On Friday, December 3, 2021 the Center for STEM Education at Northeastern University, in collaboration with the College of Engineering/Admissions, hosted the Fall edition of our Building Bridges event. 103 students from 32 different schools in 5 states came to learn all about engineering. Students picked from 12 different sessions, wherein students learned about various engineering topics through hands-on activities and presentations (see below for what was offered).
The day started with a welcome from Center for STEM Education Director, Claire Duggan, followed by an introduction to Northeastern’s College of Engineering by Dean Richard Harris and Dean Rachelle Reisberg, followed by a short admissions panel. Students then attended two sessions they selected based on their engineering interests. In the past, sessions have been mostly taught by faculty members and/or graduate/PhD students; this year, we offered two new sessions: an overview of the First Year Engineering final projects, led by First Year Professor Jen Love, and a session focused on aerospace engineering, led by Northeastern student organizations [Northeastern doesn’t have aerospace as a major, but instead offers it as a minor]. During lunch, Northeastern’s chapters of IEEE and ASCE talked about their organizations efforts and club life on campus. The day wrapped up with an Engineering Panel, in which visiting students were able to ask the panelists questions about engineering and college/Northeastern in general. An optional engineering campus tour was then offered, led by Luis Frias.
Thank you to all faculty, staff members, volunteers, and student panelists for your help today and making this day possible!
Sessions:
- Wireless Internet of Things (Electrical Engineering) by Professor Stefano Basagni
Learn more about the Wireless IoT, such as underwater acoustic communications, wireless drone fleets, and software-designed cellular networks - Polymeric Hydrogels to Improve Life Quality (Chemical Engineering) by Professor Sidi Bencherif
Learn about polymers and how they can be used for biomedical applications - Complex Fluids: are they Fluids or Solids? (Chemical Engineering) by Sabrina Marnoto [Professor Sara Hashmi’s lab] Learn about Newtonian, shear-thinning polymer, visco-elastic, and shear-thickening fluids via hands-on experiments
- Terahertz Communications: A Sneak Peak at 6G Networks (Electrical Engineering) by Professor Josep Jornet
Learn about the building blocks of and see a working prototype of the radios that future cellphones/wearable 6G devices might have - Computing Pi with Parallel Computing (Computer Engineering) by Professor David Kaeli
Learn about parallel computing and use parallelism to compute the value of pi using by performing thousands of simultaneous experiments - MM-Wave Imaging (Electrical Engineering) by Weite Zhang [Professor Jose Martinez-Lorenzo’s lab] Learn about MM-Wave imaging and advanced techniques used in state-of-the-art imaging systems
- Sensors for the Environment (Environmental Engineering) by Professor Amy Mueller
See the ways that we can investigate our environment and how getting high-res data can inform how we interact with the urban environment - Human Machine Systems (Mechanical Engineering) by Professor Rifat Sipahi
Learn about the challenges and potential directions of human machine systems and view a hands-on computerized demonstration of one such system - Fluorescent Techniques to Characterize Neural Stem Cells (Bioengineering) by McKay Cavanaugh [Professor Rebecca Willits’ lab] Learn about neural stem cells and how we characterize them using flow cytometry and fluorescent microscopy
- Designing Earthquake Resistant Buildings by Alpay Demiryurek (Civil Engineering) [Professor Mishac Yegian’s lab] Explore the world of structural engineering: see how designing earthquake-proof structures is important to the safety of millions.
- Intro to Aerospace Engineering (Aerospace Engineering) by AerospaceNU & NUSEDS
Learn about engineering student organizations on campus and learn more about aerospace engineering through student presentations - First Year Engineering Showcase (Various Engineering) by NU FYELC Students
Look at First Year Engineering projects and meet and discuss
