Engineering Highlights 2018, Harvey Mudd College

ENG NEERING Highlights 2018

News Briefs Top Engineering College: Harvey Mudd College was ranked No. 1 among the nation’s undergraduate engineering programs in U.S. News & World Report’s Best Colleges 2018, sharing the top spot for engineering with Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. The College has tied for first place seven times over the past decade.

New Engineering Faculty: Leah Mendelson, the newest member of the department, studies biological and bioinspired fluid dynamics and imaging techniques for fluid flow measurement; her dissertation focused on how archer fish propel themselves from water to feed.

ICEAA Honors Remer: The International Cost Estimating and Analysis Association presented Donald Remer, professor of engineering economics emeritus, with the association’s Educator of the Year award for his outstanding contributions to educating cost professionals.

Liz Orwin ’95, Missy Spangler ’19 and Megan Jimenez ’14

Update from the Department Chair Hello and welcome to the first Department of Engineering newsletter in over a decade. We thought it was time we reconnected with our alumni and showed you all of the exciting things that have been happening here. Harvey Mudd College’s engineering department has been engaged in innovation across the program. Our challenge is to offer a relevant, rigorous and innovative curriculum, to respond to changing needs in the engineering field and to maintain and promote our identity as a general engineering program. And, our faculty are up for that challenge!

In this newsletter, you will see that the general engineering approach and program is strong and as relevant as ever in that we are producing graduates capable of big-picture systems thinking who are capable of solving complex interdisciplinary problems. Clinic continues to be a flagship program, and undergraduate research is now a significant activity in this department.

We are currently at near-gender parity in our department, and we mirror the overall Harvey Mudd population. The past 10 years have brought an explosion of hands-on, project-based learning activities and pedagogy innovations beyond Clinic and research to support our excellent theoretical education. In particular, we have redesigned the core “baby stems” course to integrate theory and practice—you’ll get to read more about that in this newsletter! We’ve also expanded our design curriculum into design, manufacturing and management, with new courses that strengthen students’ abilities to work on teams, manage projects and budgets, design and prototype innovative ideas, and more. To support these activities, we’ve had significant upgrades to spaces and facilities. If you haven’t been to campus in a while, it’s time to come and visit!

I’m looking forward to harnessing the enormous creative energy of the remarkable faculty we have here in engineering to continue to make our mark in engineering education and to continue to produce generalists who can solve the really hard problems that face society.

Liz Orwin ’95 Chair, Department of Engineering

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Dance and Healing: Lam Huynh ’18 is using his Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to study the healing properties of dance. His project, “Vietnamese Diaspora: Counterspace Through Dance,” focuses on the culture of Vietnam War refugees’ descendants.

Lape Promoted: Nancy Lape, associate professor of engineering and director of the Patton and Clare Lewis Fellowship in Engineering Professional Practice, was promoted to the rank of full professor. She also received HMC’s 2018 Outstanding Faculty Member award and was selected for the William R. Kenan, Jr. Visiting Professorship for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton University, where she’s spending the 2018–2019 academic year. (continued on page 12)

A New “Baby Stems”

Buy a Robot & Inspire a Future Engineer

Professor Matthew Spencer with students

In an effort to boost student interest, excitement, learning and retention of the College’s general systems engineering material, the Department of Engineering undertook a major redesign of its introductory, lecturebased core course, E59.

The new course, E79, includes the same concepts as the former course, with the same rigor, but embeds the theory within an exciting, real-world context—underwater robotics, an area rich with cutting-edge, interdisciplinary applications. Students immediately use the theory they learn in class to build their own robots, run tests in a water tank, model and simulate tasks and then launch their robots in a nearby lake to gather and analyze data.

“Our goal was to create an intro course that would teach the same material but would also expose students to the excitement and rigor

engineering,” says Nancy Lape, professor of engineering, and part of the team that redesigned the course. Others involved were engineering professors Lori Bassman, Christopher Clark, Albert Dato, Angela Lee, Matthew Spencer and Erik Spjut and Director of Institutional Research and Effectiveness Laura Palucki Blake.

The team wanted to use the robot as a platform for studying engineering systems to give students an idea of what a practicing engineer does.

Redesigning introductory courses of technical subjects, such as engineering, computer science and chemistry to make the subject matter interesting and accessible for everyone, has resulted in near gender parity at Harvey Mudd in these fields where women have historically been underrepresented.

Data regarding student performance and learning outcomes in the redesigned course reveal that there has been a significant increase in learning among all students and that the gender gap previously observed has disappeared. Surveys and content knowledge tests in both the old and new courses, taught by the same instructors, showed that student enjoyment of the course—especially by women—went way up, as did enthusiasm for the material and overall learning.

“We wanted to make the course very handson and exciting,” Lape says. “For example, students used to learn about the concept of frequency response through theoretical graphs; now the students can actually take (continued on next page)

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Want to invest in the future of Harvey Mudd College and help awaken a student’s mind to the power of engineering? Here’s your opportunity! The generosity of several alumni and friends of the Department of Engineering played a huge role in funding the yearlong faculty work that resulted in the successful E79 course update. As we prepare to support this course long term and create the flexibility to undertake additional course redesigns, we have started an endowed engineering curriculum innovation fund, which currently stands at $115,000. We would like to invite our engineering alumni, parents and others to help us increase the endowment to $1 million, which will generate a perpetual stream of income to support the department’s efforts.

As a creative and fun way for donors to connect with the students in this course, we are offering the opportunity to “Buy a Robot” with a gift of $5,000. When added to the overall endowment, each gift will spin off enough funding each year to purchase supplies for a student to build one robot (approximately 110 robots—one per pair of student—are needed every fall semester).

In recognition of all who support this project, we will add named “robots” to a graphical display water tank viewable online and on a monitor in the engineering department.

To give via credit card, visit hmc.edu/ give and specify “Buy a Robot” in the “If ‘Other,’ Please Specify” box after entering the amount of your gift. In the “Comments” box, please specify the name of your robot (limit of nine characters). You can also call 1.844.GIVE.HMC (844.448.3462). If you prefer to contribute by mail, you can make a check out to Harvey Mudd College and specify “Buy a Robot” in the memo field; the Office of Stewardship and Events will then contact you regarding the robot’s name.

Big-Picture Science

Sepsis kills more Americans than breast cancer, prostate cancer and AIDS combined and costs the U.S. healthcare system more than $20 billion each year. Ajay Shah ’06, CEO of San Francisco medical device startup CytoVale, hopes that his company’s technology might help curtail this deadly condition.

According to Shah, “there’s no single test to help physicians triage patients with potential sepsis,” a condition caused by a dysregulated immune response to infection.

“But it’s well accepted that the number one way to help septic patients is early recognition, because the mortality rate increases by hour of delayed diagnosis,” he says.

CytoVale’s innovative tech provides early sepsis detection by combining microfluidics, ultra-high-speed imaging, and computer vision and machine learning. Cells from a blood sample pass one-byone through a microfluidic channel and are “squeezed.” High speed videography captures images of each cell as it is deformed.

Finally, “we take all that video data and analyze it with computer vision algorithms to extract characteristics of each cell,” in order to detect cellular properties that indicate sepsis. Classical approaches to measure cell mechanics analyze up to one cell per second; CytoVale’s can process thousands, Shah says.

“That then gives us the ability to analyze over 50,000 cells per patient sample and provide the clinician with an integrated picture of what’s happening in that underlying immune biology—all within five minutes,” Shah explains.

Shah got his first taste of this “big picture view of science” as an undergraduate.

“My time at Harvey Mudd and the research work I did really catalyzed my personal and professional growth,” he says. “One of the great things is that undergrads rule the place—we got direct exposure to the faculty and direct engagement with those who are sponsoring research.”

It also prepared him for graduate school at the Harvard/MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.

“I already came in with the confidence that I could do real science,” Shah says. “I was taught that engineers are here to solve problems and not to live in any particular lane.”

This ethos also applies to CytoVale.

“We don’t have a culture that electrical engineers do electrical work and mechanical engineers do mechanical work. Everybody gets together to solve a problem,” he says.

Shah works with several Mudders, including Senior Research Engineer Annie Jensen ’12, who was on a Clinic team that Shah sponsored.

“Annie was our first employee at CytoVale and has been with the company for over four years. Now, she leads our entire engineering group,” he says. Another undergraduate connection is Chris Dahlberg ’06, senior integration engineer; he and Shah have been friends since they met as first years 12 years ago.

“We probably have over a decade of Mudd graduates working here!” says Shah.

For Cytovale, the next step is regulated product development followed by Federal Drug Administration approval. Shah hopes to see their technology in emergency rooms by late 2020, “so that we can really impact clinical care.”

(A New “Baby Stems”, continued from previous page)

their robot, put it in a pool, and watch and measure its oscillation at different frequencies.”

The introductory engineering class meets three times a week. Students start off each week by watching videos created by the instructors before coming to the first tutorial session. In the tutorial, students are quizzed on the material, both as an individual and then as a team. Next, each team works on a short problem that provides a real-world context for the new content. During the second weekly tutorial, students work closely with instructors on solving a more in-depth problem that involves the content just learned.

“We really worked hard to devise problems that show how the material applies to a wide range of disciplines and many different contexts,” says Clark, who runs the College’s Lab for Autonomous and Intelligent Robotics (LAIR).

A student tests a robot and collects data

On the third day, students participate in a two-and-a-half-hour practicum where they focus on an aspect of the construction or deployment of their underwater robot. For

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example, in one practicum, students place the robot in a water tank with a buoyancy “spring” attached and input different frequencies into the thruster to measure output.

Topics and practicums build on each other to end in a culminating experience. The final practicum requires students to bring their completed robot to the lake just north of the HMC campus (pHake Lake at the Bernard Field Station), deploy the robot at a desired GPS location, have it autonomously track a desired depth, and collect temperature measurements at that depth.

“For me, the highlight of teaching the course was watching students during their final robot deployments at our nearby lake,” Clark says.

“They were really engaged, excited or at least curious to see if the robot they took all semester building would function properly in a real setting.”

Prof. Mary Cardenas: Try, Try Again. Repeat.

Knowing how to change a tire isn’t rocket science. But engineering professor Mary Cardenas, a former rocket scientist herself, believes that knowing how to perform basic, hands-on tasks like fixing a flat or soldering a fuse wire are fundamental skills all scientists should have.

“The way the world works has changed,” she says. “We’re getting a lot of students who don’t have a lot of hands-on skills. We have fewer woodworkers. We don’t see welders anymore. The students’ world is different, so they’re learning different skills.”

For this reason, Cardenas, the Anthony W. LaFetra Family Chair in Environmental Engineering, has developed E49: Build Cool Things, a first-year elective course that teaches students hands-on skills necessary for work in STEM fields. Students gain experience and intuition of how things work by putting things together and taking things apart, and they attain skills with manual fabrication and building. The course is designed for the student with little to no hands-on skills or previous building experience. “As practicing engineers, we have to make things and know how to fix them if they break. You can’t 3-D print everything,” she says.

he way the world works has “ Tchanged.

We’re getting a lot of students who don’t have a lot of hands-on skills. We have fewer woodworkers. We don’t see welders anymore. The students’ world is different, so they’re learning different skills.

Cardenas chooses assignments that look simple but are not necessarily easy to complete— a small hovercraft, audio equipment (amplifiers and speakers) and myriad electronic and mechanical devices— with the idea that students will have time to

Adam Grobman ’21 (pictured) and Lena Pawlek built and tested a speaker crossover circuit.

Natasha Crepeau ’21 demonstrates her five-watt-per-channel stereo amplifier.

do the project more than once, improving their skills each time. “I want to give them something they find interesting and I want them to have to practice a skill,” she says.

“Maybe the first time doesn’t work very well, and the second time you get better at it, and the third time you get pretty good. No matter what your talents are, it’s hard for everyone at the beginning.”

A former jet propulsion engineer, Cardenas built rocket engines for the Space Shuttle before becoming a professor at Harvey Mudd in 1995. She says she loves teaching and is especially grateful to be able to share her experience with her students in such an intimate setting. “Everyone struggles the first time through, and I get to say, that’s exactly what’s supposed to happen, let’s try again,” she says. (continued on next page)

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Lena Pawlek ’21 built an infinity mirror.

(Professor Mary Cardenas, continued from previous page)

Cardenas encourages students to look online for tutorials and ideas and notes that learning how to teach oneself new things is part of the process. “I didn’t have to study a lot in high school, so when I got to college, I actually had to teach myself how to teach myself. For me to get good and fast enough to take tests, I had to practice. You can apply the same idea of practice that you apply to learning a musical instrument or a sport to your academics.”

The audio equipment project was a favorite of Adam Grobman ’21, who took the class in fall of 2017. “We got to make something large scale and learn how to use even more machines. I still have the speakers I built sitting on my desk, and it’s cool to know that I built something like that. I definitely never imagined I’d build my own set of speakers in my life.”

want to give them something they find “ Iinteresting and I want them to have to practice a skill. Maybe the first time doesn’t work very well, and the second time you get better at it, and the third time you get pretty good. No matter what your talents are, it’s hard for everyone at the beginning.

Grobman fit the description of having little to no previous experience with hands-on building. “The extent to which I’d built stuff by hand before the class was an art project in, like, first grade, where we used hot glue and precut wooden blocks and then a physics project in eighth grade, neither of which used any of the machinery like the table saw or bandsaws that we learned how to use in the class.”

Natasha Crepeau ’21 did have some experience prior to taking E49, but she learned new skills. “I took woodshop in my junior year of high school, so I was familiar with using saws, routers and drill presses. I did not have any experience with soldering and circuitry, which was a large part of the class. I actually taught an introduction to electronics and soldering workshop at the summer program I worked at this summer.

Without E49, I wouldn’t have been able to teach that.”

Crepeau also learned the larger lesson Cardenas is teaching about perseverance. “I was anxious about not getting things on the first try,” Crepau says. “One thing that helped relieve my anxiety was how we were evaluated. Prof. Cardenas graded us on the quality of our lab reports and documentation and our effort, not how successful we were with creating a final product. The atmosphere within the classroom was also very calming and ‘low stakes,’ which also helped with anxiety.”

Grobman has a similar take. “I’m not gonna lie, sometimes getting things right was a bit stressful,” he says. “In the final project, I was making speakers, and one of the cases I built just didn’t work, so I made a new one. Other teams finished faster. Nevertheless, the class was always really focused on just trying and trying, and so it wasn’t super high pressure. It truly was just about trying your best and making progress.”

“I hope all the students can apply this philosophy to their other courses and even to life,” Cardenas says. “If you can fail and try again and again, I won’t worry about you.”

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Nat Efrat-Henrici ’21 built a skateboard out of seven sheets of wood veneer. He learned how to flatten veneer; glue veneer together (and fix de-lamination issues); cut out the skateboard shape and drill holes for the trucks (wheels).

Oliver Baldwin ’21 salvaged speaker drivers from a used pair of headphones, modified them to allow LEDS to light up in response to music, and fabricated wooden and leather ear cups for his project, “Wooden LED Headphones: Making Music Light Up the World.”

FACULTY RESEARCH

Better Than Diamonds

When Albert Dato devised a method of turning alcohol into graphene, he was thoroughly disappointed. The black powder his experiments rendered was not at all what he was hoping for.

“Originally, I was throwing vodka into a machine because I was trying to grow diamonds,” says Dato, Iris and Howard Critchell Assistant Professor of Engineering.

“When my experiments failed, I was turning vodka into graphite.”

The machine he used for this experiment, a microwave plasma reactor, uses ionized gas to break apart the ethanol in vodka, a process he originally hoped would produce diamond, one of the two stable forms of carbon. Instead he produced single layers of graphite, the other stable form of carbon, aka pencil lead, aka not as exciting as diamonds. But it turns out that graphene, which is a single layer of graphite, is perhaps an even better result than diamonds, for reasons that are scientific, environmental and economic.

Graphene is the strongest material ever measured. It also conducts heat and electricity well. It’s a material that could potentially be used in any number of applications. And, up to the point of Dato’s discovery, graphene was incredibly difficult to produce as it had to first be mined as graphite, then separated from impurities, then broken down into a single layer.

“At the time of my first experiments, I was disappointed because it’s really tough to grow diamonds when you’re forming graphitic materials. But once I realized what I had, I put the diamond research aside,” Dato says.

“I realized we can make graphene easier than with breaking down graphite, and that, because of its properties, we could make something useful with it to address problems in the world.”

Mining Confidence Having made his own big discovery after many failed experiments, Dato encourages his students to persevere. “The way I run my lab is to give students a goal and then let them figure it out,” he says. “That’s how I learned, and it helped me grow as a scientist. I love to teach, and I love the process of scientific discovery. It’s even better when your student experiences it.”

Students in Dato’s energy and nanomaterials lab at Harvey Mudd College agree. Chance Bisquera ’19 says he was

he way I run my lab is to give “ Tstudents a goal and then let them figure it out. That’s how I learned, and it helped me grow as a scientist. I love to teach, and I love the process of scientific discovery. It’s even better when your student experiences it.

having a tough time academically when the opportunity to participate in a materials engineering research project in Dato’s lab became available. “That was a turning point for me as a struggling Mudder,” he says. “I was looking for an extracurricular activity that I enjoyed and that allowed me to apply what I learned in the classroom to a project that can have an impact on society. My time spent thus

far in lab has provided me with a renewed sense of confidence, helped me improve as a critical thinker and scientific explorer and has taught me some of the basic research skills that I will need should I choose to attend graduate school in the near future.”

“I wouldn’t trade one HMC student for three grad students,” Dato says. “They’re really passionate about what they do. Students in the Dato Lab are excited about taking ownership of their projects.”

Graphene Is a Guy’s Best Friend “I remind myself of ‘Bubba’ from the movie Forrest Gump when I talk about the potential applications for graphene,” Dato says, referring to the character Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue, who spent his time thinking and talking about all the ways one can cook shrimp. “Car parts, airplane parts …” Dato says, laughing.

Indeed, there are a lot of ways graphene could be used in practical applications.

However, using his current technique, Dato is only able to produce tens of milligrams of graphene per hour.

“The barrier to all the applications is being able to produce a lot of high quality graphene,” Dato says. “It’s still cheaper to mine graphite for use in pencils. But the mined graphite is full of other things. The stuff we make in our lab is pure carbon. So that’s the prime advantage; it’s much higher-quality graphene.

The goal is to improve the production to make kilograms versus milligrams.”

After students modeled what happens inside the microwave plasma reactor, where

Albert Dato and Austin Shin ’18 analyze data obtained from an autonomous flying drone for the AT&T Clinic Project.

The team developed a drone-based system to collect data on over-the-air digital television signals.

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Nicole Subler ’16 and Albert Dato inspect nanocomposite specimens fabricated by Subler, who also determined the strength, stiffness and ductility of these specimens in the HMC Materials Testing Lab.

ionized gas breaks apart ethanol to produce graphene, the next step was to build a new plasma box that’s cheaper and smaller than existing models, but they had to figure out how. Results came after a lot of trial and error.

“So many designs, so much frustration and failure,” Dato says, adding that as it’s all part of the process. “I failed so many times. Me figuring out how to make graphene out of ethanol was a failure because I failed to grow diamonds. You fail, you learn, you move on.”

After several semesters of work by several students, a late-night text from one of them delivered good news. “Harry Fetsch ’20 sent me a video of the ignited plasma in a chamber,” Dato says. “He figured it out!”

Multifaceted Potential In thinking about the many uses for graphene, Dato has focused on one area of research on its potential as part of composite materials that are stronger but more lightweight than existing products—think car or aircraft panels that can withstand more impact to improve safety and also weigh less, to improve fuel economy.

To develop a composite, Dato and students are experimenting with mixing graphene and epoxy. “We think it will outperform any other composite that’s been published so far,” Dato says.

When Nicole Subler ’17 was at Harvey Mudd (she’s now an engineer at Bolt Threads), she spent 10 weeks in the lab developing an epoxy/graphene composite specimen and then creating molds to reproduce it. Jacob Knego ’18 took the project from there, working

to perfect the process of making the specimens. The results of their tests have indeed shown that graphene improves the strength, stiffness and ductility of the epoxy.

This year, Kevin Nakahara ’20 and Nathan Sunbury ’21 continue the next phase of the research, which is to determine why the graphene has the effect it does on the epoxy structure.

“The most interesting part of the research is seeing how such a simple step in adding nanofillers can have such a profound effect on the performance of the specimens,” Nakahara says. “Not only can you see the enhancement in the data but you get a sense of this during the testing process, which in itself is exciting due to the suspense created when we are breaking the specimens.”

Bisquera says working in the Dato Lab is challenging, academically fulfilling and fun.

He’s also inspired to think about his future as an engineer. “I can see my research potentially having an impact on society,” he says. “As an engineer who greatly enjoys prototyping, design and building, I have always been fascinated by 3-D printers for their ability to transform a digital design into a physical reality. Ultimately, I can see the work done in this project as having an impact on the quality and durability of 3-D printed designs.”

For Dato, working at Harvey Mudd is fundamentally about his love of teaching, his passion for graphene research and his desire to, along with his students, tackle engineering’s grand challenges. By combining all three ideas, he hopes to form a collaboration between his students and an industry partner to learn if they can make current graphene composite applications better. “If we make cars and aircraft lighter, you have better fuel efficiency, less emission— the goal in the Dato Lab is always to make something to help the environment,” he says.

And the diamonds? “Diamonds can wait,” Dato says. “Let’s focus on this material that can make the world a better place.”

e figuring out how to make “ Mgraphene out of ethanol was a failure because I failed to grow diamonds. You fail, you learn, you grow.

Students in the Dato Lab are also investigating how graphene might be used as a medium for 3-D printing. “In particular, we are trying to determine if the inclusion of a certain carbon nanoparticle improves any of the material properties (ultimate tensile strength, ductility, elastic modulus, strain at break, toughness) of specimens printed from standard 3-D printing resin,” says Bisquera, who is beginning his second semester on the project.

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Pichaya Lertvilai ’16 and Albert Dato test mass flow controllers used for the synthesis of graphene. Lertvilai designed a system for optimizing process conditions in a plasma reactor to increase graphene production.

The 2017 City of Hope Engineering Clinic team, advised by Professor Qimin Yang, designed modern lighting and camera systems that provide improved visibility for surgeons.

ENGINEERING CLINIC

Investigating Cancer Therapies One of the main reasons engineering major Ragini Kothari ’18 wanted to attend Harvey Mudd was to engage with science in a way that would have a positive impact on society—the College’s mission statement resonated with her. A similar desire drew her to a City of Hopesponsored Clinic project, where she could put her electrical engineering and software skills to use researching cancer therapies.

“I was impressed and inspired by the work they were doing,” Kothari says, referring to the team working on the project “A Raman Spectrometer for in-vivo, Real-Time Detection of Cancer.” She heard their spring 2017 presentation during Projects Day, and it dovetailed nicely with her burgeoning interest in the biomedical field. She wanted to get more experience.

Kothari spent the academic year 2017–2018 working at City of Hope—a biomedical research center and hospital—on a Clinic team investigating Raman spectroscopy and laser ablation as a therapy for cancer. She was team leader in spring 2018.

The team’s work has centered on the use of Raman spectroscopy as a surgical tool to detect cancer in-vivo or in a living organism, a multi-disciplinary project including elements of physics, medicine and engineering. Raman spectroscopy is inelastic scattering of light which produces a unique biochemical fingerprint. The team investigated the application of this technology in surgery. They focused on reducing the collection time for Raman spectra of breast tissue to three seconds or less in order to study its real-time capabilities for detecting cancer. This spectral database is then analyzed using machine learning algorithms to display the probability of breast cancer.

The team envisions a medical device for use in detecting cancer during lumpectomies with the aim of being able to evaluate the margins where a tumor had been excised to see if any tumor was left behind. This includes developing algorithms to analyze the spectra, investigating methods to reduce the collection time and modeling laser ablation of small volume tumors.

“The doctors and professors we worked with were super-visionaries, helping us dilute ideas down to what was achievable in the time frame we had,” Kothari says. “They helped us through every step of the way: understanding the problem at hand, conducting literature review, designing experiments, analyzing data and presenting our findings. It was a great experience working with doctors and surgeons at City of Hope and learning how our skills and experiences could translate into the medical field.”

Now a Harvey Mudd alumna and an employee at City of Hope, Kothari will supervise a new group of students during the Clinic project’s third and final year. Using spectroscopy in clinical diagnostics is relatively new territory, but the team is hopeful they’ll come up with a physical prototype.

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From the Classroom to the Factory Floor During summer 2018, Riggs Fellows Charles Dawson ’19, Ryan Haughton ’19 and Lydia Sylla ’19 exchanged Professor Kash Gokli’s manufacturing engineering classroom for the factory floor. Putting theory into practice, the engineering majors brought lean manufacturing principles to two Los Angeles-area companies: Mission Rubber, a manufacturer of rubber products; and Laguna Clay, a producer of clays, glazes and ceramics supplies.

“Sometimes, in academia, things can get very abstract, even if there is a lab component of a class,” Haughton says. “Seeing the application of the principles we were taught in the classroom was really striking.”

Lean principles aim to reduce inefficiencies that cost a business time and money. One such issue at Laguna Clay: Employees manufacturing pottery wheels were making them in large batch sizes instead of focusing on one at a time.

“Manufacturing can defy your intuition, because many things that you would think reduce costs actually introduce waste and make the system less efficient,” says Haughton. “For example, you might think that by manufacturing in large batch sizes, your cost per unit goes down, and you become more efficient. However, a lot of subtle costs are introduced, such as managing and organizing all the work in process inventory.

I experienced firsthand the power that single piece flow in small cells has on a company’s profitability.”

Sylla, whose previous hands-on experience includes a stint at Northeastern University’s Marine Science Center, adds: “We spent a lot of time identifying and resolving inefficiencies, and I learned a lot about what makes a manufacturing process effective.”

The result was a complete redesign of Laguna’s pottery wheel assembly line.

Replacing the original with a new, streamlined version “allowed them to increase their throughput by 156 percent while decreasing work-in-process inventory levels by 86 percent,” Dawson explains. Now, the division exceeds demand, leaving time to manufacture other products and boost the company’s profits.

At Mission Rubber, the trio implemented a new factory floor plan that created a more efficient material flow and increased workplace safety.

Riggs Fellows Charles Dawson ’19, Lydia Sylla ’19 and Ryan Haughton ’19, advised by Professor Kash Gokli, put theory into practice for two local companies.

“We delivered a proposal for a renovation that we estimated would save approximately $80,000 annually, given a $110,000 initial investment—a very attractive rate of return,” says Dawson, who is also working on a structural dynamics project with engineering professor Philip Cha. According to Sylla, “the redesign also made it possible to fit new machines into the factory and opened up space for future growth.”

The switch from classroom to boardroom is a hallmark of HMC’s engineering curriculum, which encompasses applied research, systems design and professional practice. By spending time at businesses like Laguna Clay and Mission Rubber, students learn more about the ins and outs of a corporate environment.

Sylla, for example, says she “learned a great deal about communication within companies and how to effect positive change within different company cultures,” while Haughton

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enjoyed his time at Laguna Clay so much that he stayed on after the project ended.

Dawson found the opportunity to add a new dimension to his studies particularly beneficial.

“From our classwork, we had already learned a lot of the technical skills we needed for our project. But over the summer, I felt that I had a great opportunity to learn how to work with people to effect meaningful changes.”

For all three, who hope to bring their engineering skills to fields ranging from digital systems to renewable energy and aerospace engineering, their summer work was a step in the right direction.

“It put the value of my education in perspective,” Haughton concludes, “because I was able to see how the things I was learning translated into solving problems in the real world.”

Learning Spaces Over the last several years, with the help of generous donors, foundations and friends, the engineering department has made significant upgrades to spaces and facilities.

S tudent head shop proctors Isabel Martos-Repath ’18 and Zara Lobo ’18 review mill operations and safety features with College machinist Paul Stovall and Professor Kash Gokli. This team meets weekly to set shop safety standards and ensure efficient operation of the spaces.

T he Clinic Program is now housed in one space. Maker spaces equipped with tools and a large area for building are surrounded by glass-walled rooms for each team.

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T he recently renovated digital lab supports microprocessor design as well as computer engineering courses.

Electronics lab spaces have been renovated with new lighting, paint, benches and electronics equipment to support first-year electives in autonomous vehicles and E79 Introduction to Systems Engineering (all students), as well as electrical engineering and electronics courses. The lab has more stations to accommodate the popular elective and will soon upgrade to modern scopes.

The recent shop renovation created a more open design and enhanced layout to optimize safety and sightlines in the space.

E4 students use the mill to make a hammer head.

The recent shop renovation resulted in a dedicated space for rapid prototyping where there are several different 3-D printers and a laser cutter.

ew water tank testing facility supports Introduction to Systems Engineering (E79) and N Experimental Engineering Lab (E80), as well as Clinic and research activities. Pictured are members of the 2017–2018 Techmation Clinic Team.

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Mudders Need Your Wisdom and Advice

News Briefs (continued from page 1)

When did you know that you would major in Send your advice to engineering? Perhaps it was when you were engineering-l@g.hmc.edu bonding with classmates over making your hammer. Or, when your Clinic team came up with a viable solution for your project. Whether you knew right away or it took some time, settling on a major is an important decision for undergrads.

What advice would you give to students who have just declared engineering as their major? Please share your tips regarding academics, internships, self-care, study abroad, specific classes, developments in your field or any other topic. Please send your tips to engineering-l@g.hmc.edu. Responses may be posted on our Facebook page (EngineeringAtHMC/) or used in future newsletters.

Alumni Award for Blasgen: Engineering graduate Michael Blasgen ’63 was honored by the HMC Alumni Association in May. He and his wife, the late Sharon Walther Blasgen SCR ’64, have been ardent supporters of Harvey Mudd and Scripps colleges, providing scholarship support at both institutions and funds supporting Scripps’ art collection.

At Harvey Mudd, the Blasgens established the Michael and Sharon Blasgen Endowed Scholarship with a gift of $100,000 and have given regularly to fund it and other initiatives.

HMC Wins Regional APICS Again: For the second consecutive year, a team of Harvey Mudd students won top honors at the regional APICS (American Production and Inventory Control Society) student supply chain case competition. Advised by Kash Gokli, professor of manufacturing practice and Engineering Clinic director, the team was able to analyze the data, make sound decisions, provide strong solutions, then give a presentation that helped them win the competition. Bohan Gao ’19, Anjaneya Malpani ’18, Ramita Kondepudi ’18 and Peter Leung ’19 (Pitzer) competed in the final round at the annual APICS conference in September.

Manufacturing Innovation Award: To help halt lost revenue on a product line, Purosil reached in out in 2016 to Professor Kash Gokli and Harvey Mudd engineering students to contribute modern manufacturing practices and innovative ideas. Within a year, the students had helped Purosil employees implement a new way of manufacturing that increased production and efficiency and boosted revenue by $3.1 million annually. Their effort earned them the 2018 Manufacturer’s Council of the Inland Empire Innovation Award.

Teddy is Tops: Harvey Mudd students— including three engineering majors and one stuffed animal—competed in the second annual Mount Sinai Health Hackathon in October 2017. Advised by biology and chemistry professor Karl Haushalter, the team developed a prototype for the TeddyTracker, a stuffed animal for pediatric cancer patients that is wired with sensors to detect stress, like when the child is squeezing hard or rocking forcefully.

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