Dayton Engineer

This past summer, four UD graduate students, along with students from U.S. universities, traveled to Taiwan for a week to explore Taiwan's display technology industry, thanks to a joint NSF Advanced Studies Institute (ASI) grant between Penn State University and University of Dayton.

This summer, three students from Academic City University College in Ghana spent their time in Dayton through the School of Engineering’s Ethos Center.

Maame Twumasi, David Mensah and Wehdam Luguje took part in the Ethos Center’s Dayton immersion experience. Their immersions included working with the Westside Makerspace, Greater West Dayton Incubator and the Makerspace of DECA High School.

Many student organizations have periods of hiatus over the years. But all it takes is one eager student to bring it back to life.

The University of Dayton School of Engineering’s Society of Automotive Engineers — or the Baja team as they are known — is one of them. 

“SAE International’s Baja competition has been around since 1976,” said Jeremy Price, vice president of the student organization. “We have spoken to UD alumni who competed in the 90s and early 2000s, but Dayton has not competed in many years.”

“Leave it better than you found it.” This motto has inspired Shaq Tensley ’15 to give back to UD as a volunteer, and it has served him in his global travels. 

NASA’s CubeSat Launch Initiative allows universities to build small, 10 centimeter cube satellites that will be sent up to space via a larger NASA mission. Although CubeSats are fairly simple technology, the harsh space environment provides many challenges. As the CubeSats go in and out of the sun’s view, they heat and cool very rapidly and can cause the technology to break quickly. Because of this, many fail and never complete recording data.

Thanks to a grant from NASA, UD School of Engineering assistant professor Rydge Mulford is trying to solve this problem.

For Tom Tappel ’18, ’21, the best way to learn, lead and serve within the Dayton community was to look to the future — of energy. Tappel graduated from the University of Dayton in 2018, then spent some time working as an engineer. But it wasn’t until a graduate assistantship with the ETHOS Center a few years later that Tappel dove into learning everything he could about the household energy burdens disproportionately impacting low-income families around America. He found many of those families live in buildings that were not at all energy-efficient.