Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations Debut in Capstone Course

By Patrick L. Kennedy

A new slate of interdisciplinary endeavors joined the roster of ENG’s capstone Senior Design Projects this year, resulting in promising developments in technology for applications ranging from lobstering and carpentry to molecule imaging and kidney health.

The Senior Design Project is a year-long, hands-on team effort that caps off the Boston University College of Engineering undergraduate experience. Integrating and applying the knowledge they have gained over their four years at ENG, students design and prototype products or devices that seek to solve real-world problems, often for real-life clients in industry.

Teams composed of different majors are not unheard of, but 2022 was the first year a series of intentionally interdisciplinary projects was offered to all students. Six teams assembled to take up these challenges, and the results of this experiment were promising.

demo close up fish project
A PUCKFish team member demonstrates the marine data collection system.

PUCKFish, for example, earned the award for “Best Electrical & Computer Engineering Project,” even though three of the team’s five members were Mechanical Engineering majors. (Each team was assigned to one of the three departments in order to receive consistent faculty guidance, explains Associate Professor of the Practice Bill Hauser, who coordinated the ME Senior Design Projects.)

The device aims to bring the lobster industry into the 21st century. By collecting data on six key metrics of marine life, the PUCKFish system would enable fishermen to place traps more efficiently—in areas of the sea floor that are most likely to hide lobsters—thereby meeting regulatory standards and reducing the incidents of whale entanglement in fishing gear.

The clients for the device are two ENG alumni, Andy Whitman (’19) and Anthony Byrne (’19), co-founders of the marine startup Fathom Fishing. Most of the PUCKFish team members had previously worked alongside Whitman and Byrne in the BU Rocket Propulsion Group.

“Andy was from a lobster fishing town and saw a need for data-driven trap placement,” says team member Victoria Thomas (’22). “As we had had experience working on aerospace projects, we were easily able to transfer over to marine projects. These two mediums are surprisingly similar, as they are both harsh environments with high or low pressure on a device.”

Another joint ME-ECE project, NanoPack, was an invention designed for the firm NanoView Biosciences. It’s an automatic packaging device that uses a robotic arm and a tweezer actuator to place silicon chips in a packing container, speeding up the production of NanoView’s signature molecule imaging device.

NanoPack has been accepted to the 2022 Capstone Design conference in June at the University of Texas at Dallas, says Associate Professor of the Practice Alan Pisano (ECE), who oversaw the ECE projects.

“I am a big fan of our new approach to interdisciplinary project teams as they bring perspectives to the design team from multiple disciplines,” says Pisano. “Since all the students on the team work together with the same schedules and deliverables, they can work together as a cohesive design team.”

“Overall the two interdisciplinary teams [in Biomedical Engineering] were very strong,” says Associate Professor Darren Roblyer (BME).

One of those, Team 37, was composed of BME and ECE students who crafted a digital biopsy device that uses an image processing algorithm to find key indicators of kidney disease.

“When I spoke with the students about their experience,” says Roblyer, “the ECE student said he learned much more about biology and medicine than he anticipated or was exposed to in the ECE curriculum; and the BME students said they learned much more about deep learning than they had exposure to in BME.”

“More than just new skills, we were exposed to a new way of thinking about and approaching problems through these interactions,” says Aksel Laudon (’22) about his experience. “We also had to better master our own expertise in BME and biology concepts in order to convey them in simple terms to someone from another field. The interdisciplinary characteristic improved the development of our teamwork and communication skills.”

Hauser says the team of Senior Design Project coordinators hope to fine-tune the process of offering interdisciplinary projects in the coming years, building on the early success of the pilot program.