A graduate student in mechanical engineering at the U, Nicolas Brown is the leading member of a team that is improving the lives of people with spinal cord injuries by creating a dock to help them participate in water activities. Jeffrey Rosenbluth, medical director of the Spinal Cord Injury Acute Rehabilitation program, hosts camps for […]
Topic: Student Innovation @ the U 2018
Scrap-Metal Sorting
Jake Salgado, a senior metallurgical engineering student, works full-time in professor Raj Rajamani’s development lab. Salgado and Rajamani are working on an automatic, scrap-metal sorting machine. When asked his role on the team, Salgado replied, “I am an engineer at heart. I like to build things. I identify what we are doing in the processing […]
Cleaner Transportation
At the age of 16, Sam Hirsch became a social entrepreneur when he founded CleanFare — a mobile app that gives points to people using clean transportation by walking, biking and taking the train or bus. The app allows users to log in and get points and achievement awards as it tracks their mileage of […]
Smart Shoes
For people suffering from Parkinson’s disease, walking can be increasingly difficult as the disease progresses. More than one million Americans live with Parkinson’s disease and suffer a significantly higher risk of falling than other populations. Roboticist and physical therapists at the University of Utah, however, have teamed up to develop a gait therapy using the […]
Monitoring Algal Blooms
A graduate student trio from three disciplines is collaborating to develop a high-resolution, low-cost spectral imaging drone to measure urban impact on water resources. “Urban influences play a huge role in water quality,” said Carly Hansen, a civil engineer about to deliver her dissertation on Utah’s water quality. Hansen met Casey Duncan (a geology student) […]
Tracking Air Quality
Kyle Tingey, a computer engineer passionate about innovation, has been instrumental in the design, development and integration of a “hyperlocal” air-quality monitoring solution for the Air Quality & U project (aqandu.org). As entrepreneurial lead selected by the U’s Technology and Venture Commercialization program, which helps commercialize new technologies developed at the U, Tingey’s Lean Canvas […]
Bruxit: Gnash, Bzzzt
If you suffer from bruxism, you know the symptoms. Gnashing and grinding your teeth in your sleep causes sensitivity and teeth to flatten and chip. The standard of care for this condition is to just treat the symptoms — aspirin for the pain, a teeth guard for the tooth damage. That is, until now. A […]
Exponentially Positive
Watching positive videos helped fourth-year dental student Alex Piedra stay motivated for exams, which gave him an idea. Frustrated with a lack of cutting-edge technology in mental health, he asked himself, “Why isn’t there an app that only gives positive feedback?” With support from faculty at the School of Dentistry, Piedra helped create MoodPal, a […]
Simulations of the Heart
As his senior research project, bioengineering student Stuart Loertscher is fixing problems of the heart with Lucas Timmins, the principal investigator at the Cardiovascular Pathomechanics Laboratory, a multidisciplinary group of researchers studying the role of biomechanics in cardiovascular disease. Using FEBio, a finite-element modeling software developed by the University of Utah’s Scientific Computing and Imaging […]
Tracking Virus Mutation
When the opportunity came to use new DNA sequencing technology, Thomas Sasani, a graduate student in the Department of Human Genetics, stepped up to the challenge. The traditional approach to sequencing DNA can be a very laborious process. Researchers extract DNA, cut it into tiny fragments and read each tiny piece, slowly attempting to put […]