Engineers Week 2021, which is sponsored by the National Society of Professional Engineers and runs from Sunday, Feb. 21 through Feb. 27, is an ideal time for celebrating the work accomplished during Senior Design. All UD mechanical and biomedical engineers are required to take the semester-long course, although a smattering of the University’s environmental and electrical engineers join, too, making the experience truly interdisciplinary. At the beginning of the term, each participating Blue Hen selects from a predetermined list a project they would like to complete. The students choose a sponsor, which could be a nonprofit organization, a clinical partner, a member of UD’s faculty or a local, national or international company with a big problem to solve.

Based on these interests, the students are broken into teams — 41, this year. These groups then serve as independent consulting firms hired to do a specific job. Typically, these jobs are “the long-shot stuff,” Buckley said. “They are the things a sponsor has not had the time or energy or creativity for, so they put a team of students on it to see what fresh ideas they can come up with.” It is a strategy that pays off — in an average year, about a quarter of the student prototypes result in a patent.

Of course, this has not been an average academic year. Because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, most courses at UD transitioned to a virtual format in the fall of 2020. Senior Design was one of the few with on-campus access, but the prototyping lab was limited to a handful of students at a time. Additionally, because of a restructured academic calendar, class members lost out on two weeks of prototyping time. But expectations for the students — including those held by the students themselves — remained high. Despite all of the challenges, participants in Senior Design successfully created everything from a new-and-improved face mask for combatting COVID-19 to a simplified process for building bamboo wheelchairs for Paralympians in Ghana to an efficient training device for technicians learning to put down chickens humanely.

“Some of these next-generation engineers have already managed to secure jobs based on the experience they had in this course, which is really commendable,” Khandha said. “So being able to work on real-world problems not only gives them confidence entering the workforce, it gives them the satisfaction of feeling like they’re contributing something meaningful that’s going to have a lasting impact.”

Consider Pavithran Naicker, a biomedical engineering major. For a project sponsored by the Newark-based Elasthetics company and advised by Khandha, he worked on a pioneering orthosis device meant for children with cerebral palsy, to help them walk longer and more comfortably. This apparatus, worn like a boot, is special because it incorporates an electronic component — sensors measure how the leg is moving and where it needs support. This information is then transferred to artificial muscles in the orthosis that will extend or contract based on feedback.

“I don’t mean to sound cringey or sentimental here, but I feel honestly blessed that I got to work on this,” said Naicker, who hopes to launch his own medical tech company one day. “Something like Senior Design puts into perspective how much you’ve learned and just how much you can do with that.”

For Isabella Krynyckyi, the sky is the limit — literally. Her team’s task, sponsored by the Aero Society of Automotive Engineers, has been to build a functional, remote-controlled model airplane that will colonize Mars… or, at least, simulate the colonization of Mars. In a competition in June in Lakeland, Florida, against other engineering teams from across the country, their team’s plane will not only need to lift off and land successfully, it will need to release water bottles (supplies), Nerf footballs (habitats) and an autonomous glider carrying ping pong balls (colonists) in designated locations.

“This project solidified my future plans,” said Krynyckyi, adding that she’ll complete UD’s 4+1 program in mechanical engineering, which will result in a master’s degree, before trying for a career with an aerospace company like ILC Dover, SpaceX or NASA. She might, one day, just have a hand in colonizing the actual planet of Mars.

“I definitely got my dream senior project,” she said. “I know engineering in general has a reputation for being really competitive and every-man-for-himself, but the mechanical engineering department at UD does a great job of building a sense of community and teamwork. The faculty and students make it feel like home.”