4 minute read
Intelligent risks drive discovery
Intelligent risks drive discovery
Advertisement
Innovation is a thread that runs through all aspects of a Pickering College education. It is at the heart of the Global Leadership Program and it’s preparing our students for whatever the future brings. And that future even includes space travel.
Pickering College alumnus Nico Macias ’14 just graduated from Northeastern University with a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and in July began his job as an actual rocket scientist. The full-time vehicle structures engineer for SpaceX is working on the Falcon rocket platform / heavy rocket platform and will be moving towards Starship which is SpaceX’s interplanetary manned air vehicle.
“As a structures engineer what I do is design and analyze structures and mechanisms inside of a rocket,” he explains. “At SpaceX a lot of people are divided into the design side or the analysis side. Our group is in this middle place where we get to go around and if there’s a really interesting problem that pops up we solve it and come back home—it’s a little bit of everything so it’s quite a lot of fun.”
Macias’ program at Northeastern University included three six-month co-operative education placements which gave him his first taste of working for SpaceX. He actually designed and built some parts on the rockets SpaceX has recently tested which, according to Macias, “you can almost sort of see (because they are really small) on the outside of the rocket … they’re essentially a new hardware retention system for the really big bolts.”
For Macias, hardware-based problem solving has always been his thing. Back when he was a student at Pickering College he was a member of the Munk team which he credits for preparing him for his current path. “I really got to dip my toes in designing and making things,” he says. His group’s project was to design a better way to distribute and engage users of a product called Sprinkles, created to combat anemia. Macias took a hardware approach to the solution and he and his teammates developed a pill bottle with a mechanism that when rotated back and forth dispensed a consistent dose.
“It was also refillable which meant the user had to bring it back to the nurse … and each pill bottle would have its own serial code on the outside so they could track actual usage,” he explains. “My experience with the Munk team really helped me to get into Northeastern and set me on a path of where I can actually do things I think are a good idea.”
Nico Macias
For instance, for his Capstone project at Northeastern, Macias and a team of fellow engineers designed a miniature wearable blood sampling device geared to athletes.
“We wanted wearable so that athletes can sample their blood during exercise, which is important because there are blood biomarkers like lactate, cortisol and oxygen that we currently cannot track during a workout and those biomarkers change in levels,” he explains. “So imagine a marathon runner checking their blood at miles 10 and 20 to see how their blood biomarkers are changing to inform their training regimen—there’s definitely a market for it.”
The device is almost painless and uses microneedles to draw a small amount of blood for analysis. Though he and his fellow students won’t be the ones to take the product to market as they already have jobs elsewhere, they created the prototype and obtained a provisional patent which they’re hoping will spark some interest from a couple of companies.
Macias chose Northeastern because of the experiential learning opportunities that it offered, much like the education he received at Pickering College. Through Kim Bartlett, Director of Teaching and Learning, Macias connected with Grade 7 student Thomas Bianco earlier this year, who appears to be following a similar path.
Bianco has a passion for inventing. His recent prototype of a fully-functional prosthetic hand which he designed for his uncle won first prize in the Intermediate category at the Youth Innovation Fair, hosted by the Town of Aurora. “I told my uncle about the idea first because I had to take measurements of his arm. He’s known that I’ve always been into this kind of stuff,” says Bianco. “It made me really happy because he said to me after it was finished ‘I knew one day you would do something incredible.’”
Thomas Bianco
Bianco credits PC for opening his eyes to new technology that only furthered his aspirations to design and invent. “If it wasn’t for the school getting a 3D printer, I would have never known about 3D printing—it was a big step for me,” explains Thomas. “The teachers have been great with teaching me the program and I have had the ability to print things here, like my entry to the Youth Innovation Fair last year.” In Grade 6, Thomas took home top honours in the Junior category at the same event with his toothpaste dispensing toothbrush.
Like Macias, Bianco has his sights on attending university for mechanical engineering, and aspires to one day work for Tesla or SpaceX. “He’s way ahead of where I was back when I was in high school with the level of CAD (computer aided design) work that he’s doing and successfully printing off a working mechanism—it’s really impressive,” says Macias. “Finding that something and taking active participation in it will drive innovation but also set you apart and on a path to success.”
As for Macias, he’s excited about what the future holds. “I’m really looking forward to learning a lot as an engineer but also being valuable to society and working on projects of consequence that are really going to further technology and further our ability to explore and solve problems.”
