Alumni Newsletter
Master of Engineering
Nicholas Engels , winner of the Alumni Innovation Award at this year Capstone Expo
Winter 2016
Coleman & the Wearable Animatronic Suit Team, Winners of the Audience Choice Award
After a year of astounding changes, it’s a good moment for us to reflect on our own community. Looking back at 2016, we have so much to be grateful for and excited about: we graduated our 5th cohort, introduced our largest cohort ever of 270 full and part-time students, celebrated our 5 Year Anniversary, which was a joy-filled gathering of our community; we co-hosted a Women in Engineering networking event with Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner, sponsored by IBM and Intel; we worked with Bose and Autodesk on an audio design challenge—as well as mentorship opportunity for M.Eng. students—to create an educational learning kit aimed at middle and high school students using headphones and microphones; and we successfully partnered with the School of Public Health to introduce the Fung Fellowship, a new 2-year program for undergraduates to address public health challenges through digital technology solutions. We also had more alumni participation than ever before. Over 100 alumni attended the 5 Year Anniversary weekend events, many of whom took part in one of the 3 panel discussions where alumni shared their knowledge and experience. You helped us with all our career panels, came to recruit, presented at the Women in Engineering event, joined me at an alumni reunion in Paris, and took part in the alumni panel of judges for the fall Capstone Expo. If it’s not obvious, allow me to say that what we have here is special. We are a community that cares, and we show it though our dedication and our mutual support for each other. Individually and together we are in steadfast pursuit of excellence, and the Capstone Expo is a great example of all this. I still remember my first Capstone Expo back in December of 2012, when it was called the Poster Session, because each of the 22 capstone teams were neatly and uniformly arranged around Blum 100 in front of their posters. As you know, the format has been changed to a more open model where students are encouraged to be creative in showcasing their work. Alex Beliaev was the force behind this change, and his reaction after this year’s Expo was: “I’m stunned. These are the most innovative, creative displays I have seen...” This year’s Capstone Expo was a culmination of everything that the Institute stands for. With each iteration of the Expo, we saw a growth, a progression, a novel and more creative expression. The pictures are wonderful, but they don’t quite capture the energy and bustle of activity that like an incredibly honed and resounding symphony flowed through the halls of the International House. 79 capstone teams. Countless prototypes. Games that demonstrated concepts. Creative designs. Costumes. Interactive Displays. Live Demos. High energy and engaging presentations. Thoughtful answers to our questions. Max capacity with over 300 guests in spite of the rain. An alumni panel of judges. And Coleman Fung. I was busy filming video throughout the Expo, but during the award ceremony as the alumni were explaining their difficult task of choosing the best projects from each area, I looked around the packed auditorium of so many excited faces and deeply felt the feeling of arrival. I found myself standing there with a massive grin and welling pride for what we have become. For all that we are already doing. For all that we will do to protect our planet, help the less fortunate, cure the sick, and build a better future for ourselves and our children. Paul Lee, Alumni Relations
The Capstone Expo
Chirag Mehta, Class of 2014
“A few years ago, my teammates and I stood in the Hearst Mining Building, eagerly presenting our product at the Capstone Expo. One of our professors gave me a $20 bill to invest in our capstone idea—a small amount, but a huge show of faith in our idea and ability! This year, with the tables turned, I was an alumni judge, walking around Chevron Auditorium and watching students demonstrate the fruits of their hard work. I wanted to show the same faith that my professor showed me, and there were just so many deserving candidates! With projects tackling renewable energy issues, to those solving 3D printed implant feasibility, this expo was a disruptive technology vanguard. When you see the students who worked so hard on projects that intent to make our world a better place, you know that the M.Eng. torch of innovation is being carried forward responsibly.”
The Alumni Innovation Award
This year we added the Alumni Innovation Award for the most innovative capstone project. Unlike the Audience Choice award, which is based on popularity, this award was rewarded for viability and real societal impact. 6 alumni took part to judge and present the award. It went to the Liepmann Lab project, which is developing low-cost and effective manufacturing techniques for the production of plastic microfluidics with integrated electronics. They are discovering new ways to design and integrate inexpensive circuitry components into BioMEMS in the hope that mass-produced sensors, embedded into plastic chips, can lead to a new level of automated medical and chemical analysis micro-devices.
Wayne Delker Director of Capstone Experience
Engineering Leadership & the Role of the Capstone
For those of you I didn’t meet at the 5-year anniversary celebration, I’m Wayne Delker, the new Director of Capstone Experience—also known as “the new Don”! It is a pleasure to be here at the Fung Institute and build upon the great foundation that Don created over the past several years. By way of background, I spent my entire career in business leading R&D and engineering organizations: the first half at GE and the second half at Clorox, as Sr. VP of R&D and Chief Innovation Officer. Throughout my career I’ve seen how important business and leadership is for engineers. It enables them to build better careers, create greater value for their companies, and adapt engineering to make a real difference. As the world becomes increasingly technical, organizations need leaders like you, who understand what it takes to lead and solve critical issues in this highly technical environment. As you can imagine the Capstone program is larger than ever, with 79 teams this year. Our largest areas are ME and IEOR, but we have more students than ever across all the disciplines. We just completed our Capstone Expo, which was exciting and well attended. You could feel the energy in the room. These projects showed how engineering expertise, innovative thinking and teamwork come together to allow these teams to create and show off amazing innovations. I’d like to thank those of you who attended and helped us select our first Alumni Innovation Award, and I hope many more of you can come see these teams “show their stuff” at our Showcase in May. Looking forward as we continue to expand, we are trying to innovate in how we offer the program. We are currently experimenting with “tracks” or clusters of projects in a related area. For example, this year we have 7 teams working on using data analytics to better understand and ultimately optimize the US patent process, with each team focusing on a separate part of the process, including the value created from Intellectual Property. Next year we will look into Virtual and Augmented Reality. I can see a variety of really cool applications, including how to use VRAR to enable better visualization of data for decision-making. Finally, I’d like to meet everyone! If you are in the Bay Area, please stop by or send me a note at wdelker@berkeley.edu. I’d love to hear your experiences about how the program has helped you in your career as well as your suggestions for improvement. If there is anything I can do to help you, please don’t hesitate to ask.
Hugs
The 5-Year Anniversary Celebration
More Hugs
New & Familiar Faces
Hugs Hugs Hugs
The Fung Fellowship for Wellness and Technology Innovations is a unique program that brings together 45 undergraduates from across the Berkeley campus to address public health challenges through digital technology solutions. Fung Fellows participate in a model of undergraduate education that emphasizes learning by doing with students’ co-creating the curriculum, participating in design challenges, leading class discussion sections, and collaborating on teams. As community and industry partnerships are a cornerstone of the Fellowship program, fellows regularly engage with industry and community partners to deepen their understanding of real-life experiences and the needs of different communities. By the end of the program, Fung Fellows are prepared with the knowledge and skills needed to understand complex public health issues and excel in the 21st century digital economy.
The Fung Fellowship
Reflow Filament is a venture started with one of our alumni and CTO, Rahul Mehendiratta. Through the production of recycled filament, it aims to create a new model for the 3D printing industry that empowers communities and encourages innovation in developing regions worldwide. We recently had the chance to sit down with their CMO Ronan Hayes to talk about the future of the company and their vision of the 3D printing industry.
Content: Paul Lee, Wayne Delker, Chirag Mehta, Adrienne Greer | Photography: Golnaz Shahmirzadi
We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Allen Yang will be joining the Fung Institute as our Chief Scientist. Allen is the Executive Director of the College's Center for Augmented Cognition and the lead researcher in augmented and virtual reality. He will help us launch new M.Eng. programs in this space, run Capstones, and work with Professor Fleming to teach the business and strategy of this exploding new industry. Allen earned his undergraduate degree in CS from the University of Science and Technology of China and did his graduate work in EE at Urbana Champagne. He holds 11 patents, has been the CTO of Atheer, and founded Grafty. Welcome Allen!
Reflow Filament
Allen Yang New Fung Institute Chief Scientist
We want to thank all the Alumni who have been so generous with their time and energy this past year. We could not have achieved all that we did without you. You are doing so many amazing things, and we know that we are merely scratching the surface with this newsletter, the magazine, and the articles we write about our growing M.Eng. community. We want to hear from you. We want to share your joys and successes, lessons and expertise. If you hear of any interesting projects other alumni are working on, please let us know. There is much that we can learn from each other, and in the new year we want to share more technical, industry, and climate/sustainability related articles, like the Relow Filament piece above. Keep innovating, growing, and pushing the boundaries of engineering. And let us know if we can help in any way. Happy New Year from all of us at the Fung Institute!
Alumni Articles on Medium
Alumnae Margaret Liu & Amanda Karen (right), Women in Engineer Networking Event
Alumni Reunion in Paris
Empowering Communities Through Sustainability
SAVE THE DATE!
Alumni Happy Hour! March 10 @ Microsoft Reactor in SF
Start-up Networking Night February 22 @ Julia Morgan Ballroom in SF Joint event with Berkeley-Haas MBA program & School of Information