Dayton Engineer

“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.

It’s not everyday that a student gets to combine their major and personal interest into a research opportunity. 

But for Rachel Crossman, the opportunity came when she least expected it.

University of Dayton School of Engineering student David Albrecht has been named one of two 2023-2024 SciTech and Human Rights FutureGen Scholars by the AAAS Science and Human Rights Coalition. The coalitions’ goal is to recognize students whose work crosses the intersection of science and human rights.

Bridget Gerber’s first UD tour was “just one stop” of many on her search for a college. But that stop led her to pre-college programs on campus and, eventually, to hands-on experience, research and an internship, all before her sophomore year.

This year’s Vision Award winners were recognized during the Dean’s Welcome Back Meeting on Aug. 18. The Vision Awards recognize the innovation, creativity, entrepreneurial thinking and outstanding performance of our faculty and staff.