Designs and devices recently filled part of campus at Western New England University as an engineering expo showcased the efforts of more than 300 students – from capstone work to first-year projects.
Research and toil were on display Tuesday as students from across WNE’s engineering programs showed off the fruits of their labor.
In the gymnasium, the 2025 "Emerging Engineers Expo" featured the work of seniors as well as “First-Year Smart Projects” – spanning engineering of all kinds, from biomedical to industrial to construction management and more.
“Some of those are first-year engineering project, where they've got a clear customer, they've made a prototype and they've got a marketing plan for what they're trying to the marketplace,” says Mike Rust, biomedical engineering professor and Director of Experiential and Entrepreneurial Learning in the College of Engineering. “And then we've got about 60 or so senior capstones – those are students at the end of their four-year journey with us, working for either a semester or the full-year. Sometimes, those projects come from industry, sometimes they're from the faculty research, or sometimes the students create those projects as well.”
Altogether, the university says there were 35 First-Year Innovation Projects and 69 Senior Capstone Design Projects – all displayed on an array of tables, like a higher ed science fair.
Projects ranged from an apparatus built to vent and dry wet shoes to designs for jet engine systems to proposals for the campus itself – including studies of how to go about renovating Rivers Memorial Hall, which houses WAMC’s Pioneer Valley Bureau.
Much of the student work was assembled and in-action, like mechanical engineering senior Zackery Wysk’s wall mount-able air purifier – an energy-efficient, particulate matter-nabbing device he built and tested himself.
“I wanted to make something wall-mounted, so you could mount it up high on a wall, turn it on, and then kind of just forget about it,” the graduating senior explains. “So - just every day, all day - it's just filtering air, ensuring that rooms have low particulate matter and are healthy - because ever since COVID and the wildfires happening recently, there's a lot of particulate matter being blown around.”
Nearby, a trio of mechanical engineering students stand over a small, bolted-down cylinder, with wires and a small screen sticking off to the side – “an integrated cycle counting system,” according to student Douglas MacPhail.
The team uses an air compressor to cycle the bolt of a hypothetical nail gun or firearm their counter could potentially go on. Brandon Pepin leads me through it.
“Every time it refills with air, you pull the trigger, it goes down, 'removes a round' from your nail gun count - and with a firearm, it'll demonstrate how many rounds are remaining in your magazine,” he says.
Following a cycle, a small screen attached to the apparatus ticks down from 0 to -1.
“So, you hold your new mag up to the RFID sensor, press the new mag button, and it will update your system,” MacPhail adds. “Unfortunately, it was already sitting at zero, but it will remember, if we go back to mag B, the default magazine internally, it will remember that there were no rounds inside of it.”
!["You can see right here, back in the buffer tube, [the] bolt-carrier mechanism, which is actuated with the compressed air - comes back, triggers the switch, and will update your round count, which is on this little screen back here," MacPhail says.](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6fc0283/2147483647/strip/true/crop/4032x2268+0+0/resize/840x472!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fbf%2F60%2Fa82a6a524063b8c065266ba828d0%2Fround-chamber-counter-wne.jpg)
Their colleague, Raffael Raduazo, says similar devices are being developed elsewhere, but his team has been working on something more user-friendly.
“Oftentimes they require proprietary technology that requires their stuff to work with their systems,” he said. “Ours is completely - you can bring your own to the party and it works. It's more user-friendly, it's more consumer-friendly and it's better for the market.”
A few tables down, another trio of students, all biomedical engineering majors, stand over a special ultrasound device setup intended to make life easier for medical professionals.
One of the students behind the “SonoSight Ultrasound Probe Holder” is Noor Awkal.
“Basically, we have a sponsor, Dr. Zachary Coope from Yale New Haven Hospital - he came to us saying ‘Hey, I do [around] 20 ultrasound-guided IV insertions in a shift: that's 25 percent of my shift, just stabilizing the ultrasound probe - my hand is killing me at the end of it. Could you come up with something to hold the ultrasound probe or just make my life easier with this?’” she recounted. “So, from that, we took all of his feedback, he showed us how to do an ultrasound-guided IV, and we came up with our device.”
The medical device consists of a clamp as well as a series of adjustable rods with an ultrasound machine wired around it, honed in on a fake human arm fitted into holders below it, says fellow-developer, Matthew Darling.
“Going up, there's a ball joint and a locking mechanism that can tighten and loosen once the health care professional finds an IV,” he adds, pointing to the device standing over the fake arm with water flowing in and out to simulate circulation. “There's also a horizontal (mechanical) arm that allows for smooth ... movement towards and away from the healthcare professional, and there's also a gooseneck with Velcro straps on it, that can hold the ultrasound probe and have multiple different probe designs and fine adjustments to make minor movements.”
Darling is looking into grad school, but hopes to one day work in research and development as well as cell and tissue engineering. Awkal says she’s also interested in R&D and lab work, while their partner, Ashton Rutkowski, says he’s job searching, hoping to work at medical device companies.
There were similar stories across the gymnasium floor as professionals and experts surveyed the projects – giving valuable feedback and evaluations along the way.
For Professor Rust, he says it’s one of his favorite days of the year.
“We have industry partners, local companies, alumni, even members of our campus community that are here as judges, and so, they're going around and they're evaluating the projects,” the professor tells WAMC. “A lot of that interaction, you just can't buy that time in front of somebody, where they're going to ask you questions about what you've done. In some cases, it's like a job interview and even if it's a first year student, they're planting a flag with a company that might come back and look at them for an internship or full-time employment downstream."
"The conversations are super-rich - the students are talking about their ideas and how they brought them to life over the past few months."
