Our Stories

The 2016 Holiday Toy Hack brought together UW students, faculty and community members to adapt toys for children with disabilities. 

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.

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.