Holly Cluff

Meet Autumn Twitchell! She is a first-year Masters student from Folsom, California working under Dr. Rice in aeronautical telemetry. She will be the first in a series of ECEN Interviews celebrating our students, inspired by the Cougar Queries.

Our BYU chapter of Eta Kappa Nu, the IEEE honor society for electrical engineering students, has big plans for this semester despite roadblocks from a pesky pandemic. The chapter has been striving to build a sense of community within the department between students and professors, and it has more ideas on the horizon for furthering the chapter’s goals.

The population of Earth’s orbit grew ten satellites larger Sunday, Jan. 17., when NASA’s Virgin Orbit launch vehicle released ten student-built satellites into space. Two of them - the Passive Inspection Cubesats (PICs) - came from Dr. David Long and his team of students. The PICs entered Earth’s orbit successfully, and the team is now pursuing the next steps.

If you’ve ever had the inclination to break into top-secret laboratories, now would be the time to do it.

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.