Holly Cluff

Even though students couldn’t touch one another with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole at this year’s department Christmas party (held Thursday, December 10th), it was virtually (get it?) the best party ever thrown!

Dr. Greg Nordin and his research team have again landed in the top 5% of highly cited authors with the Royal Society of Chemistry journals for their paper on the creation of a custom 3D printer for microfluidic devices.

If you follow BYU news, you might have heard about the CubeSat - the small, six-sided “spacecraft selfie cam” a team of our electrical engineers will soon launch into space. The handsome fellow narrating the video is PhD student Patrick Walton, and the unprecedented CubeSat project - which he started as an undergraduate - was just his warm up. In addition to the soon-to-be-launched space camera, Walton is building a fleet of tiny weather satellites with the potential to fill the gaping holes in forecasting data. He started the project, called Care Weather, in January 2019, with business partner Alex Laraway and faculty mentor Dr. David Long.

Friday was the night.

Each year, BYU Capstone partners with government agencies, corporate leaders, humanitarian organizations, and entrepreneurs to provide opportunities for senior-level engineering students in Computer, Electrical, Manufacturing, and Mechanical Engineering to participate in real-world engineering challenges. Top engineering faculty and skilled industry mentors guide students through the design and development process. This year, teams of Capstone students are participating in 53 unique projects across a wide variety of industries.

Boy Scout camp has a cherished place in American hearts for its role in teaching the skills essential to life: wilderness survival, first aid, citizenship, and - if you’re PhD student Jakob Kunzler - calculus and differential equations.

Mark Ruzindana cites a few people as his inspirations: his parents and sisters, professional rock climber Tommy Caldwell, and Batman.

At the same conference where grad student Farah Arabian took home third place for her presentation on mobile systems last week, another ECE student placed for his presentation on the self-driving car platform featured on BYU’s YouTube channel and the recent department tours.

You might recognize her name. In 2018, she won the First Place Graduate Student Award at the International Telemetry Conference (ITC), and last year she won the Myron Hiram Nichols Telemetry Spectrum Award at the ITC. This month, Farah Arabian - a PhD student studying under Dr. Rice - received another award: third place in the engineering track at the Intermountain Engineering, Technology, and Computing Conference (i-ETC) for her paper “Who’s on First in 5G Mobile Networks: Equalizers or Polarization Diversity Combiners?”. She compared two mobile phone architectures to see which outperformed the other, specifically observing how the order of combining and equalization in signal processing affected the outcomes.