Category: Student Highlights

This month we celebrate Black engineers of UF MAE and the legacies they are creating for future students and engineers of color. Follow along as we spotlight MAE engineers, their work, and their experiences.

On Wednedsay, December 6th, Dr. Persad’s undergraduate senior design capstone group presented at the Nuclear Sciences Building. This is a culminating design course for Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering students, and they worked to develop a conceptual design for external clients. This semester, student teams worked with the Astro Restoration Project (ARP), a not-for-profit, all volunteer […]

Carl Wisniewski did not set out to create a sonic shock wave that students could touch, but he inadvertently created one as part of his UF MAE undergraduate honors thesis research. Wisniewski, a recent UF MAE graduate now enrolled in the MS program, sought an inexpensive means to characterize choked flow through throttle bodies, also […]

After six years of hard work and competitions, UF’s SolarGators placed first in the 2023 Electrek Formula Sun Grand Prix, held June 27–July 2 at Heartland Motorsports Park in Topeka, KS. The student-run team, sponsored in part by both the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE), […]

Last November, the NaviGator team from the UF Machine Intelligence Laboratory (MIL) traveled to the land down under for the Maritime RobotX Challenge in Sydney, Australia. The competition, which involves boats being controlled by integrated autonomous robotic systems completing tasks on the water, featured teams from 20 universities in eight different countries. Prizes are awarded […]

MAE graduate research assistant Suhas Tamvada has made a major discovery in the field of heat transfer, a breakthrough that addresses a question debated in nucleate boiling science for decades. The research and its findings have recently appeared in the International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer.  Tamvada’s research, conducted alongside UF MAE’s Dr. Saeed […]

UF Aerospace Engineering Capstone students brought to life aircraft previously only imagined on-paper. Taking to the skies, these real aircraft flights culminated a new initiative by Dr. Ting Dong, a UF MAE instructional assistant professor to add a build / realization component to her EAS4710 Aircraft Design course. Previously, Dr. Dong’s senior design students produced […]

SWAMP Blimps, UF’s lighter-than-air vehicle team, made Hindenburgs out of their opponents at the 99++ Luftballons competition in November. Hosted by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), the event took place at Indiana University and also featured teams from Baylor University, West Virginia University, George Mason University, and Lehigh University.  The matches consisted of an […]

The Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society held its annual convention from September 28 – Oct 1, 2022 in Knoxville, Tenn. The University of Florida chapter, “Florida Alpha,” was recognized as the R.C. Matthews Outstanding Chapter, an award which goes to the chapter determined to be the best out of over 250.

Graduate research assistant Sidharth Sanadhya made a significant and consequential discovery in the field of separation science earlier this year, and submitted a 150-page paper on it that was accepted for publication by the Journal of Molecular Liquids. The paper, which was published in the JML this month, described Sanadhya’s work on predicting phase separation […]

During the first week of July, the Solar Gators student engineering team left the swamp to head west and manifest destiny on the wide-open prairies of the heartland. And the challenge that awaited them in Topeka, Kansas, was the Formula Sun Grand Prix. At the FSGP, teams from universities across North America race solar-powered cars […]

In a field of 60 teams at the NASA Student Launch competition on April 23, UF’s competitive rocket design team, Swamp Launch, blasted its way to 4th place overall in the launch category and 3rd place for the payload design award. The event, hosted at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama, is an annual […]

UF’s Formula SAE team zoomed to the second best result in its 31-year history at the Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan. Out of 100 teams representing universities from six countries, Gator Motorsports finished third place overall. The team’s only higher finish was second place in 2015. For FSAE competitions, students spend a year designing […]

The atrium of the Herbert Wertheim Laboratory for Engineering Excellence was transformed into a modern Colosseum on April 9, when mechanical gladiators from all over the state descended on UF for the Scuffle in the Swamp. The first open battlebots event ever to take place at UF, the tournament was hosted by Gator Robotics, a […]

“What makes me proud to be a black engineer and represent the black community in this field is just being able to be a role model,” says Ciku Makumi, a current Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering student. Makumi recently completed a master’s degree in mechanical engineering with a minor in electrical and computer engineering at UF […]