Seniors and master’s students provide businesses and nonprofits solutions to real-world problems.
The Sri Vidya Temple Society had a problem. In the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, the leadership of the Hindu temple in Rush, New York, removed carpeting at their community gathering space and installed tile flooring to allow for more frequent deep cleaning and make the space more inviting. But the change had unintended consequences.
“The sound started bouncing everywhere,” says Veena Ganeshan, a senior instructor of at the and coordinator of public outreach for the Sri Vidya Temple. “It became less of a meditative atmosphere and much more of a chaotic atmosphere.”
In a moment of what Ganeshan calls “divine intervention,” she met colleagues in the (AME) program and discovered the temple’s acoustic issues are exactly the types of challenges AME students are equipped to tackle. She approached her colleagues to see if they had students willing to help.
It became one of 79 capstone projects that 282 senior and master’s students from the completed this academic year. While some capstone projects are research theses or vehicles to be entered in national competitions like ASME’s e-Human Powered Vehicle Challenge, many of the projects offer an opportunity to engage with the community. This year, clients for engineering capstones ranged from the Rochester Museum & Science Center to the Arc of Monroe.
These clients present the students with real-world problems and constraints. For example, due to a fire pit in the Sri Vidya Temple’s gathering space, any acoustical treatments the students recommended had to be fire retardant. The solution also had to be easily removeable and conform to the space’s aesthetics.
Under the guidance of Associate Professor , the team took measurements of the gathering space, built a virtual model, and then developed acoustic simulations to assess how different solutions would perform. They found that placing 24 fiberglass panels along the ceiling would make a significant improvement.
“The two main things we wanted to tackle were to decrease reverberation time and increase the clarity,” says Yunji Kim ’25. “In the simulation software, we were able to decrease the reverberation time by about a second at the speaking level frequency. And when they’re playing music, there’s an annoying ringing sound, and this should help cut it out as well.”
The students designed, fabricated, tested, and installed the first panel and provided the Sri Vidya Temple Society a manual so they can easily make the rest of the panels. Ganeshan says the students have been committed to improving the experience in the temple.
“They are ideal engineers—the first solution never works, and they have been great about troubleshooting solutions and finding alternatives,” says Ganeshan. “This is a really good solution they have come up with, and we look forward to making more of the panels.”
Making metered dose inhalers more convenient
A team of biomedical engineering students hope a small change to a device for administering medication to the lungs can make a big difference for patients worldwide. Patients who are prescribed metered dose inhalers (MDI) to treat conditions such as asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are often recommended to use a spacer—a plastic tube that helps deliver the medication effectively into the lungs.
But spacers can be cumbersome and inconvenient for patients to carry, sometimes getting lost. Erika O’Geen, a registered respiratory therapist at the , says that years ago she had the idea for a collapsible spacer and approached the about developing a prototype.
“I thought it was time to pursue the opportunity after hearing from patients repeatedly the reason that they never used a spacer in the first place was due to it being too ‘bulky,’” says O’Geen. “Patient after patient with the same response. But when patients use a spacer in the first place, they experience a better outcome with the medication delivery and deposition of the drug.”
Supervised by Associate Professor of Instruction , the students 3D printed a mold to create a silicone prototype of a more convenient, collapsible spacer. Once their prototype was ready, they tested it to see if it could withstand everyday wear and tear, conducted fluid flow testing to ensure it administers as much medication as existing products, and tested the cleanliness to see how much bacteria grows inside after use. But prototyping is just one part of the learning experience.
“This project is not only about engineering something,” says Rupika Talagadadeevi ’25. “It’s also about budgeting, teamwork, communicating with people back and forth to understand the problem.”
O’Geen says she has been pleased with the outcome and believes it has real-world potential. The students say it was rewarding working with a customer who works to help patients daily.
“It’s pretty cool that the customer is at the Medical Center, so we have a very close connection to the patients,” says Elena Dapi ’25. “We know that the patients she’s talking about are real people, and it’s nice to hopefully help them with this issue.”
Making astronomy accessible to kids
Building on a capstone project from last year that was sponsored by the optical products manufacturer Nighthawk Solutions, optics students are working to empower K-12 students to get into backyard astronomy. A team with shared interests in space exploration and accessibility gravitated to the project and worked on an affordable design for a fun and engaging product.
“Our telescope is do-it-yourself in the sense that children can set the optics into place and learn about how to handle them,” says Alexandria Hajec ’25. “It’s also a Newtonian design, something that is certainly less common in the DIY market, where we have one large mirror at the base and a smaller mirror near the top of the telescope. The big pull, really, would be the Wi-Fi compatible sensor that we use instead of an eyepiece.”
The telescope connects to a cellphone that gives users a live view from the telescope and allows them to instantly save and share the images it captures.
To see if the telescope was as kid friendly as they intended, the project team put their relatives to the test. They asked their 12- and 13-year-old family members to give it a shot and found that within half an hour, they were able to fully assemble the telescope and start taking pictures of the moon.
The students enjoyed working on a product with an aim toward commercialization and were surprised to find their soft skills were just as crucial as their optical engineering prowess.
“The most important part of this project was learning to work as a team,” says Hajec. “We all had very different skill sets going into this project, and I think we were able to come together to make something really special. It’s always interesting to hear different points of view and look at problems from a variety of angles. We were able to explore a lot of unique solutions in our project, and that really is due to our diverse knowledge base.”
