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Dr. Eugene Olevsky has been appointed permanent Dean of the College of Engineering, effective May 1, 2019. Distinguished Professor Olevsky joined the SDSU faculty in 1998 and since March 2018, has served as Interim Dean.

Sulaiman Al-Tunaib, one of our featured Outstanding Graduates in the Spring 2017 Newsletter, represented the State of Kuwait at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP24) to talk about Kuwait’s initiatives to reduce its carbon footprint, one of which is through pledging to generate 15% of Kuwait’s electricity needs from renewable energy sources by 2030.

Nha Uyen Huynh (Ph.D.) and Richard Lee (MEng) are student researchers from the Experimental Mechanics Laboratory. They are currently working on the development of a novel approach to characterize nontraditional materials using terahertz radiation through funding from the U.S. Department of Defense under award No.W911NF1810477.

In this issue, Dr. Katira, along with Dr. Henry Hess and Stanislov Tsitkov from the Columbia University in the city of New York, and Dr. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse from Stanford University published an overview on the applications of molecular motors in the design of next-gen biomimetic active materials.

Kelbi Redquest is a mechanical engineering student graduating in May 2019. She was a member of the Division I women’s rowing team for 2 years where she was recognized as a scholar athlete for all 4 semesters. She was also awarded the James Malik Award for Fall 2016 and Spring 2017 for earning a 4.00 GPA for these semesters while a member of SDSU athletics.

During his years at SDSU, he has been a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers since 2016 and was involved with Aztec Electric Racing during his sophomore year. For his senior project, Benjamin and his team members, known as Archimedes’ Crew, are building a custom 3D-printed quadcopter designed to house a crossband repeater that will utilize UHF and VHF frequencies.

On March 15-17, members of ASME went to E-Fest West at the Fairplex in Pomona to compete in the Student Design Competition and the Human-Powered Vehicle Challenge. Our two SDC teams, led by chief engineer Dustin Ybarra, placed 5th and 10th out of 18 teams.

Our Senior Design Project is to redesign and fabricate the primary unit of the Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT) for the Baja SAE Car. The belt-driven CVT replaces a conventional gear transmission by using centripetal force to continuously change the “gear ratio” between the primary and secondary units.

This is a study in Dr. Karen May-Newman’s Cardiovascular Bioengineering Lab. The lab’s objective is to improve the lives of patients with heart diseases through innovative approaches to medical device design and integration. One of the device that the researchers in the lab study is left ventricular assist devices (LVADs).

Geovana Pessoa is a Ph.D. student at the Experimental Mechanics Laboratory with research interest focused on fundamentally understanding the mechanical behavior of polymer matrix composites from the nano to the macro scale.