Season's Greetings! | Case School of Engineering | Case Western Reserve University

Wishing you happy holidays and numerous successes in the new year!

Case School of Engineering's year has been filled with research breakthroughs and academic advances. Explore just a few of our year's highlights:

12+ sensations felt with a prosthetic hand

With the help of $15.9 million in funding from DARPA, researchers at Case Western Reserve University and the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Administration Hospital have developed an advanced prosthetics system that restores the sense of touch, allowing wearers to distinguish between more than a dozen different sensations via a collection of pressure sensors tapped into the user's residual nerves. MIT Technology Review heralded the project as one of the best biomedical stories of 2015, and the work made national headlines with features in TIME and the New Yorker. Recently, the team has further expanded the usefulness of the system with the ability to also distinguish between levels of pressure.

11 hours scanning an ancient statue to solve an art mystery

A piece of 21st-century technology at the university's Sears think[box] helped solve a 6th-century puzzle at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Curators and conservators at the art museum had been trying to match a fragment to a stone statue of Krishna for decades, but the pieces never seemed to fit together correctly, leaving experts wondering if they were indeed part of the sculpture in Cleveland's collection or if they belonged to similar statues at a museum in Cambodia. The museum turned to Sears think[box], which used 3-D imaging technology to scan the pieces and compare the fragments to the full sculpture in digital form, proving they did indeed match. Learn more about this bit of high-tech detective work.

10 students developing apps for Microsoft HoloLens

On the heels of Cleveland Clinic and Case Western Reserve announcing their partnership with Microsoft to develop the company's augmented reality technology HoloLens into a teaching tool, engineering students got to work directly with Microsoft HoloLens to create their senior design projects. The results of mixing innovative young minds with radically disruptive technology: eureka-worthy apps that make it easier to play music, track energy usage and more. Explore the students' apps in action now.

9 test fault locations on a custom-built laboratory scale power grid

Thanks to a unique model energy grid, researchers at Case Western Reserve University can conduct experiments on the power system without risking sweeping blackouts and aggravating disruptions. Custom-built by university researchers and Rockwell Automation—with support from the Department of Energy—this table-top system mimics a full-sized power grid, including nodes representing traditional power generators like fossil-fueled power plants, a mix of renewables and energy storage devices, and three categories of power consumers: residential, commercial and industrial.

8 plugs and ports on a student-built solar-powered table

This spring, students built a picnic table outfitted with two 90-watt solar panels and a battery pack to serve as an outdoor charging station that features both USB ports and AC plugs, allowing multiple users to charge their devices. The program was a pilot for the ThinkEnergy Fellows program—a new initiative spearheaded by the Great Lakes Energy Institute designed to connect students with faculty, companies and communities around energy topics. Learn more about the charging station and energy literacy program.

7 floors of Sears think[box]

In the fall of 2015, the doors were opened on the first phase of the university's innovation and entrepreneurship center—the Larry Sears and Sally Zlotnick Sears think[box], which occupies the 50,000-square-foot Richey Mixon Building and follows the innovation process from ideation to incubation. The innovators' paradise is open not just to CWRU faculty, staff and students, but also to the entire community with no entry cost. Floors two through five are now open, with six and seven scheduled to open in the fall of 2017, and floor one to follow. Explore all the innovation resources of Sears think[box] now.

6 turbines on Lake Erie

Civil engineering researchers at Case Western Reserve are helping a local company build a wind farm off the shores of Lake Erie. Project Icebreaker has spent four years in the making since LEEDCo—the Lake Erie Energy Development Corporation—and Case Western Reserve won a $4-million grant from the Department of Energy to design an offshore freshwater wind farm. The company won a $40-million grant from the DOE this year to get the six-turbine pilot project installed by the end of 2018. University civil engineering researchers have been analyzing core samples from the lakebed to help inform the foundation design and will continue outfit the turbines with a series of sensors to monitor performance once the farm is up and running.

5 new courses for our data science major

Case Western Reserve University officially launched one of the country’s few undergraduate Bachelor of Science degrees in data science and analytics in 2016. Housed in the engineering school, the program expands on the success of the university’s data science minor, which launched in 2013, and will focus on real-world applications. The curriculum includes a number of new Internet-of-Things-related courses developed as part of the rollout of the university’s new Institute for Smart, Secure and Connected Systems, or ISSACS.

4-hour life span for a biohybrid robot

University researchers have utilized organic tissue and 3-D printed parts to develop a "living machine"—a biohybrid cyborg robot designed for search and rescue operations. The 2-inch-long biohybrid robot features living sea slug tissue, because it's designed by nature to function underwater. The robot is built around a single muscle from a sea slug's mouth, which provides movement—the robot can crawl when stimulated by an external electrical field. The research team envisions swarms of these hybrid 'bots scouring the ocean floor in search of a black box recorder, for example, or rooting out the source of a toxic leak in a pond. Learn more about the new crawling cyborg sea slug.

3 days of innovation

Case Western Reserve University, with significant leadership from the Case School of Engineering and Sears think[box], hosted its inaugural Innovation Summit Oct. 26-28, which featured more than 500 visitors and 80 speakers exploring various models of innovation. With speakers including Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Gallup CEO Jim Clifton, priceline.com co-founder Jeff Hoffman and ARPA-E director Ellen Williams, the summit explored the opportunities and challenges of various models of innovation at the global scale. Watch the highlights video now.

2 virtual hugs

We all crave connection, and sometimes, those closest to us are just too far away. Student and entrepreneur Xyla Foxlin invented a way to send long-distance hugs via wirelessly connected teddy bears. A patent-pending sensor system detects when one bear is hugged and transmits those warm fuzzy feelings via haptic vibrations to its pair-bear anywhere in the world. The mechanical engineering major has been hitting the road promoting her startup, Parihug, garnering attention, top prizes and funding from CES, Disrupt NY, Her Startup Global, South by Southwest and more. Learn more about the digital hug innovation and its creator.

1 controlled fire experiment in space

Space is an unforgiving environment, and a fire on board a spacecraft is one of the most dangerous situations astronauts can face. So why on Earth—let alone off it—would researchers light one in space on purpose? Because a better understanding of how flames behave in microgravity could help keep astronauts safer, which is why aerospace researchers at Case Western Reserve teamed up with NASA Glenn Research Center and scientists around the world to perform the largest fire safety experiment ever conducted in space. Learn more about the microgravity burn experiment, which was the first in a series of six.

and millions of brain waves traveling by new-found means ...

Chemical and electrical synaptic transmission and diffusion of ions are the known ways brain waves can travel—and now, thanks to the research of a university biomedical engineering team, a new method of brain wave propagation has been discovered. Using a small electrical field, individual cells in the hippocampus were discovered to be able to stimulate and synchronize neighboring cells, spreading brain activity layer by layer. The mechanism was noted as a method of transmission for epileptic activity—suggesting a possible novel target for seizure-blocking medicines. Learn more about the brain activity propagation now.