Every engineer spends countless hours learning their field inside and out, but only a relative few ever launch a company to bring their inventions to the world. Luckily, the Oregon State University Advantage Accelerator helps faculty, staff, students, and alumni take that critical step by shepherding new companies through all phases of the startup process.
In the fall of 2019, during the recently completed Merryfield Hall renovations, a plumber descended into a crawl space beneath the building to tap a water line for a new drinking fountain. He also found an odd bit of construction: a dozen concrete-filled barrels, aligned in two parallel rows, supporting a significant chunk of the building. The barrels, it turns out, had also been observed during a 2014 remodel of one of Merryfield’s labs. Who knows when anyone had seen them before that?
Mike and Barb Schmierer created a student success endowment in their name and have been loyal annual donors to the College of Engineering for more than 20 years.
Although neither is an engineer or an Oregon State alum, their family formed strong connections to the college and university through their son, Paul, who graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 2005. Shortly after finishing college, Paul landed a job in research and development at Sage Fly Fishing, a maker of high-end fishing rods and reels based in Washington.
Last Christmas, Amrit Nam Khalsa, B.S. mechanical engineering ’18, woke up to a wonderful gift: the perfect launch of the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, the largest, most complex space telescope ever built.
“I thought, ‘Finally, this is actually happening.’ Then I thought, ‘Now comes the hard part,’” Khalsa said. “The launch was not necessarily the hardest thing the telescope had to endure. There were still weeks of nail-biting deployments and positioning.”
Rick Robertson was barely a teenager when he started his first construction job. He dug catch basins, pushed concrete, and hauled materials through the long summer days. The hard work was nothing new.
If John Lienhard could eradicate one word from the English language, it would be “innovation.”
“It’s a waffle word. How about that?” he said, offering a more temperate formulation in place of one deemed too salty for print.
Lienhard prefers “invention,” a word that industry leaders conspicuously avoid, he says, because of its world-changing implications.
Four faculty in the Oregon State University College of Engineering have received prestigious early-career investigator awards from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy. Houssam Abbas, Yue Cao, and Xiao Fu are the recipients of the Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, awards from the NSF. Kelsey Stoerzinger is the recipient of an award from DOE’s Early Career Research Program.
