ME senior Bradley Wachter has been working in the ME Ability & Innovation Lab to design body-powered orthoses to enrich the lives of those who depend on them. He was featured in “Helping the body heal, feel and move again,” a multimedia story about 10-year-old Jayna Doll. Here, Bradley speaks about his UW experiences and why he’s studying ME.

For over 15 years, ME has partnered with the Seattle VA’s Center for Limb Loss Prevention & Prosthetic Engineering. This collaboration has resulted in hands-on research opportunities for more than 50 ME students and has helped propel UW biomechanics research in new directions.

ME students have developed a generator that converts heat energy from fires into electricity to charge phones. The team won the Environmental Innovation Challenge in 2015, the Business Plan Competition in 2016, and now they aim to take their product, the JikoPower Spark, to market.

An alumnus who aligned his passions for diving and oceanography with mechanical engineering, Glenn Piper, '80, spoke with ME about the value of hands-on learning.

The UWashington Hyperloop team is taking part in Elon Musk's competition to design a pod that can travel at transonic speed within a vacuum tube. After winning the Safety Subsystem Technical Excellence Award this January, the team will advance to the next leg of the competition, set to take place in January 2017 at SpaceX.

The Boeing Advanced Research Center, or BARC, is providing UW students with the opportunity to get real world engineering experience as they tackle tricky problems alongside UW professors and industry leaders from Boeing. This winter, BARC launched an aircraft engineering class co-taught by UW faculty and Boeing engineers.