Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

With quality products, strong market research, and continuous innovation, any industry can be improved. Alan Nawoj, a Harvard SEAS alum, proved this with Beacon Mobile, a platform connecting car washes and customers. Founded in 2009, Beacon Mobile expanded globally and was acquired by Vontier (NYSE: VNT) in 2022. Learn from Alan’s journey and his valuable advice on breaking into new industries. https://bit.ly/47AXnfw

This summer, 15 Boston-area high schoolers the BioSTAR program at SEAS. Under the mentorship of faculty like Professor Samir Mitragotri and Active Learning Labs staff Avery Normandin and Melissa Hancock, students gained hands-on experience in cutting-edge bioengineering. From culturing cancer cells to mastering CRISPR, these young scientists dove deep into a range of complex topics.

Participants walked away prepared for their future careers. They learned not just lab skills, but also teamwork, perseverance, and the scientific method—skills that will serve them well for years to come. Thank you to all the staff and volunteers who made this program an invaluable experience. https://buff.ly/4cAYaOo

Last spring, a new class at SEAS aimed to combine computation with traditional design concepts to broaden the ways architects and designers can approach how they solve design challenges. ES138: Computing, Spatial Design, and Human Values” introduced students to a range of design and computational concepts, then challenged them to design final projects that could solve challenges in a range of design spaces, including robotics, materials science, architecture and fashion.

"“I was looking for an opportunity to bridge the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical application, ensuring that my values in design were not just conceptual but also tangible and actionable," said Joyce Lee, a grad student in the Master in Design Engineering program. "The course’s emphasis on computational techniques provided the perfect platform to combine these diverse influences, allowing me to put my learning into practice in a meaningful way.” https://buff.ly/3WX1CwX

Watching her mother struggle with both COPD and COVID-19 inspired Master in Design Engineering student Mimi Kigawa to found Zeph, which uses machine learning to help pulmonary disease patients track their rehab at home. Zeph is already in the market with several clinics and hospital partners, and is running several pilots with around 200 total patients. The company, which currently has six employees and is based in New York City, successfully raised its preseed funding, and Kigawa expects to begin its first seed round in the next six months.

“Every time we do a pilot, every session, it’s so gratifying to see patients be so grateful that they have this opportunity to make a new friend, have some time with a therapist and see the improvement in their lung function and quality of life,” she said. “As someone who’s really driven to build things and put them out into the world, this is all I could imagine doing and being glad to do. It’s about getting it in the hands of people who really need it, and figuring out the business model to wrap around it.” https://buff.ly/4dKDvZP

Interested in our Master in Design Engineering program? This new video has all you need to know about the two-year program, which is co-run by SEAS and Harvard Graduate School of Design.

The Master in Design Engineering (MDE) Program - Overview Faculty, students, and alumni discuss the Master in Design Engineering (MDE) program, including its curriculum, goals, accomplishments, and outcomes. Learn m...

There are millions more pets in the U.S. than veterinarians. SEAS alum Marc Atiyeh is aiming to help pet owners access veterinary medicine through Pawp, a veterinary telehealth service he co-founded with SEAS alum Andrew Malek and Cody Simons. In the past five years, Pawp has gone through multiple successful funding series, raising over $27 million. In 2022, Atiyeh and Malek were named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 – Consumer Technology list. This past May, the company announced a transformative partnership with Walmart.

“Our mission is to make pet care accessible and affordable for everybody,” Atiyeh said. “Digital healthcare isn’t going to replace physical healthcare, but the best outcomes happen when digital and physical work hand in hand. The reality is that people usually only go to the vet once a year, and they only go because something really bad is happening. Our deep belief is that the more touch points you have with a care provider, whether it’s a veterinarian or veterinary technician, the better the outcome for your pet, and the cheaper it is in the long run for your pocket.” https://buff.ly/3X67uVP

Lab-grown organs are a long-time "holy grail" of organ engineering that has yet to be achieved. New research from SEAS and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard have brought that goal a big step closer using a new 3D-printing method called co-SWIFT.
co-SWIFT prints double-layered vessels that are infused with smooth muscle cells and endothelial cells into living human cardiac tissue, and can even replicate patient-specific vascular structures.

3D-printed blood vessels bring artificial organs closer to reality New printing method creates branching vessels in heart tissue that replicate the structure of human vasculature in vitro

The SEAS post-baccalaureate program gives students a chance to develop graduate-level laboratory research skills in the 2-3 years after finishing their undergraduate degrees. This can help ease the transition from undergrad to graduate programs.

“I’m super glad I did it, because now I’ve honed in the research skills that I started to develop as an undergraduate,” said Maggie Vallejo, a former environmental science and engineering undergraduate concentrator at SEAS. “I definitely think more like a researcher, and I better understand that research isn’t linear.”

Six students have completed post-baccalaureate studies at SEAS since the program began in Fall 2021, with two more set to study here this fall. Five of the six are currently in, or about to begin, their graduate degrees, and the sixth is working as a lab technician in his former post-bacc lab.

“Post-baccalaureates programs are really great because they teach you how to be a successful grad student,” said Eva Langenbrunner, a returning post-bacc in the Harvard Microrobotics Lab. “The program goes over how to properly write research articles, which is something no one in undergrad teaches you how to do, but then you get to grad school and they expect you to know it. The biggest thing I learned here was how to structure a research project from beginning to end.” https://buff.ly/3xRNSuY

Master in Design Engineering (MDE) students Joachim Asare, Sangyu Xi, Hessan Sedaghat and Prachi Mehta build Enlight, an AI-based browser extension offering data analytics for blind and visually impaired business owners. The extension can interpret interactive or dynamic graphics based on inputted data, such as graphs and tables, then suggest questions it can answer for the user from the data. For example, Enlight could look at online data about product sales in a given month, then answer questions about which products sold the most.

“Nearly 96 percent of websites aren’t developed with accessibility features, so even screen readers hardly work, and users lose out on contextual understanding,” said Asare. “One major downfall especially is with complex data. A screen reader can’t really interpret a graph, because the HTML code doesn’t see it.”

Enlight placed third at the 2024 MIT Sloan Product Conference pitch competition. It was first designed during a core class in the MDE program, which is run jointly by SEAS and Harvard Graduate School of Design.

“We can also expand this into education for data science or business majors,” Xi said. “For visually impaired students, this can be a powerful tool for understanding what’s going on. Even if you can see the data, you might not understand what’s going on, and this tool is there to help with that.” https://buff.ly/4eNK52u

More than 100 students gather for Quantum Noir, a conference for individuals of color interested or involved in quantum science, nanoscience and engineering. Several SEAS faculty were among those who led sessions in the event hosted by the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems.

“This really was a missing link, in the sense that we’re not educating students in this space … and we’re letting that talent go do something else. We’re letting that talent go work on satellites, as opposed to working on semiconductors,” Wilson said. https://buff.ly/4cBiLT5

Athena Kan's career in tech entrepreneurship began with CS50, the SEAS introduction to computer science. While still at Harvard, she co-founded Coding It Forward, a non-profit that aimed to bring more young, technology-savvy people into government work. Now she's CEO at Dreambound, which helps connect people with job training and education opportunities.

“People who are looking to change careers use Dreambound to search for the right education that will help them get there,” she said. “We serve everyone, but the majority are adults who feel a little bit lost in their lives and are trying to figure out what to do next. We help them find everything from short certificate programs to a full four-year degree.” https://buff.ly/3zoUUaO

SEAS researchers describe their worst climate fears in Harvard Climate Action Week panel entitled “What Could Go Wrong?” In an overheated world, the forces of extreme weather, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss threaten to interact in ways that will challenge future generations with mass migration, epidemics, and interruptions in food production. These facts must be examined if people are to prepare.

“We must communicate the real risks more clearly so that we can prepare for what’s coming,” said moderator Daniel Schrag, Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology and Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering at SEAS. “Because we’re doing an experiment on the planet that hasn’t been done before. We are pushing Earth to a place that it hasn’t been for millions of years, at a rate that’s never happened before.” https://buff.ly/3xt0TuI

A research team at SEAS and Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University has developed a biodegradable scaffold material that can be locally injected under the skin and used to restimulate CAR-T cells after their administration to increase their therapeutic efficacy in killing tumors.

“Although our strategy needs to be translated to human needs and settings, it potentially offers a safe, and simple avenue on which to further improve CAR-T cell therapies in patients with poor responses,” said David Mooney, Robert P. Pinkas Family Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS and Wyss Founding Core Faculty member, who led the study. “It also could have future potential to simplify the extremely arduous and expensive manufacturing of CAR-T cells by transferring part of the process into patients’ bodies.”

https://buff.ly/4ccKfOY

Living through Hurricane Gilbert in Jamaica in 1988 taught Deika Morrison about the challenges of organizing disaster relief efforts. She'd eventually found Do Good Jamaica, a non-profit that’s undertaken a number of projects around early childhood development, climate and emotional resilience in Jamaica, and has provided a digital database that connects civic organizations looking to collaborate on other kinds of projects.

“We want to help organizations help each other,” Morrison said. “We have our own projects that we do, but we also help a lot of groups that have their own projects. The idea was that if people knew about each other, and the public knew that these resources are available, there would be more opportunities. I’ve had endless requests from people living overseas, for example Jamaicans living abroad but wanting to stay involved.”

https://buff.ly/4c18Feo

SEAS faculty discuss the science and ethics of solar geoengineering at a Harvard Climate Action Week panel at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability. Long considered taboo, the idea that humans might deliberately reflect the sun’s rays to cool the planet is today gaining mainstream attention. As humanity’s efforts to decarbonize continue to fall short, and the effects of climate change accelerate, scientific and policy circles are increasingly discussing solar geoengineering as a last-ditch effort to protect Earth from dangerous warming.

“I’ve done a lot of work building complex models. And that makes me inherently distrustful of models,” said Robin Wordsworth, Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental and Planetary Science at SEAS. What’s needed, he argued, are “larger experiments because our best models are only ever as good as the laboratory experiments that constrain them.” https://buff.ly/3RoK0Ik

For their senior capstone project, Ruben Fonseca, Nate DeLucca, Joey Liu, Blake Woodford, Cole Kuster, John Deneen and Denzel Ekes designed a low-cost blimp capable of measuring emissions from factories, traffic or wildfires for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The blimp could be a solution for tracking real-time emissions changes over large areas, which can be difficult using ground-based instruments or satellites.

“We wanted to build something that could stay in the air and measure these very important parameters over longer time periods than you can with any existing methodologies,” Woodford said. “We were trying to create a platform that others could use, and be very diligent in the documentation so even people without engineering backgrounds could still use it.”

The group split the project into four subsystems: guidance, navigation and control; power and propulsion; payload; and overall structure. Once the subsystems were completed, the blimp went through a test launch at Crow Island Airpark in Stow in central Massachusetts.

“One thing we learned from this project is that integration in the field tends to take much longer than you expect,” Ekes said. “The second flight test was significantly smoother. Everyone knew what to do, and we were able to get everything situated. It did fly and was able to collect data.”

https://buff.ly/4aZ9iUz

For their master's capstone project, SEAS students Sudhan Chitgopkar, Noah Dohrmann, Stephanie Monson and Jimmy Mendez built a machine learning model to extract information from limited partnership agreements, reducing the workload and complexity that financial firms face.

"These documents are long, verbose, and difficult to parse. As a result, entire legal teams are sometimes necessary to summarize these documents. The skills we’ve learned at SEAS helped us design and develop a cohesive and production-level application end-to-end. SEAS has taught us how to design good, robust, and versatile software and how to turn those designs into reality at scale to be deployed at companies of all sizes – which is hopefully the future for this project!" https://buff.ly/4ceF0y9

One seminar on the neurophysiology of visual perception forever changed Nambi Nallasamy. He's now an ophthalmologist and surgeon at the University of Michigan's Kellogg Eye Center, where his lab is developing ophthalmologic diagnostic tools that use computer vision and machine learning.

“Ophthalmology, and corneal transplantation in particular, gives me the opportunity to restore vision in a pretty dramatic way for patients with certain conditions,” Nallasamy said. “I can see a patient with a cloudy cornea, perform a corneal graft, and the patient can go from not seeing very much to seeing well and actually being able to function and get back to their day-to-day life. It reminds me every day of the impact that vision can have on a person’s life and drives me to build tools to help patients who can’t be healed with current techniques.” https://buff.ly/3RhQzMK

For their master's student capstone, project Susannah Su and Nathan Zhao used ChatGPT to develop tools to help frontline negotiators quickly process large amounts of documents ahead of the start of negotiations. The tools included a crisis negotiation simulator that helps train practitioners by simulating real-life scenarios using the voice-to-voice function in ChatGPT to actually practice negotiating with different stakeholders.

"Negotiators usually have to read through hundreds of pages of documents, extract and synthesize useful information to form their arguments and agenda for negotiations. In frontline or crisis negotiation, time is the key," the group said. "Hence, how to process and analyze a large amount of documents very quickly becomes an important question that negotiators care about. Using our tools negotiators will be able to reduce the time needed to go through and analyze all the documents from days to just minutes." https://buff.ly/3Re3rno

For their computational science and engineering capstone project, SEAS students Samantha Nahari, Rama Edlabadkar, Vlad Ivanchuk and Mitch Miller developed a drone-based computer vision system that can be rapidly deployed to assess disaster sites such as rail incidents. Train derailments can cause mass evacuations of towns, lasting environmental damage, and ongoing health concerns in the community.

"The're a critical need for rapid and effective incident assessment and management, especially in resource-limited areas where the local infrastructure and emergency response capabilities may be overwhelmed," the group said. "We developed a prototype for a lightweight, real-time object detection system that can enhance situational awareness immediately following rail incidents, providing real-time data crucial for coordinating emergency response efforts." https://buff.ly/4bB0Xr8

For a master's student capstone project, Yuhan Yao, Luis Henrique Simplício Ribeiro and two students from Politecnico di Milano used generative AI to analyze the collection of fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré and create designs that resemble his style.

"Our project employs data science and AI techniques to explore, manage, preserve, analyze, enrich, and augment a part of fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré’s archival database to demonstrate the possibilities of human-AI co-creation during the creative development phase and bridge fashion cultural heritage with innovative design approaches," the group said. "Besides the technical skills mentioned above, we learned about cross-cultural communication and virtual teamwork. We also learned a lot about generative AI with this project, both text-to-image generative models, and large language models." https://buff.ly/4aDzHa5

As a Ph.D. candidate at SEAS, Nick Lesica studied the intersection between neuroscience and engineering. He worked under Garrett Stanley, who'd pioneered research into the connections between visual stimulus and neural activity in the human brain.

“Because my experience up to that point wasn’t really related to neuroscience, to be able to see the kind of frameworks I’d become familiar with through my engineering studies being put to use in that application was a big moment," he said. "That really drew me to him and that sort of work, and I’ve been doing pretty similar things for the last 25 years.”

Lesica is now a Professor of Neuroengineering at the Ear Institute at University College London, where his lab studies the neurophysiology of hearing and hearing loss. He's also co-founded a biotech start-up, Perceptual Technologies, that is developing deep learning algorithms that could enable the next generation of hearing aids.

“The ear, when it’s healthy, has the ability to reshape sounds, and it does this in a highly nonlinear way,” Lesica said. "We do experiments where we record lots and lots of neural activity in response to lots and lots of sounds, feed those data sets to deep learning, and then develop essentially perfect replicas of the auditory system.” https://buff.ly/3WZKUi9

Check out all our photos from Thursday's 373rd Harvard Commencement! https://buff.ly/3USc0oU

Caroline Martin, Ph.D. in applied physics, will be pursuing postdoctoral research in biophysics at Brandeis University. “Starting over again doesn’t feel so scary now that I have my Ph.D.,” Martin said. “As a Ph.D., you don’t always see that you’re going on a path, but looking back you can really see it all come together and create a narrative that makes sense.“

Jonathan Alvarez, Ph.D. in materials science and mechanical engineering, will be continuing his research as a postdoctoral student in the Harvard Biodesign Lab, then applying for jobs in industry. His research focuses on quantifying muscle deformation as an indicator of applied force, which could be used to help control robotic exosuits, as well as prevent injuries, track recovery efforts or detect muscle atrophy in humans. “Within my lab, there’s a really strong sense of community, and the work that we do ties us all together,” he said. We’re trying to work on enhancing human performance and human function, and it’s a passion that all of the graduate students and staff members carry.”

Jamelle Watson-Daniels, Ph.D. in applied mathematics, will work as a research scientist in algorithmic fairness and artificial intelligence in society at Meta. Watson-Daniels arrived at SEAS as an applied physics student under Marko Loncar before switching to applied math under Dean David Parkes. “When I was being admitted in applied physics, there were just a handful of Black women in physics across the country, and at the time two of them were here as grad students,” she said. “The diversity of the student body was really important to me. switched fields and advisors, and had a great experience with both. I feel like I’ve gotten so much guidance, and it was a really ideal experience.”

Yaowei Li, Ph.D. in environmental science and engineering, will join the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Li will be co-hosted by Caltech and MIT, and his research will focus on the intersection of field measurements and computational models of climate change and atmospheric pollutants. “When we work in the field, we measure atmospheric pollutants on the molecular level,” he said. “But if we want to understand their global impact, we need to put those measurements into a computational model.”

Orhan Eren Akgun, completed the S.M. portion of his Ph.D. in computer science and will be back at SEAS to continue his research in the REACT Lab. “My lab here offers great opportunities for the research areas I’m interested in. We work on multi-robot coordination. I’m trying to make multi-robot teams more secure. I’m trying to make them resilient enough to work even when they’re hacked.”

Kehang Zhu completed the S.M. in computer science portion of his Ph.D. studies and will be back at SEAS to continue his research in the lab of SEAS Dean David Parkes. “I’ve reached a stage where I can independently conduct research instead of taking courses," Zhu said. "I’ve graduated from one state and am marching into the unknown.”

Maria Emilia Mazzolenis, S.M. in data science, will be conducting machine learning research and development in industry