Videos tagged engineering
(97) videos
Watch this video
BU Goes to the Moon | Behind the Scenes Featurette: LEXI Launch Diary
At 1:11am on January 15, NASA’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 spacecraft blasted into the sky from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, riding on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and destined for the moon. On board: a telescope designed and built at Boston [...]University. Postdoctoral researcher Emil Atz was watching the launch from the project command center in BU's Photonics building, on call to communicate remotely with LEXI in case anything went wrong. (Spoiler alert: Everything went great! But it was very emotional.)
More info
- 19 love it
- 0 comments
- 384 views
Watch this video
BU Goes to the Moon | Behind-the-Scenes Featurette: Mounting LEXI on Blue Ghost
In the video above, go behind the scenes at Firefly Aerospace’s operations center, as the LEXI telescope is mounted to Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander.
More info
- 9 love it
- 0 comments
- 145 views
Watch this video
BU Goes to the Moon | Behind-the-Scenes Featurette: Fancy (and Fragile!) Optics
In the video above, Professor Brian Walsh discusses the inherent risks of sending LEXI’s new, innovative optical technology to the moon.
More info
- 8 love it
- 0 comments
- 237 views
Watch this video
Electrical Engineering PhD Creates Unique Guitar Pedals
Playing guitar gave John Snyder a respite from long hours babysitting experiments in a clean room in the basement of Boston University’s Photonics Center as he worked toward his doctorate in electrical engineering. A gearhead since high school, [...]Snyder (CAS’14, ENG’20) melded his two interests, designing an effects pedal to use with the band he was playing in. It worked well, so he made a few more and sold them.
More info
- 18 love it
- 0 comments
- 114 views
Watch this video
How Math and Engineering Changed This Student’s Life: A Personal Story
When most people think of robots, what comes to mind is probably something with a hard shell, likely made of metal or plastic—and maybe shaped like a human. But when Boston University mechanical engineering major Sarah Alizadeh-Shabdiz thinks of [...]robots, she pictures a bendy, wiggly piece of rubber. Purple rubber. That’s because Alizadeh-Shabdiz (ENG’26) spent her summer doing research in BU’s Soft Robotics Control Lab.
Soft robots are just that: robots—or parts of robots—made from bendable, pliable materials, such as silicone rubber. Designers of soft robots often take inspiration from nature, looking at animals with naturally flexible limbs, like octopuses. The potential applications of their work are wide-ranging, from assisting with surgeries to engaging in search and rescue missions in difficult-to-squeeze-into places. In the Soft Robotics Control Lab, principal investigator Andrew Sabelhaus, a College of Engineering assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and his students are studying novel ways to improve how soft robots are controlled, as well as the fundamental physics underlying how they interact with the environment.
“Soft robots are understood in the scientific community to be inherently safer,” says Alizadeh-Shabdiz. This makes sense, intuitively: a robot arm made of soft rubber seems less likely to crush something than one made of hard plastic or metal. But it turns out that very little research has been done on exactly how much safer soft robots might be. Among Alizadeh-Shabdiz’s summer research projects was an experiment, funded by a grant from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, designed to measure the force one of the lab’s soft robot limbs can exert on an object.
In the video above, find out why Alizadeh-Shabdiz needed the help of Toys“R”Us to complete her study and how her love of mathematics inspires her research—and her goal of becoming a teacher.
More info
- 16 love it
- 0 comments
- 358 views
Watch this video
Comparing Majors: Mechanical and Biomechanical Engineering... What's the Difference?
Everywhere he looks, mechanical engineering major Paul Ferrer (ENG’24) sees physics and math at work: the efficiency of an air-conditioning system, the weight that a structure can carry, the ability of a plane to become airborne. For biomedical [...]engineering major Arjavi Vyas (ENG’24), her academic life is not only physics and math, it’s also biology, human physiology, and chemistry.
In the latest installment of our video series Compare Mode, which pairs two Terriers from similar majors and asks them to talk about what makes their respective programs unique, Ferrer and Vyas discuss the academic demands of their program, the career possibilities available to them, and (surprise!) the unexpected upside of homework. Take a look.
More info
- 33 love it
- 0 comments
- 473 views
Watch this video
Who Are the Stateless? Director of BU Center on Forced Displacement Explains.
The scale of the global refugee crisis is widely reported—and staggering. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, over 110 million people globally have been forced to flee their homes; that’s more people than live in [...]Egypt, Germany, or the United Kingdom. But less well understood, less seen—some would say invisible—are the four to six million people around the world who have no home country at all. These people are described as “stateless,” meaning they are not formally recognized by any state or government. “As far as the state is concerned, they actually do not exist,” says Muhammad Zaman, director of Boston University’s Center on Forced Displacement and a College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering.
Zaman grew up in Pakistan, where as many as a million ethnic Bengalis are forced to live on the margins, without access to government identification, schools, or hospitals. “They are not part of any census, they’re not part of any counting,” says Zaman. “And because of that, their numbers may be even greater than we estimate.” Stateless people often live in informal, urban settings that leave them vulnerable to the worst effects of natural disasters and the impacts of climate change, he says. For these same reasons, stateless communities can pose challenges for researchers attempting to understand just how they came to be citizens of nowhere, and what can be done to help. “Simply recognizing that these people exist is an important first step,” says Zaman.
In our latest video mini explainer, Zaman tells us how so many people fall through the cracks—even here in the US.
More info
- 20 love it
- 0 comments
- 345 views
Watch this video
Boston University 2022 DeLisi Lecture, Dr. Zhiping Weng
Dr. Zhiping Weng on 'Annotating Human and Mouse Candidate cis-Regulatory Elements in the ENCODE Project'
More info
- 22 love it
- 0 comments
- 2 views
Watch this video
Boston University Creating the Societal Engineer
All Engineers make things, but at Boston University College of Engineering, our Engineers make a difference. Focused on practical training and global impact, our students have the knowledge and leadership skills to move society forward.
More info
- 26 love it
- 0 comments
- 570 views
