocomposites course.

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Nancy Lape received a CAREER grant in 2009.

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Three Classes and a Quarantine Transitioning to an online curriculum has required countless hours of dedication by faculty members across the College. In the engineering department, three faculty members describe how they pivoted to offer three courses online. ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

E155 Microprocessor-based Systems: Design and Applications Joshua Brake Assistant professor of engineering The general structure of E155 (MicroPs) is a set of seven independent labs that students complete on their own for the first half of the semester followed by a final project which is completed in teams of two. In the past, the class focused on a combination of microcontroller and field gate programmable array (FPGA) development, but this year we focused on the microcontroller development to make the class more amenable to remote learning. The focus on microcontroller development provided the students with more time than in past iterations of the course to dig into the inner workings and advanced topics related to microcontrollers, like interrupt-driven design, real-time operating systems and low-power operation.

What’s new?

With the focus on microcontrollers, we also had the opportunity to introduce a few new labs. One of these new labs was focused on demystifying how code written in a high-level programming language like C is translated into the binary file that is stored in memory and executed on the microcontroller. This lab, based on a step-by-step breakdown of the popular, open-source GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), helped to demonstrate in practice the connection between software and hardware, naturally connecting to the computer architecture content that students learn in the prerequisite course, E85: Digital Electronics and Computer Engineering.

This fall, each student in the class received a kit with an ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller development board, an allin-one USB electronic measurement tool (the ADALM2000), a selection of various electronic parts, like buttons, LEDs, resistors, capacitors

and a few integrated circuit chips, like a digital-to-analog convertor and an ESP8266 WiFi chip, which is widely used in industry to develop internet-of-things (IoT) devices.

The ADALM2000 in particular was key for students to be able to probe the input and output of their systems and to debug any problems in their development.

Creatively engaging students My favorite part of MicroPs is the weekly lab checkoffs. The labs are completed by each student and then they meet with me each week to demonstrate the operation of their lab.

Translating these one-on-one meetings over Zoom worked surprisingly well and provided an opportunity for me to get to know each student individually and check on how they were doing in the course.

The remote setting also presented opportunities for group work in class.

For several of the lectures throughout the semester, I would introduce a topic in class and then split the class into breakout rooms of four to five students on Zoom to directly implement the concept we talked about in class. Since students each had a copy of the hardware, they were able to develop in their small groups using Zoom features, such as screen sharing to write code together and then test it out immediately on their development boards. The breakout room structure also allowed me to easily move from group to group and see what they were working on and address any questions.

The structure of the kit and cross-platform compatibility of the development tools enabled this in a way that was not possible in previous offerings of the course.

Best online teaching approaches MicroPs has traditionally been taught using the whiteboard and interactive class activities.

With the move to online learning last fall, I wanted to give students a more structured version of the material and decided to move to slides. I also incorporated various activelearning activities like in-class programming

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

assignments where I was available for questions and short quizzes at the beginning of class to pique students’ interest in the material for the day or to revisit material from past lectures.

Online learning advantages To help manage questions about the course, I used a Slack workspace for the class. This was a helpful way to allow the class to ask for clarifications about the assignments and get help with problem solving. Having access to the chat in Zoom during lectures provided students with a way to ask me, or each another, questions without having to interrupt the lecture. This allowed me to more optimally sequence answers to the questions in the lecture material and also enabled students to answer each other’s questions in the chat.

Although not directly related to online learning, providing each student with their own personal oscilloscope and logic analyzer was very useful for helping them learn how to debug their circuits without access to the digital lab on campus.

Hurdles The biggest hurdle last fall was revamping the course to use the new development board and setting up the kits to not require any assembly like soldering that would be inaccessible to the students at their homes. Luckily, thanks to our fabulous engineering administrative support team, the logistical challenge of getting the kits ordered and shipped out to students all over the country was seamlessly.

A An all-in-one USB electronic measurement tool (the ADALM2000)

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Three Classes and a Quarantine

E80 Experimental Engineering Matt Spencer Associate professor of engineering E80 is a class about experimental practice in engineering. The in-person class is divided into two halves. During the first half of the class, students carry out a series of labs that are centered on designing an underwater robot. During the second half of the semester, students use the tools and skills they’ve developed in the first half-semester to build a robot that carries out an experiment of their choice in the ocean. The course culminates in a field deployment to Dana Point, where students put their robots to the test.

We adapted this class significantly in Spring of 2020 to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The first half of the class was the same because students were on campus, but the second half required significant changes after students went remote. These changes were designed to let students get a full E80 project experience, including a field deployment, at home. Students received a take-home project kit, and teams needed to collaborate to build four instances of an experiment that could be conducted outside each of their homes. Teams did a great job of

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running with this, and they took advantage of differences in altitude, humidity, population density and other features of their homes to conduct all sorts of interesting experiments.

Creatively engaging students I’ve tried to optimize project freedom. Letting students tailor their projects to their living circumstances helped them buy into the work.

Frequent face time: It was very important to stay in touch with students as they carried out the project to ensure they had adequate technical support and the same kind of mentoring they’d get in a lab. Often we had two or three scheduled Zoom calls with each team each week.

Best online teaching approaches Since the remote part of E80 was during the project phase, we didn’t have lectures per se.

However, we had many small group Zoom meetings to stay in touch with teams and help students debug their projects. In other courses (E79 and E157), flipped classroom models with in-class active learning has adapted to Zoom easily. We often pair these flipped models with team-based learning assessments, and some

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students have collaborated on those better than in person, thanks to the magic of Zoom annotation.

Online learning advantages There are some benefits to student collaboration through digital media and digital communities. I find it easier to respond to student questions over chat programs than email, and I get surprisingly good office hours turnout online.

Class support Sam Abdelmuati, our stockroom manager, has been invaluable in packing and shipping kits and equipment to E80 students and research students. Our office staff, especially Sydney Torrey, did a great job with purchasing and shipping to multiple locations, especially on short notice when we were first assembling the kits.

Hurdles Keeping students engaged, both in classes without eye contact and easy back-and-forth conversation and in projects where they can feel like they’re working in isolation.

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Three Classes and a Quarantine E4 Introduction to Engineering Design and Manufacturing Leah Mendelson and Steven Santana ’06 Assistant professors of engineering

E4 is one of the first classes that students take in the engineering sequence. Typically, small teams of three to five students spend most of the semester engineering a solution to a need posed by an external client. They work on projects that will have a tangible solution, something that the students can build since this is a class that’s about design and manufacturing.

A big part of E4 is learning how to work with a team, how to lead and how to give and receive feedback. Every team experiences conflict and working remotely can negatively impact communication. In response, we’ve augmented the teamwork, team dynamics and leadership instruction that’s already central to the class and are eager to continue this work when we’re back in person!

Creatively engaging students Design is about answering well-defined questions with no one solution. We teach students about possible solutions by having them build and test things. When the students left in spring 2020, they had already started building and testing designs for clients. So online, they transitioned to building out more advanced computational and mathematical models of their designs, using SolidWorks to create 3D drawings of their design solutions and testing them for various features like strength or ability to last under certain conditions.

During the 2020–2021 academic year, we sent them tools and materials, and provided them with a budget, to support prototyping and testing remotely. Students then couple this work with computational modeling— using SolidWorks and computer-aided drawing—to evaluate, test and model design solutions. With these tools, the engineers in E4 produced great work!

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We didn’t just ship them tools and say “Go for it.” Each student design team got matched with a machine shop student proctor to get support on manufacturing considerations, materials and the machines needed to build their project so they could make recommendations to the client. That closed the loop between this broad idea of conceptual design—not producing a final design but instead, delivering technical drawings, a bill of materials, and a process router, all to equip the clients with everything they need to build the design.

Best online teaching approaches Teaching engineering design online has really brought into sharp focus the need for structuring and facilitating meaningful conversations among the students, like: How can I be a leader on a team? How do I engage with team members when we have differences of opinion? How do we get and receive feedback to help us function better as a team and also to make our design better for the client?

Communication among remote teams with members who have never met in person can be difficult to develop. Giving students tools and training to navigate conversations about technical topics and team dynamics while building trust and challenging ideas serves students well for future work - both in terms of their work’s quality and the joy they experience through creating it. To practice these skills, the work in E4 remains centered on each team’s self-selected trajectory through the design space and is supported with checkins, debriefs and candid feedback.

A An E4 class during spring 2018

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Hurdles Having no access to the machine shop has been the biggest hurdle for E4. We all want students to build things and deliver solutions to clients – without the shop, they just can’t do this.

We have this great makerspace that’s opening soon. We have a fantastic student-run machine shop. We have Drew Price, our amazing shop manager. The students certainly have all these fantastic resources, but they don’t have access to the equipment. We have been working closely with Drew to plan ways for students to get in the shop, use the equipment, and close the loop on what they’ve learned but haven’t gotten to touch or interact with yet.

Class Support Shop proctors have partnered with student teams to give them feedback and advice during the design process. We also have a team of student TAs that help in the class regularly by offering direct feedback on the design process and CAD. There’s intentional overlap in knowledge between the TAs and the shop to make communication and messaging seamless between our design instruction and what’s happening in the shop.

An alumnus’ perspective (Santana) I think something that is notably different that has really served students taking engineering classes in this remote time has been the culture that has been developing in the engineering department about critically reflecting on student success and its connection to instructional practices pedagogy happening in engineering classes.

Certainly this is helpful as we look at gaps in equity, gender, performance or other areas that may impact different groups of learners.

The department’s culture and reflective and critical nature toward its pedagogy has set us up well to do cool, interesting things that support student learning. Instead of just doing the same things, the ethos of the department is to look at what’s happening, make sense of it and make sure that we’re supporting student learning and success as best we can. Certainly students miss the social connection, being in the space, sharing that college experience with peers. But in terms of training engineers who can go out and impact society in the future, I’m confident that we’re still doing that with a high degree of success.

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Talking Shop with Staff and Student Managers Machine shop manager Drew Price, hired by the Department of Engineering in fall 2019, is enthusiastic about carrying on the tradition of the shop being a space that welcomes learning and creativity. Like past managers, Price instructs students on design techniques, oversees projects in the machine shop and ensures that students and faculty members learn the correct techniques to safely use the equipment.

After graduating from Northwestern (B.S., mechanical engineering), Price managed a car repair shop then worked for The Pilot Group, a company that provides contract design work building custom equipment. This exposed him to new methods of manufacturing and machinery, and he was able to work on a variety of projects, from aerospace hardware to farm equipment.

Now at HMC, he is helping students and faculty achieve their goals and is creating an environment that encourages collaboration.

During construction of the Scott A. McGregor Computer Science Center, the machine shop was repositioned so that it is adjacent to the new makerspace, a multidisciplinary hub.

Price is excited for this new configuration, which will allow students and faculty to pass easily between the two spaces for prototyping and manufacturing.

Drew shares what it’s like working on campus to support remote teaching and learning.

About remote teaching and learning.

I’m really enjoying being more involved with instruction and outreach! When someone would come into the shop to get info about how to make something, I could take them around to look at examples or get inspiration about what the various tools are used for.

When everything was remote, I had to learn how to communicate that differently, by holding things up in front of the video camera or sending out videos showing how things work. Communicating effectively when you’re not in the same room as your collaborators was a unique problem.

About supporting specific projects.

Clinic: I made parts on campus and shipped them to a number of teams and worked with others to enable their prototyping work at their places of residence. At least two teams successfully set up test equipment remotely to further their hardware development, and we made relevant equipment and resources available to teams when we could.

Scripps Advanced Digital Art: This was a new collaboration with Aly Ogasian, assistant professor of art and design at Scripps. Her students learned about designing projects to be made using a laser cutter to bridge the gap between what can be done on a computer and what can be done manually. Normally they would have been in the shop to cut their projects themselves, but during fall 2020, we made them on campus and mailed them to the students.

About prototyping work. I do some prototyping for classes, professors’ research equipment, the engineering department and campus at-large. I worked with facilities and maintenance to build out our COVID protection equipment for the shops and labs.

We came up with some ideas to keep high touch surfaces around campus cleaner for everyone who is working and moving around HMC. About being on campus during the pandemic. Campus was lonely, but I got to

A E4: I collaborated with professors Leah Mendelson and Steven Santana ’06 to teach lessons on 3D modeling and CAD, gave virtual tours and introductions to the machine shop, manufacturing processes, tolerances, mechanical drawings, and talked about how to build prototypes. We also assembled and mailed prototyping kits of tools and raw materials to everyone in the course to use at home.

know our amazing support staff in F&M pretty well! The campus doesn’t stop needing care just because there are fewer people around, and we wanted to make sure everything was set up properly and safely for everyone to return to Claremont.

E86: I planned revised at-home materials testing lab projects with professors Albert Dato and Gordon Krauss for spring 2021 semester.

Scripps Intermediate Computational Media: This was a new collaboration with Jane Mi, assistant professor of media studies.

Her students designed products or devices to lessen the burden of specific COVID-19 pandemic related issues they encountered in their own lives. We 3D printed their designs on campus and sent them to the students for review and reflection.

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A A laser cut sample

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Talking Shop with Staff and Student Managers 2020-2021 Shop Managers Price also oversees the shop management team—Aubrey Egerter ’21, Jimmy Fernandez ’21, Fionna Kopp ’21 and Hugo So ’21—who led projects in collaboration with the proctor staff. The shop managers give design feedback online, answer manufacturing questions and support their fellow Mudders similar to how they would on campus if someone walked into the shop to ask questions about how to make something.

In what ways did you revise and improve E4 shop project procedures and processes?

With the remote semester and an inability to physically A Aubrey Egerter be in the shop, the shop proctor team split into various shop improvement projects. I worked with a team of four other shop proctors to update the E4 hammer process routers, which included the procedures for the hammer head, faces and handle. Over the years, we have adapted some of the procedures in the ways they are taught (verbally) but have never edited the process routers directly—until now! One example of this is using pin gauges to get an accurate hard face fit. The hard face is especially finicky to machine since it has to be heat treated then press fit into the hammer head. In the past, there have been issues with getting the perfect fit, so a year and a half ago, we started teaching students to use pin gauges to measure their hammer heads and adjust their hard face diameters accordingly.

Since a lot of E4 students are new to the shop environment, we also wanted to add additional background information for tools and machines used throughout the project.

The updated routers now include several photos of tooling and machine parts to help students get acquainted with the shop environment and important lingo. We also worked on improving the heat treatment directions, since they often cause confusion, and wrote a short blurb about the science behind heat treatment for any curious students. In the midst of writing this, we actually discovered a potentially unnecessary step and worked with Drew to change the process accordingly.

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What are some of the new training tutorials for equipment you developed?

We created some new resources aimed toward students who are newer to working A Fionna Kopp in the shop. We made a couple of flowcharts for thinking about how you decide what cutting tool to use on the lathe and mill based on the material and what type of cut you want to make. We also made some introduction videos for E4 students focused on reading technical drawings and going from a drawing to a process router.

What is going into the new website and knowledge base? We are focused

on ensuring that information about the shop is useful and easy to access for people at A Hugo So all levels of comfort in the shop. This took the form of creating a brand new machine shop website. We focused on ensuring that all relevant information is easy to find and access, adding information about every machine in the shop, and updating the

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

user interface to complement the new machine shop. This includes a dedicated page for every machine, with descriptions of their purpose and use cases, as well as additional resources for helping users get the most out of their shop experience. We further boosted the amount of information available to shop users by revising old shop tutorials and writing new tutorials.

Please describe your work revising and improving the shop safety quiz. The Safety

Quiz was created a long time ago. Because of that, there were a number of outdated A Jimmy Fernandez questions about tools that now rarely see use, as well as no questions for newer fabrication techniques the shop now has access to, like the laser cutter and 3D printer. As such, my goal for the revision was to make the quiz more reflective of safety procedure a shop user would need to know now. Additionally, the automated script that grades the test and manages the user list was written in an inefficient way that makes it difficult to edit the test. Another goal of my work was to rewrite certain sections of the code to make the quiz a little more flexible and efficient.

9

SCHOLARLY ACTIVITIES

Prototyping Mindset Project The Department of Engineering is implementing several new approaches to enhance its renowned general engineering degree that emphasizes experiential, hands-on learning and team-based projects with real-world applications.

The department’s new initiatives are designed to instill a “prototyping mindset” in engineering students, faculty and staff, that is, the willingness to test out a potential solution that may not be—and is likely not—the final or best solution. The department will apply this mindset in three main areas: student experience, innovative curriculum, and inclusive and equitable culture.

A key aspect of the program, and the reason “prototyping” is such a big part of it, relates to a core principle of design thinking: bias toward action.

“We don’t want to just think about potential innovative ideas but actually go out and try them, even if we fail,” says Nancy Lape, professor of engineering and interim department chair. “We believe that by combining a bias toward action with small prototypes, we will be more willing to test truly innovative ideas and quickly move towards success.”

For the student experience facet of the program, students will apply the prototyping mindset to develop their own personal missions, design their experiences in the engineering program and investigate future careers. Courses to support this effort began in spring 2021.

Students Audrey Young ’21 and Kaitlyn Paulsen ’22 and assistant professor of engineering Joshua Brake helped develop the courses and served as facilitators.

“I think one aspect that is very interesting to me is that in general we are led to believe there is a formulaic path to life—graduate, perhaps go on to grad school, enter the industry, work the 40-hour week, etc.,” says Paulsen. “We spend so much time trying to reach the next steppingstone without stopping to consider what we really want out of our career, our relationships and beyond.”

In Prototyping Your Mudd, sophomores spend time thinking about and prototyping around what they want out of their college experience overall and from their engineering

degree in particular. Prototyping Your Future Self, inspired by the Stanford Life Design Lab, is aimed at helping seniors design a career and life that fits their interests and best aligns with their personal philosophy and interests.

Both courses require students to carry out weekly prototypes, including conversations with alumni, faculty, and fellow students and experiences, such as shadowing Clinic teams or professionals, to inform their pathways.

Lape, who leads both courses, says, “I think this is a real chance for students to pause and look at what they want out of college and out of their life instead of just being on the receiving end, with life happening to them.

I hope this allows students to see a path that is specific to them, not try to fit the mold of what people perceive to be an engineer.

We want students to really be able to find a place for themselves—their unique identities.”

“I hope the Prototyping Mindset Project will help enhance a culture of creativity, encourage students to promote failure and help them lean into what feels uncomfortable,” says Paulsen, “and that these courses and this dedication to creating a culture of prototyping help students learn about themselves and pursue a professional path that’s in alignment with their values.”

Another goal of the program involves prototyping curricular innovation. Engineering

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

faculty will test potential curricular changes, learn from failure and evolve to allow for revolutionary rather than evolutionary curricular changes.

“When you want to redesign a class, it’s a lot of work, and you feel like you have to make it perfect or know that it will work,” Lape says.

“This is particularly challenging when working across the curriculum because changes will affect multiple courses and what our graduates get from the program. We’re trying to find a way that faculty members can try things out to know if they’re worth investing in further. And we hope that it will lead to more innovative ideas.”

Faculty members and future engineers will continually progress through the cycle of try-fail-learn-evolve. The engineering department is also working with students, faculty and staff to create a more inclusive and equitable culture. In conjunction with the Office of Institutional Research and Effectiveness, the department surveyed engineering majors about the current culture and added questions to the Senior Exit Survey aimed at understanding the impact of student identity on experience in the engineering program. Additionally, future student-faculty working sessions will address issues of inclusion in the engineering community and program.

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SCHOLARLY ACTIVITIES

Alloy Research Results in Patent Filing and Accolades An international cohort of faculty and student researchers developing novel compositionally complex metal alloys (CCAs) celebrated the filing of a patent and best poster awards in 2020 and spring 2021.

Professor of Engineering Lori Bassman, five Harvey Mudd College students, and two of their University of New South Wales (UNSW) colleagues, Kevin Laws and Patrick Conway, are named on the patent that is based on work developed over two summers at UNSW in Australia.

“The project goal was to develop alloys that could be a substitute for stainless steels in specific applications,” Bassman says. This is the third international patent for an alloy family filed by Bassman, her HMC students and her UNSW colleagues. The most recent patent includes contributions from Stephanie Blankley ’20 (engineering), Doug Raigosa ’20 (engineering), Jackson Baker ’21 (engineering), Natalie Krieger ’21 (engineering), and Holly Frank ’20 (physics).

During the summers of 2018 and 2019 at UNSW, the engineering team determined that a small (5 atomic percent) addition of aluminum to iron-chromium-manganese alloys resulted in a ductile crystal structure instead of a brittle, unusable one called sigma.

Inspired by the experimental work, Frank initiated work on first-principles computation to explain how aluminum destabilizes the brittle crystal structure and creates a more ductile structure for her senior thesis.

Savanah Diaz ’22 (math/physics) and Anna Soper ’22 (math/physics) are continuing this work, and their (virtual) poster presentation at the 2021 Minerals, Metals & Materials Society annual meeting (TMS) was awarded Best Undergraduate Poster in the Structural Materials Division.

Three HMC alumni serve as mentors for the group’s computational work: Aurora Pribram-Jones ’09, Jonas Kaufman ’17 and Adam Shaw ’18. Kaitlyn Paulsen ’22 (engineering) and Alexandra Loumidis ’22 (engineering) also conducted thermodynamic modeling of this alloy family when they were not able to do planned experimental work in Australia in summer 2020 and presented their results at TMS. The alumni mentors also co-advised Emily Hwang ’20, who completed a chemistry

thesis that used computation to study a different family of novel alloys. Hwang won best undergraduate poster in the Structural Materials Division at the 2020 TMS conference.

Emma Cuddy ’21 (physics) and Julianne Lin ’20 (CS/math) also contributed to this work, which the team published this year in Physical Review Materials.

Hwang says that what interests her most about CCAs is the possibility for their practical applications. “Not only have they shown unusual and superior mechanical properties compared to conventional alloys (such as overcoming conventional limitations, like the strength-ductility tradeoff), but also the alloy design alone (including number of elements, combinations of elements, ratios of elements, etc.) allows for tailorable properties in these CCAs, which could result in a nearly limitless range of possible applications,” she says.

The project Hwang presented during TMS was motivated by the work of Kyla Scott ’18 and Bailey Meyer ’18, who experimentally found a set of quaternary CCAs that were unusually ductile. “Our work sought to find a computational indicator of ductility using density functional theory in order to more efficiently guide experimental work,” says Hwang, who received a 2020 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

Their computational metric, which involves no preliminary knowledge of these alloys, can be used to guide experimental work. “I like seeing how computation and experiment can play off each other, and I hope that our ductility metric can uncover new, ductile alloy systems,” says Hwang.

Since 2009, Bassman has brought students to the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the UNSW, and the productive collaboration will continue. This spring Bassman and Pribram-Jones, who is an assistant professor of chemistry at UC Merced, were awarded a National Science Foundation grant to continue the collaboration with UNSW and provide international research experience to undergraduates from both HMC and UC Merced. The group will use its experience with CCAs to develop new, commercially viable, lead-free brass alloys. The project builds on experience with copper-based CCAs that began with the work at UNSW of Aarthi Sridhar ’15 (engineering), Cody Crosby ’15 (engineering), Mo Zhao ’16 (engineering), and Shifrah AronDine ’16 (physics).

Bassman’s work has been supported by several prior National Science Foundation grants and the Jude and Eileen Laspa Fellowship in Applied Mechanics.

mputational Indicators of Ductility in Compositionally­ Complex B2Alloys

A Chemistry major Emily Hwang ’20 with her award-winning research.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

11

SCHOLARLY ACTIVITIES

Sandia Clinic Team Celebrates Publication of Research At the outset of the Sandia Clinic project in 2019, the team set a goal to publish their research in a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

By the end of the academic year, they were celebrating just that.

Cambridge University Press published the paper “Determining the dielectric constant of injection-molded polymer-matrix nanocomposites filled with barium titanate” (https://doi.org/10.1557/mrc.2020.69) prepared by members of the Sandia National Laboratories Clinic team. One of 56 Clinic projects sponsored during 2019–2020, their project concerns barium titanate (BTO), a ferroelectric material used in capacitors because of its high dielectric constant, which may be even higher in nanoparticle form.

A team of juniors and seniors were tasked with helping Sandia investigate the dielectric constant of BTO nanoparticles as a function of particle diameter by manufacturing composites of BTO embedded in low-density polyethylene.

Before the campus closed in mid-March, the Sandia team of Daniel Brito ’20, Guadalupe Quirarte ’20 , Joshua Morgan ’20 , Eleanor Rackoff ’20, Michael Fernandez ’20 and Dithi Ganjam ’21 had made great strides in its research analyzing the dielectric properties of barium titanate nanocomposites. “With recent modifications to our fabrication method of the nanocomposites, we were able to fabricate samples with significantly higher concentrations of the nanoparticle,” says Quirarte.

Rackoff says, “We were trying to develop a process to produce nanocomposites composed of BTO in order to extract the nanoparticle’s dielectric constant. But, in order to extract the dielectric constant, we needed to make nanocomposites that were at least 30% volume

loading (that is, 30% of the nanocomposite is BTO). Literally a day or two before the entire school left because of COVID, we achieved a 30% volume loaded sample. Our whole team was so excited.”

Quirarte says, “Developing a fabrication method that allows for such flexibility in the concentration levels is a necessary step towards more accurate examination of the nanocomposite’s dielectric properties.”

Through virtual collaboration, the team developed an efficient workflow and began building on previous results. “We used computational methods to perform insightful comparisons between experimental and simulated results,” Quirarte says. “This transition also helped us step back and develop areas of further work that can provide momentum to future iterations of the project.”

“Everybody had a great attitude about chipping in to work wherever needed,” says Rackoff.

“Our collaboration was definitely key to our success, because we all had a hand in the work.”

Team advisor and engineering professor Albert Dato says, “The Clinic Program provided the team with the ability to remotely access COMSOL software on the Clinic computers, which enabled them to work as a team and generate results. The team’s publication is a result of the data generated from the hands-on work before COVID-19 and the computational simulations that were done remotely after campus was shut down.”

Dato also notes that the Sandia team chose to continue to work on this project even after the seniors had graduated. “Sandia Clinic liaison Todd Monson is very impressed by the team and their hard work, resilience and dedication to their Clinic project,” he says.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Engineering Clinics with a Social Justice Focus A world-class solar panel factory has been designed by seniors Nate Smith, Giulia Castleberg, Christopher McElroy, Priscilla Chu and Jacquelyn Aguilera (Pitzer) guided by Kash Gokli, Oliver C. Field Professor of Manufacturing Practice and Engineering Economics and former Engineering Clinic director. For client CLGP, they produced an optimal plant layout, outlined detailed workstations and determined which specific machines, tools and equipment were needed.

The Fresno Metro Black Chamber of Commerce partnered with local organizations and the Transform Fresno Climate Communities Collaborative to clean the air in downtown, Chinatown and southwest Fresno. To help monitor the results, students Kaitlyn Loop ’19, Sidney Cozier ’20, Eliana Goehring ’19, Simone Griffith ’19 and Jakim Johnson ’19 were tasked with implementing low-cost sensors throughout the area to help visualize the fine particulate pollutant concentration. This factory is now in operation with a $2.1 million investment.

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SCHOLARLY ACTIVITIES

Mudd Team Competes at RoboSub During summer 2019, Harvey Mudd College fielded an entry in the RoboNation RoboSub competition, which has been contested annually for 21 years. The Harvey Mudd Robotics Team, MuddSub, fielded its Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV), Alfie, against AUVs from other teams representing schools from 14 countries and several U.S. states.

The MuddSub team of Seth Isaacson ’21, Daniel Yang ’22, Kyle Rong ’22, Omari Matthews ’21, Ginger Schmidt ’21 and Diana Lin ’22 designed, built and programmed Alfie, with the intention of entering the competition.

The team worked on the AUV during summer and were ready when the weeklong competition arrived. The competition was held at Transdec, a 38-foot deep, six-million gallon Naval testing pool in San Diego, where Navy divers assist the AUVs once they’re underwater.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

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SCHOLARLY ACTIVITIES

Mudd Team Competes at RoboSub (CONTINUED) Here are some highlights of the team’s week at RoboSub. Day 1

Day 6

For the first test time, the team’s main goal was to qualify for semifinals. They had to autonomously submerge and navigate through a gate about 15 meters away from the starting point, a challenging test of controls to stay on course.

They qualified during the first time slot and on their first try making them the first team to qualify for semifinals, aside from the roughly 20 teams who completed a more challenging prequalification task before the competition.

For the second run, their vision system was up and running. With some slight tuning of thresholds, they were able to identify obstacles through somewhat dirty water.

Their final test of the day was less successful with start switch and computer issues. Other teams stepped in, including the Carnegie Mellon team who lent them a backup part for the computer which allowed the HMC team to keep going. Team president Seth Isaacson ’21 said it was “just one of many examples of the incredible collaborative environment at RoboSub.”

The team qualified for a wildcard slot on day six, during which they managed to hit their buoy.

It wasn’t enough to qualify for finals, but it meant the robot accomplished all it reasonably could have, given the onboard hardware.

Isaacson said, “There were so many highlights over the week, not the least of which were the strong connections we made with other teams, especially Carnegie Mellon, which had a profound impact on our overall experience. In addition to the mutual assistance, friendship and fun that provides, we’re very excited to continue collaborating with them throughout the school year. We hope to work together to build a realistic simulator of the RoboSub pool (which will benefit both teams) and to collaborate on designs of the RF signal processing boards needed for the hydrophones task. Both are notoriously tricky things which we think we have a better chance of succeeding at if we work together.”

The team’s work continues. Follow the MuddSub team on Twitter @MuddSub, and visit the Harvey Mudd Robotics Team website at muddsub.org.

Days 2–4 The HMC team worked on hardware, tests and data collection to improve their vision algorithms. Day four was the first of two days of semifinals with one run per team each day. Alfie’s vision system successfully made it through the gate with a random starting angle from the dock (for extra points). For the buoy task, the AUV bumped each of the buoys, but the team misjudged the depth they needed to run at, missing over the top.

Day 5 During the second semifinal run, the gate task worked flawlessly (starting at a random angle, identifying the smaller side of the divided gate and then spinning for style points), but due to a sign error in the code, Alfie didn’t make it to the front of the buoys and had to be stopped from heading into a wall. In the 15-minute run, they were unable to find the source of this error.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

14

ALUMNI

Watson Fellow Marino ’20 to Work Out Around the World Workouts build more than muscle, they’re also helpful for managing stress, overcoming mental and physical barriers and, for Harvey Mudd College engineering major Victoria Marino ’20, being the best version of herself.

A Watson Fellowship will allow Marino to explore “Beyond the Playground: International Workouts.” As a 2020 Watson Fellow, she receives a $36,000 stipend to pursue “a year of unparalleled international discovery.” She plans to travel to Colombia, Chile, India, Egypt and China.

Marino will immerse herself in gyms around the world with a main focus on playground-style gyms. “I will spend my time working out with calisthenic workout groups across different cultures and communities to explore how working out provides a physical, mental and emotional release and challenge myself to gain a better, global and empathetic understanding of others.”

An engineering major and first-generation college student, Marino transferred to Harvey

Mudd from Palomar College, a community college in San Marcos, California. In addition to working out regularly at HMC, she became the athletics director for the Associated Students of Harvey Mudd College (ASHMC) and worked with Division of Student Affairs staff and fellow students to improve athletic resources and equipment. Her academic work includes participating in a 2018 health hackathon in New York, where she and fellow team members brainstormed, planned and built a prototype of an at-home EEG kit for infants. To prepare for medical school, she has done research at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (genetics lab), CornellRockefeller-Sloan Kettering (neurobiological lab) and in HMC engineering professor Elizabeth Orwin’s lab (bioengineering) as part of the Engman Fellowship Program.

Her Watson year precedes her entry to medical school at University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine in the Innovation of Medicine track and Medical Scientist

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Training Program. She sees the fellowship as preparation for participation in Doctors Without Borders. “I want to grow a more diverse and global perspective through travel and experiences around the world to be able to most effectively use my position to better treat and serve patients, abroad and within the United States.”

Marino says, “My goal is to immerse myself in new experiences through the commonality of the gym to gain emotional growth and a more global perspective to make me a better sister, daughter and future physician-scientist.”

Harvey Mudd College nominated its first students for the Watson fellowship in 1976 and has had one or more students selected for the honor nearly every year since. Lori Bassman, professor of engineering, is the Watson Fellowship program advisor.

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ALUMNI

The Technologist Goes to Washington With its large white dome, the United States Capitol Building is one of the most recognized buildings in the country. For over two centuries, it has housed the meeting chambers of the Senate and the House of Representatives and is where Congress sets national policy that influences our daily lives, from the Civil Rights Act and Title IX, to the recent CARES Act. As a senior technologist for Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, not only does Allison Hutchings ’07 get to walk these hallowed halls, she is literally writing more history herself as she advises congressional leaders on new technology policies that could one day impact our nation.

But as a kid in Seattle, Hutchings wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to be when she grew up, which is perhaps why she ended up at Harvey Mudd College. When she attended the school’s Admitted Student Program, she realized she was in the right place.

“This group of students I met was equally passionate about just learning as much as we could for four years,” Hutchings says.

And while Hutchings decided to major in engineering, participating in a research group that literally set houses on fire in order to study the stability of the burning structures, she says it was the liberal arts courses at Mudd that she has since found to be the most fundamentally important to her career.

After graduating, Hutchings went on to complete internships at Blue Origin, a private aerospace company, and NASA. She earned her master’s in aerospace engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, where she worked on parachute alternatives for Mars entry, descent and landing, and considered joining the new space industry before finding a position with aerospace testing business ATA Engineering in San Diego. The consulting firm works with a range of companies in different industries, and for Hutchings, who likes work variety, the position was a perfect fit.

“The company’s expertise is structural dynamics, which relates to many of the classes I took at Mudd,” Hutchings says.

“We examined things that vibrate a lot to make sure they don’t break. You can apply findings to launch vehicles and Mars rovers, and it also applies to roller coasters and animatronic figures.”

During nine years at ATA Engineering, Hutchings worked on a variety of projects, from advanced engineering software to the James Webb Space Telescope. She moved her way up to project manager, leading a team of analysts for a future Jet Propulsion Laboratory Earth monitoring satellite.

Ready for a change in 2018, she applied for the Congressional Innovation Fellowship, which places mid-career computer scientists,

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

engineers and other technologists as technology policy advisors to members of Congress. In January 2019, the program placed Hutchings in the office of Sen. Brian Schatz from Hawaii, where she supported him on emerging issues in technology, including artificial intelligence, facial recognition and transportation resiliency.

But before the yearlong fellowship was over, Hutchings’ work caught the attention of Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, a champion for technology, internet freedom and cybersecurity. He already had a technologist on staff—the only senator with one—and was in the process of interviewing applicants for a second position. One of his staffers asked Hutchings to apply and she joined the office that October.

In her role as a senior technologist, Hutchings keeps Wyden updated on any developments that may be relevant to his priorities, helps prepare him for meetings with business leaders and other constituents and works on long-term policy, including developing legislation.

During her time in Wyden’s office, Hutchings has led several initiatives surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, including the senator’s right-to-repair legislation, which would make it easier for hospitals to fix critical medical equipment. This equipment has been almost impossible to legally repair because manufacturers have a monopoly on tools and replacement parts, but Wyden’s legislation would protect constituents like hospitals from prosecution if they make a copy of parts, and would require manufacturers to provide access to information and tools to repair equipment. Hutchings also led Wyden’s initiative that called on congressional leadership for funding and rule changes that would allow state governments to access federal technology expertise, as their outdated computer systems are having difficulty keeping up with the millions of Americans now applying for unemployment benefits.

While none of the initiatives have passed, Hutchings says a lot of this work will help move the conversation forward and prepare for a new congress next year. With a presidential administration change in 2021, Hutchings believes more tech experts will be involved in policy conversations.

“We need people who have hands-on experience working with technology in positions of policy,” she says. “In particular, the Hill needs this, but it’s broadly needed in agencies and state and city governments.”

Who can fill those roles? Hutchings believes Harvey Mudd College students and alumni, in particular, are up to the task.

“Mudd creates engineers, scientists and mathematicians who have very broad experiences,” she says. “This is incredibly important in the field of tech policy, and it’s a fun way to apply your education to real-world problems.”

16

ALUMNI NEWS

1962

1972

Joseph S. Barrera: I have hung it up! Starting

John Sell: Leading the hardware architecture

in 1967 at HP Labs, I spent 13 years in various positions at HP and left in 1980 with four others and started Harris Microwave Semiconductor. I ran that company for 13 years and sold to Samsung and stayed on for three years. Left and started Ubiquity Communication and sold to Western Multiplex.

Joined Whisper Communication but had to close it down when third round funding collapsed. “Retired” by going back to technical work and consulted for Loral Space Systems up until last year. I have been a manager, VP general manager, president, COO and CEO and independent consultant, but I now raise sawdust at my ranch in Northern California and also have a home at The Sea Ranch on the coast. You can’t take the engineer out of my existence, so I enjoy designing and building even though I am now pushing 80 years old.

of the Microsoft Xbox for more than 14 years, including the new Xbox One Series X and S, but recently recruited to be the chief security architect for Intel’s Security Architecture and Engineering group.

1966 Pat Barrett: Since being repatriated by the U.S. State Department from a tour in Morocco when the world shut down in March 2020, we have been operating from home like pretty much everyone else. We stay busy with church, which has all been on Zoom. It has actually made it possible for friends in other parts of the US, as well as other countries, to join us for services and meetings. Zoom has been a benefit to other types of meetings as well (although I’d be happy to get back to in-person meetings) because there is no travel time involved, so more meetings are possible!

Some of our community activities also continue on Zoom or in somewhat artificial socially distanced physical arrangements. We get regular exercise walking the city because that is one of the outside activities that has continued to be allowed. Life is certainly not boring. All the best to everyone else.

1968 Terry Lee: I was as an Air Force officer in the

aircraft maintenance field and logistics for 31 years. Then I worked for a federal agency as an IT project manager for 11 years. Retiring for the second time, I then “daycared” my two grandkids for four years. Now I continue to invest in the stock market from home.

1981

1977 John Bradfute: I met my wife of 42 years shortly after graduation, in Idaho, and went on to get a MSChE from the University of Minnesota. After a career working for Sealed Air/Cryovac that included working in R&D developing new plastic packaging materials, primarily for food; profit and loss responsibility for a small business segment; process engineering responsibilities in North and South America; and global purchasing of raw materials, I retired at the end of June, 2019.

It was a delight to work in Europe (Italy) for three years, develop customers in the Pacific Rim, help to improve process performance (rates, yields, quality) in multiple sites in both Latin America and the U.S., and finally, negotiate contracts with suppliers around the world. We retired to Colorado and retirement has been great! I finally have the time to work in my woodshop and have enjoyed the various projects undertaken in the last two years.

1980 Bob Kossler: After 40 years working in Silicon

Valley, I retired in the fall of 2019. Upon retiring, I fulfilled a two-decade-long plan to enter into full-time ministry. I now work as an interim minister at my second church in San Mateo. Interim ministers serve as faith leaders between permanent pastors and priests. It is challenging because you only have a short time to impact the community, typically twelve to twenty-four months. Many ask me whether I miss the work as a technologist, and I reply that I miss my colleagues and the technical challenges. I still keep in touch with my geographically dispersed teams. However, this work in ministry allows me to give back skills, knowledge and insight learned over the course of my career. I can’t describe how rewarding and satisfying this work is for me.

I hope it benefits the community at large, especially during this critical time as we respond to the pandemic and its impact on families, friends and neighbors.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Ken Lehmer: After 38+ years with Northrop Grumman I retired in January 2021.

Am now focusing on multiple hobbies and assisting two great kids finish up their college educations. Also still flying my 1959 Beech Bonanza.

Kirk Norenberg: I have been fully retired since

the summer of 2018, so I think I’ll stay retired from here on out. My wife and I had expected to increase our international traveling as she edged closer to retirement herself, but COVID-19 had other ideas. We have recently ventured out for some domestic travel as we recover from our pandemic-induced cabin fever.

1985 Scott Hazelwood ’85/’86: After five years as a faculty member at UC Davis, I am entering my 14th year on faculty in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. My wife, Rachael; our two boys and I enjoy living on the California central coast.

Laveille Kao Voss:

Jeff ’s (’82) and my hobby during our pandemic year has been to learn how to manage a vineyard and make wine in the garage. Our family vineyard didn’t make a commercial wine for the 2020 vintage, and we took advantage of that. We recently had a blending session and we learned a lot from this process. We are looking forward to our 2021 vintage and improving from 2020. When not working (whatever that means) I am also trying to improve my golf game. One of these days, I will be able to take advantage of being empty nester.

17

ALUMNI NEWS

1989

1991

Steven Molin: Behind the scenes DevOps

Gene Mason: The last five years, I’ve been

I’m leading strategic alliances with storage software companies for Seagate’s enterprise systems group. After five years of software engineering for Hughes Aircraft after HMC, I received an MBA from UCLA and have been in the Bay Area where I have done business development, product management and marketing for a variety of companies in the data center hardware business, consumer electronics and the advertising industries.

work for a major FinTech company.

doing medical IV infusion product design with Becton Dickinson leading a project team. BD is a great company, and I like working somewhere that is addressing the coronavirus crisis.

1988

Tim Wendler: I’ve enjoyed hosting a number of virtual Class of ’89 mini-reunions! I have also rejoined the Board of the Arroyos and Foothills Conservancy, a land trust that works to preserve wildlife corridors. I was recently appointed to the Pasadena Unified School District Redistricting Committee and continue to serve on the Pasadena Planning Commission, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy Advisory Committee and as president of the Professional Environmental Management Association.

Ellen Heian: I’m interested in cottage-scale plastics recycling. If anyone has thoughts in that direction, I’d love to hear them.

1990

1994

Wendell Wenjen ‘85/’86:

Susan (Buckels) Doherty: I’ve been

chief marketing officer at Fort Mason Games, producing fun mobile games created for women by women.

During the pandemic, I’m taking time off to help family and take care of our new puppy, a collie pup who is a delightful addition to our family. For fellow Bates Aeronautics alums our there, I enjoyed reading Iris Critchell’s new biography The Privilege of Flight. What a great book about Iris’ interesting life!

G. Douglas Green: On a sabbatical. After 27 years and with the pandemic causing havoc, we took the opportunity to move to our house in Mexico. Getting tired of not traveling.

We have trips planned but pushed them out.

Greece next year.

Adam Shane ’88/89: I’m working as a security

consultant to LAX airport. Even during pandemic work from home orders, the work has continued at 100%. Our company is expanding the Los Angeles office and doing work in San Diego and elsewhere. Kathy and I celebrate our 25-year wedding anniversary this year. We have one child at Bowdoin College in Maine and another in high school in L.A. (a baseball player). I hope everyone is staying safe from the virus and fires and extreme weather. Looking forward to a more normal 2021.

Peter Temesvary: I’m the safety manager

of the Budapest International Airport.

Responsible for keeping employees, passengers and airplanes safe, and for ensuring compliance with EASA (European equivalent of FAA) regulations. Lots of coordination with airlines, ground handlers, air traffic control, regulators, etc. The best part is getting to hang out at the airport all day and watch planes—like all of us Bates-ers did when we were kids :-).

Janet Cooke Hansen: I’m still

based in Encinitas, California, where I enjoy year-round gardening and daily beach walks. For the past 20 years, I’ve been making custom lighted clothing, mostly for clients in the entertainment industry (Broadway shows, theme parks, concerts, sports mascots, etc). While this work has been slower during the pandemic, I’ve been spending more time on the non-wearable side of my business, building up my portfolio of LED art. See janethansen.com and enlighted. com for examples.

Jeff Gray: I retired in 2018 after a 25-year

career as a silicon design engineer at Intel.

My wife Holly Leer SCR ’91 and I live in Portland, Oregon, where we thoroughly enjoy the absence of work-related obligations.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

1992 Chris Raczkowski: Started in corporate America and expanded into global entrepreneurial activities across North America, Europe and Asia. I consistently leveraged my excellent HMC science and engineering education to facilitate my growth opportunities.

David Williams: Still living in Southern

California and moving into my 25th year as a game (systems) designer. Last year was the biggest release yet with The Outer Worlds getting terrific response including several game of the year awards.

1993

Greg Harr: Career transition! Matching my

paycheck with my passion, I joined a small consulting firm focusing on utility energy efficiency and electric vehicle programs— electrify everything! My unpaid side hustle solarforall.org is working on our 30th solar install on affordable housing in Oregon and southwest Washington this year. We’re upgrading our website. Check out our efforts to save the planet one family at a time!

Scott Hampton: Yowza. We’ve been keeping the manufacturing running despite the pandemic and panic buying and all the crazy with global supply chains. Back when I went to grad school to do (unglamorous) manufacturing, there were a lot of classes on “Just In Time,” which, thank you Mudd for skeptical thinking, seemed a bit sketch.

It’s good to have inventory. That’s been my life for eight months, so sorry I can’t talk about cool new packaging and filling systems or nifty ERP that links to user apps, etc.

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ALUMNI NEWS

1997 Tiffany Scurry (Leneis): I live in

Orange County, California, and work for Western Digital, a global data storage company. As SVP and chief compliance officer, I oversee ethics and compliance issues for our 70,000 employees worldwide.

My engineering training has served me well throughout my career, including the past 12 years at Western Digital. I’ve traveled all around the world and helped navigate and solve cutting-edge, technician-legal challenges.

HMC opened the door to more adventure than I could have predicted.

to protect sea turtle nests from inundation along the Texas coast. My wife, Noemi, and I just had our first child, Nolan, in June 2021.

2004 Lewis Kanofsky: After working for the last

10+ years as an operational weather forecaster, I moved to Kansas City in mid-March to start a new job as a research meteorologist at the Aviation Weather Center.

Mats Cooper: I’ve been doing research into

Sarah Jacobson: I’ve been an economist at Williams College since 2010 and an associate professor since 2016. I specialize in environmental and behavioral economics.

In recent years, I’ve also been working a lot on diversity, equity and inclusion in economics, in my department and more broadly. I recently won an NSF grant with some colleagues to study in-kind donations (donations of stuff rather than money). And I’m looking forward to a sabbatical in 2021–2022!

A Greg Pomrehn: Have been weathering a challenging season at Boeing since the tragic 737 crashes in 2018. I’ve recently reflected on the importance, not only of quality engineering work, but the ability to communicate that importance to others in effective ways. Technical excellence is meaningless when no one is listening.

Somehow survived 16 months of remote school and work with three kids (ages 2, 8 and 12) in the house. A roadtrip and distanced visit with Brian and Michelle Brenhaug ’04 was a pandemic highlight.

2006

2000 Robin Willingham-Hsueh: Over the past two

Be part of

shaping future technology

years, I’ve been learning about neurodiversity, emotional regulation and social thinking.

2002 Antonio Medrano:

I’m an assistant professor of computer science at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. In 2020, I was part of a group awarded an NSF grant for using artificial intelligence for environmental science research (AI2ES, www.ai2es.org). My lab is using deep learning

Completed my PhD in the history and sociology of technology and science at Georgia Tech. My dissertation analyzed engineers in the mid-20th century U.S. through a model of white masculinities. I am wrapping up a fouryear term on the board of the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES).

Nathaniel Schlossberg: For the last four years, I have been serving as vice president of engineering at Feedonomics, the leading data feed management and eCommerce middleware platform. We were recently acquired by BigCommerce (BIGC). Living happily in San Diego with my wife, Kerry; and two daughters, Aviva (5) and Galia (2).

1998 green technologies and trying to imagine what a post-carbon world looks like. I’m affiliated with a VC firm, which gives my research leverage to make real change in the world.

2007 Alice Clifton-Morekis (née Alice Clifton):

ASML!

'

_

-~

Aw'/at ASML.com/us

A Laura Angell: I have been working for ASML on the EUV Lithography equipment for the last five years. In October 2020, I was promoted to be the manager of the quality, reliability and root cause analysis team, supporting the San Diego site. ASML is the “relatively obscure Dutch company” that is helping global foundries keep pace with Moore’s Law. I am also featured in the latest hiring campaign and was highlighted in the ASML International Women’s Day video in 2021 and was featured in a commercial that aired during the Tokyo Olympics.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Badier Velji: In June, I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, to reunite with my wife, Kai, who is doing her PhD in rhetoric at UW-Madison.

I also changed careers from technical project management and am now a strategy consultant with Ernst & Young’s Parthenon group.

2008 Rosemary Dodson:

I have traveled across the sunny United States working as a test engineer for various companies.

After graduation, I spent five years in Hawaii at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard testing non-nuclear systems on Naval submarines. I met my future husband there while he was serving as a submarine officer and followed him to Los Angeles, where I was a production test engineer at SpaceX testing rocket components for manufacturing defects.

We moved to Orlando for my husband’s medical school, and I spent three years at L3Harris Corporation testing communication systems. Currently, I am a system integration and test engineer for Northrop Grumman in San Diego while my husband is doing his residency at Naval Medical Center San Diego.

Test engineering has allowed me the flexibility to change jobs because the principles and experience carry over to completely different systems and types of testing. I find testing engaging because it is active work and requires great communication and coordination.

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ALUMNI NEWS

2008

Claire O’Hanlon: I won a contest to name a tunnel-boring machine for the Los Angeles Metro purple line extension that runs by my workplace (the VA hospital in West L.A.) after Iris Cummings Critchell, who taught aviation and aeronautics at HMC for many years. https://thesource.metro.net/2020/10/21/ metro-announces-winners-of-purple-lineextension-section-3-tunnel-boring-machineart-and-naming-contest/

A Christopher Pong: I’ve been working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for over six years.

I’m currently working on the Mars 2020 mission, which launched on July 30, 2020, and arrived at Mars on Feb. 18, 2021. As a part of the cruise operations team, I work on the attitude control subsystem. The photos show the me in the cruise mission support area during one of our trajectory control maneuvers.

2012 Johnson Qu: I’ve come full circle back to aviation, but in a niche world. I started flying paramotors after graduating just for fun, but nowadays I’m often sitting in meetings discussing fitting avionics and pitot tubes on our wild west ultralight aircraft. Every time we quickly take a look at power spectral densities of data that was taken while I was the test pilot, I smile and think about how lucky I am to have all these worlds come together.

Moriah Gelder: I am a civil engineer at the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago (MWRD). I started this job in 2018, and before that I worked as an environmental engineer at an environmental consulting firm in Baltimore. My current role at MWRD is in the stormwater management department; specifically, I work on green infrastructure projects. Stormwater management and flooding is a big concern in the Chicago area, and our goal with green infrastructure is to install projects like permeable pavement and bioswales/rain gardens to be able to capture stormwater at the source and allow it to infiltrate into the ground or be soaked up by native plants. Without green infrastructure, stormwater will flow into combined sewers that can overflow and pollute Lake Michigan and nearby rivers during large rain events. Aside from work, I now live in Chicago with my partner (a fellow Mudd grad), our dog, and close to lots of family!

Ben Stanphill:

I’ve been working as an environmental engineer for Arcadis U.S. Inc., a global consulting firm based out of the Netherlands, for the last 13 years, primarily focused on removing toxic contaminants from soil and groundwater.

It’s been a great mix of chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering, with a bit of geology and chemistry thrown in for good measure.

I also married Shelley DeFord ’08 10 years ago, and we have 4- and 6-year-old sons.

2009 Tony Evans:

In the spring of 2018, I quit my job to travel the world with my partner, Masha.

We went to Southeast Asia for three months, followed by living out of a van for a year in New Zealand. We came back to the U.S. right at the start of the pandemic, but within a few months we’d settled down in Eugene, Oregon, and I’d started work at Arcimoto, an electric car company. We were fortunate to get family and friends together to celebrate our wedding!

Kristen M. Warren:

Since 2016, I’ve been a research engineer at a startup company called Embr Labs!

Our first product, the Embr Wave, generates sensations of warmth or cold on the inside of your wrist, stimulating your thermoreceptors with precise temperature profiles we call thermal waveforms.

Our device and patented thermal waveforms have been shown to help users with general temperature regulation problems sleep better and feel less stressed, and women going through menopause experience alliviation of hot flashes.

2013 Diana Chen: After graduating with a PhD (civil engineering) from Clemson University in 2016, I was hired as a founding faculty member at the University of San Diego to start a new general engineering program (integrated engineering).

My tenure application is due in spring 2022, after a year of serving as interim department chair for the program during the pandemic.

My husband (Nick Hill ’12) and I happily live in San Diego with our pandemic puppy, Misty.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Andrew Hilger: Completed M.S. in

electrical engineering at Stanford in 2018.

Did research with glaciology professor mapping basal conditions under Antaractic ice using synthetic aperture radar. Worked at Sandia National Labs on software that processes remote sensing data. Currently working on autonomous vehicle maps at Zoox.

2015 Brittany Borg:

After spending five years in engineering after graduating from Mudd, I recently made the leap to business school. I’m currently enrolled in an MBA and M.S. program at Northwestern University, building business and design acumen to transition my career toward marketing and product management. This summer, in between school years, I am interning at Intuitive and developing their robotics platforms.

Cody Crosby: After defending my PhD dissertation at the end of July, I have started as an assistant professor of applied physics at Southwestern University, a small liberal arts college in Texas! I will teach engineering and physics courses while founding a new research laboratory focused on the applications of 3D bioprinting.

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ALUMNI NEWS Josh Sanz: I worked for three years at MIT

Lincoln Laboratory on radar signal processing.

Now I’m in year three of an electrical engineering and computer science PhD at UC Berkeley, working on machine learning for wireless communications. In my spare time, I rock climb, run, ski and play Age of Empires with friends during social distancing.

2016 Ramy Elminyawi: Currently working at a

startup in San Diego that creates satellite payloads. Since we’re a startup, I wear many hats but my main two involve writing embedded software and integrating the individual electronics into a fully functional system.

Hamzah Khan: After graduating, I worked at Anki Robotics on behavioral AI in a robotic children’s toy. I then joined Uber ATG (the self-driving car division) to work on prediction and motion planning. Outside of work, I volunteered my time on developing an application that applies modern machine learning techniques to help Muslims learn and understand the Quran. I’ve gotten a lot done at work, but I’ve also been enjoying my time outside of work. I did some traveling, have enjoyed spending more time reading, and have developed new hobbies. I plan to start a PhD program this fall at UT Austin to explore further research in robotics.

(computer science) with a specialization in computational perception and robotics from Georgia Tech. I’m now working at Cruise, an autonomous car company in San Francisco, as a software engineer interfacing cameras with the vehicle’s autonomy stack.

Emily Jerger: I’ve spent the summer baking,

Kathryn Jones: After working for two years at

IMI, I’ve returned to school to pursue my PhD (civil engineering) at UCI, with a focus in concrete additive manufacturing and its potential uses for creating hyper-tall wind turbine towers.

Paige Rinnert: I work at SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, analyzing loads for the Dragon capsule that brings astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. When I’m not working, I enjoy volunteering with the organization Indivisible, reading books and watching TV (mostly sci-fi/fantasy!).

Lydia Scharff: Working at Aurora Flight Sciences in Virginia, with most of the last two years on the Boeing Passenger Air Vehicle.

2018 Lupe Carlos: I joined at a Network SoC

computer hardware design startup right after Mudd. Shortly after, we were acquired

by Intel, and I worked there until I started a GEM fellowship at Synopsys before pursuing my master’s in electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

El Segundo. I’ve also kept busy during the pandemic by building a climbing wall in my garage, and am enjoying my newly purchased power tools!

Zayra Lobo: In 2021 I got my master’s

2017 making pottery, playing Animal Crossing and camping around Chicago with my husband Paul Jerger ’15. Up until recently, I led R&D projects at MxD, a company that runs government-funded collaborations with manufacturers, universities and startups to enable the adoption of digital technology by manufacturers. I just transitioned to a new role as senior project manager at Fivestars.

A Kristin Lie: Still working on satellites in

A Ramita Kondepudi: Just finished my first

year of (remote) law school at the University of Washington! I’m loving law school, and all the reading, writing and critical thinking that comes with it. I’m thinking about pursuing a career in technology law, either technology transactions or intellectual property. I recently moved to Seattle. I spend most of my days trying new food places with fellow Mudd alums Anji Malpani, Shivam Malpani and Srinidhi Srinivasan. In July 2021, a number of our Mudd friends came to visit!

Marissa Lee: Over the past year, I’ve taken

my PhD qualification exams, conducted collaborative biomechanics research and attended a conference, all from home! I was fortunate to make road trips from the Bay to Oregon and Northern California to get a change of scenery and put a pause on my TV binges. Most excitingly, I got vaccinated!

As always, enjoying my interactions with Mudders in the Bay (shoutouts to Bailey Meyer ’18 and Joe Sinopoli ’17 for exciting and motivating me during this challenging year) and through the Alumni Association Board of Governors. Looking forward to when I can reconnect in person with many more!

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Bailey Meyer: Since graduation, I have been working at Fenwick & West as a patent agent. I have really enjoyed working in patent law, so I am currently applying to law school. In my free time, I often play tennis or pickleball with Marissa Lee ’18 and Ramita Kondepudi ’18 or spend time exploring the Bay Area with visiting Mudders (pre-COVID-19). In this photograph, Bella Lee ’18 and I are stopped in front of the Golden Gate Bridge on a sunny afternoon in March.

Sarah Silcox: I live and work in Salt Lake City at Dominion Energy as an integrity engineer, and spend my free time drawing and fishing. I catch carp the most, with trout and catfish when the wildlife resources department is generous enough to stock the local ponds. I began fishing in July 2020 when I realized I was an adult and could fulfill my wildest dreams.

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ALUMNI NEWS

2019

2020

a few. Now that work ends at 5 and there’s no problem sets, I have many creative personal projects to devote my time to. I also have thought about what kind of impact I want to have in my work and how to accomplish it.

It took some digging to find a career path that I could apply my skill set from Mudd to, and I’ve decided to go into science writing and communication, starting with a life science writing internship now and moving to a patent writing position in the spring.

Charles Dawson: I just finished my master’s

in (aeronautics and astronautics) at MIT (working on robot motion planning), and now on to the PhD! I’ll be working on safety for autonomous systems. Outside of grad school, I’ve been doing a lot of climbing, baking and gardening.

Flora Xia: I’ve been working on a PhD

(mechanical engineering) at Caltech. It’s been a great experience so far, and I’m really grateful to have met so many new wonderful people.

A Matthew Huerta: I’ve been living in Seattle since I graduated in 2019. I’ve been working for RS&H, an engineering consulting firm thats headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida.

I’ve been supporting their transportation infrastructure and emerging technologies team by providing hardware and testing support, and by doing internal research for new technology solutions concerning traffic signal controllers and signal priority, amongst other transit-based applications. Overall, I’ve really enjoyed this role, as its been super dynamic, and I’ve learned a whole lot along the way. I’ve also been really enjoying living in the Pacific Northwest. In the winter I went skiing frequently at both Crystal Mountain and Mt. Baker, and I just recently I visited Olympic National Park. I’ve also been a club athlete and volunteer with the local Club Northwest track club here in Seattle, which has allowed me to keep up my running since graduation.

A Danielle Michaud: This year has given me time to learn about myself in a way that I couldn’t have at Mudd. I’ve found many new things that I enjoy doing and am surprisingly good at! Cutting hair, woodworking (I made the couch and planters in the photo), painting, cooking and bothering my cats just to name

2021 Lucila Grinspan: I’ve been relaxing with the

family in Miami and Asheville, North Carolina.

I am also working on getting my Salesforce administrator certification.

MUDDCOMPASS This new platform provides direct access to a trusted network of diverse peers who can serve as mentors and supporters.

Whether joining as an information provider or information seeker (or both), engaging on MuddCompass allows you to connect directly with Mudders in-person and online, locally and globally.

David Kwan: After graduating, I worked

for Georg Fischer Signet (my Clinic sponsor) as a firmware engineer and then as a project manager. Since then, I have moved up to the Bay Area and am now working as an engineering program manager at Apple.

I’m excited to be around many of my Mudd friends in the Bay Area!

Jingnan Shi: Since graduation, I’ve been working toward my PhD (robotics) at MIT AeroAstro. My paper “Optimal Pose and Shape Estimation for Category-level 3D Object Perception” received the Best Paper Finalist award at Robotics: Science and Systems Conference this year. Going forward, I will be working on robust robotic perception systems and the intersection between theory and practical systems.

HARVEY MUDD COLLEGE | ENGINEERING HIGHLIGHTS 2020–2021

Once you join the community, make sure to download our new mobile app.

Visit muddcompass.hmc.edu on your mobile device browser and log in (Use Safari on your iOS device).

Follow the prompts to “Add to Home Screen”

JOIN AT MUDDCOMPASS.HMC.EDU

MuddCompass now features alumni-owned businesses! Add your business listing.

Log in to MuddCompass, select the Resources tab in the main menu, and then choose Business Directory in the sub-menu.

Select the blue Create a Resource button and enter your business information into the form, then select the blue Submit button at the bottom of the page.

Questions? Email muddcompass@hmc.edu.

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