Photos by Karl Maasdam, Lucas Radostitz, Gale Sumida.
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?
Photos by Peter Knox and courtesy of the Schmierer family.
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.
Photos by NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCL, and Kerry Dahlen.
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.”
Photos courtesy of Rick Robertson.
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.
Oregon’s natural beauty is renowned the world over, from its vast expanses of wild forest to its majestic coastline. But living side by side with nature also means living with a certain element of danger from natural hazards, like earthquakes, wildfires, tsunamis and ocean swells, coastal erosion, and landslides.
Brynn Olden, B.S. chemical engineering ’13, and Anthony Amsberry, B.S. bioengineering ’13, had big plans in high school. Olden, in Wilsonville, wrote them down for a Spanish class assignment. In translation, she said — I will be a scientist, cure cancer, and win a Nobel Prize. Just 15 miles away in Beaverton, Amsberry was aiming at medical school.
Their paths converged at Oregon State University, where they became classmates and friends, and where each tallied an impressive record of internships, research, scholarships, and service. Both graduated summa cum laude in 2013.
Imagine someday you could have a backup copy of your heart or liver, grown from your own stem cells and ready to transplant, just waiting in cold storage should you ever need it. While that technology doesn’t yet exist, new research from the College of Engineering is paving the way toward a key prerequisite: The ability to preserve living tissues indefinitely.
