News & Events

04-18-18

Medical Engineering graduate student, Colin A Cook, has won third place at the 2017-2018 TigerLaunch Finals for his pitch on a phototherapy contact lens he has been developing with his advisor Professor Yu-Chong Tai. TigerLaunch is a national entrepreneurship competition, dedicated to building student founder networks. It is the largest student-run competition of its kind with events in Chicago, NYC, Paris, Seattle, and Princeton.  It had over 300 applicants in 2017 and over $30,000 in prizes.  Colin learned about the competition and was encouraged to apply while taking Professor Ken Pickar's class E/ME 103: Management of Technology. [ENGenious feature on Colin Cook]

Tags: honors MedE Yu-Chong Tai Ken Pickar Colin Cook

04-10-17

The course Design for Freedom from Disability (E/ME/MedE 105a) taught by Professor Ken Pickar and Andy Lin, a rehab engineer at Rancho Los Amigos National Rehab Center, has given undergraduate students Stephanie Moon and Lawrence Lee a new view of the power engineers have to benefit others. [Learn more]

Tags: MCE Ken Pickar Andy Lin Stephanie Moon Lawrence Lee

03-29-11

Students in Ken Pickar's course Entrepreneurial Development (E 102) have the opportunity to identify a technology currently under study at Caltech and develop a business plan for it. The ideas used by the students this year included a solid-state memory technology developed by Jehoshua (Shuki) Bruck, Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering. In this business plan the students proposed targeting Netflix and other high-volume streaming content providers. Another team pinpointed a new market for the vertical wind turbines of John O. Dabiri, Professor of Aeronautics and Bioengineering. A third team pitched a noninvasive method for breaking up arterial plaques using the concentrated-acoustic-pulse technology developed by Chiara Daraio, Professor of Aeronautics and Applied Physics. [Caltech Feature]

Tags: APhMS EE research highlights Chiara Daraio GALCIT Jehoshua Bruck John Dabiri Ken Pickar

12-10-10

The only way to pass Visiting Professor of Mechanical Engineering Ken Pickar's E/ME 105 class, Product Design for the Developing World, is by designing something—a machine, a tool, a gadget, a process—to help improve the lives of the billions of people in the world who live on two or three dollars a day. [Caltech Press Release]

Tags: research highlights MedE MCE Ken Pickar

10-28-08

Popular Mechanics honored a group of Caltech alumni at its annual Breakthrough Awards ceremony on October 15. Rudy Roy ('07), Ben Sexson ('07), and Daniel Oliver ('07), along with Art Center alum Charles Pyott, received the magazine's Next Generation Award for establishing the nonprofit organization Intelligent Mobility International (IMI). IMI's mission is to empower people with disabilities in developing countries by designing and producing safe, affordable wheelchairs made for the rugged terrain of rural communities. The project originated in 2006, in a Caltech class called Product Design for the Developing World, which is taught each fall by Visiting Professor of Mechanical Engineering Ken Pickar.

Tags: honors MedE health MCE Popular Mechanics alumni Ken Pickar