News

Congrats to EcoCAR, Formula Motorsports, Human Powered Submarine and Husky Robotics for their success during this summer’s competitions!

GeekWire visited the UW’s Clean Energy Testbeds to learn how the Testbeds are speeding up the process by which discoveries are transformed into scalable products. Mechanical engineering associate professor Devin MacKenzie, who is technical director of the Testbeds, stressed how difficult it is to make money in clean energy and how the open-access infrastructure provided the Testbeds is key in reducing the cost involved in turning innovative ideas into working prototypes. The Testbeds have attracted users ranging from startups to Microsoft—innovators large and small, all striving to create breakthroughs in clean energy.

GeekWire visited ME associate professor Brian Polayge and graduate student Emma Cotter to learn about their work measuring the impact of tidal and wave energy machines on marine life. The monitoring system used to capture animal interactions with the machines produces an immense amount of low-value data, so Cotter developed machine learning tools to help capture data only when marine life is nearby. The data will help advance the design of more benign marine energy systems.

The Seattle Times profiled the Engineering Innovation in Health program, which was founded in the Mechanical Engineering department, as part of their Education Lab spotlight. The Times highlighted projects like EpiForAll that got their start as part of the year-long program but have developed into ongoing endeavors as they progress on the path toward commercialization.

UW researchers are developing devices to answer some of the trickiest questions about marine energy’s environmental effects. Working as part of the Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center, researchers have developed a detection system that captures important data about interactions between marine life and marine energy converters — but only when marine life is present. This detection system drastically reduces the extreme amount of low-value data that researchers would otherwise need to store and inspect.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), reported on Jonathan Liu’s new light-sheet microscope for the NIH Director’s Blog. Collins lauds the potential the microscope presents for improving patient outcomes in cancer treatments.

A versatile light-sheet microscope, developed by a UW team including ME associate professor Jonathan Liu, can provide surgeons with real-time pathology data to guide cancer-removal surgeries and can also non-destructively examine tumor biopsies in 3-D. The microscope provides surgeons with proof that they have removed all cancerous tissue, preventing the need for further surgeries to remove cancerous cells that were missed during the initial procedure.

ME graduate student Jessica Zistatsis shares her journey through the commercialization process at the UW, thanks to Engineering Innovation in Health. Jessica is one of the innovators of PlayGait™, a pediatric exoskeleton that helps kids with cerebral palsy get more walking practice outside of therapy so they can learn to walk independently.

Congratulations to UW EcoCAR 3 for picking up a number of awards at this year's national competition, including the NSF Innovation Award, Most Creative Outreach Event Award, and Best Fall Swimlane Report! Special shout-out to ME undergrad Rachel Krause, for receiving the General Motors Women in Engineering Rookie Award!

UW 360 featured teams from this year’s Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge that are moving forward to bring their innovations to market. Among the projects featured were Epi4All and PlayGait, both of which got their start in ME’s Engineering Innovation in Health program.

EcoCAR is multi-phase challenge in which students work to convert a Camaro into a hybrid-electric car. UW Engineering’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program supports multidisciplinary, long-term projects like EcoCAR that present real-world, experiential learning opportunities to students.