Bioengineering alumna earns SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member award

Recent UC San Diego alumna Elizabeth Heyde, who earned her master’s in bioengineering in 2021, is one of 10 students in the country honored with the Society of Women Engineers’ Outstanding Collegiate Member Award. Heyde will be recognized at the SWE national conference on October 21-23 in Indianapolis. 

Heyde has been involved in SWE from her undergraduate years at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, through her time as a graduate student at UC San Diego, and even now as a working professional. Her main goal through SWE has been to reach out to the next generation of engineers, to help them have a better understanding of their options. 

As an undergraduate, Heyde helped develop the SWENext outreach program for students in grades K-12, launching 11 local SWENext clubs. SWENext provides young students with access to programs, mentors, and resources designed to develop the leadership skills and self-confidence to succeed in engineering and technology careers.

She continued to be involved in outreach through SWE at UC San Diego, where she advised the chapter on their SWENext activities, and served on the Edge and Envision outreach event committees. 

At the SWE national level, Heyde is a work group lead for SWENext Clubs on the SweNext and Student Programs committee, and is a work group lead for Training Adult Advocates on the Outreach Committee. 

“I'm really passionate about outreach to younger students in general,” said Heyde. “I was really lucky because my parents made sure I was exposed to all sorts of different things. I got to really choose what I was interested in, and STEM was one of those things. I realize that’s not something everyone has the benefit of, which is why I'm passionate about outreach and why I got involved with SWE.”

Though she initially joined SWE to help young students learn about engineering, Heyde said she wound up finding a vital sense of community through the organization, as well.

“I’ve had a lot of great experiences through SWE in general,” she said. “It was a community I didn’t realize I was lacking until I joined, and realized there were a lot of other like-minded people, especially women, who had similar industry and career goals. They really resonated with things I wanted to do in my future so I got to be around a lot of those like-minded individuals, and I made a lot of friends.”

As a student at UC San Diego, Heyde, who is now a research and development engineer at Medtronic working in their structural heart group on heart valve therapies, was part of a team of engineers and physicians rapidly developing an emergency ventilator for COVID-19 patients. The team developed a low-cost, easy-to-use device built around a ventilator bag usually found in ambulances. The UCSD MADVent Mark 5, as it’s called, cost just $500 per unit, compared to $50,000 for state of the art models. 

“This was a cool project because there was an immediate impact, which resonated with me and is why I’m interested in medical devices in general,” said Heyde. “I think a lot of times with research, the length between working on something and seeing its impact on patients can be huge. I was lucky to work on a project that had such an immediate impact.”

Students get hands-on with Summer EnVision Experience

Blake Iwaisako and Zoe Tcheng work
in the EnVision Arts and Engineering
Maker Studio

 A team of five UC San Diego undergraduate students spent the summer developing a device to help TaylorMade Golf study how minute differences in the golf balls they produce affect the balls’ performance. The 10-week Summer EnVision Experience (SEE) internship brings students from across campus and from various engineering disciplines together to collaborate on a project sponsored by a partner company or organization.

SEE was designed by the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering to provide sophomore and junior students with hands-on experience creating, pitching and developing a project from start to finish. During the internship, students gain hands-on experience with the wide array of tools available in the EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio. For Zoe Tcheng, a bioengineering student, SEE gave her the opportunity to develop her computer modeling skills, and ultimately confirmed her choice of major.

Ariel Navarro builds
a prototype of the
manufacturing pipeline

“I definitely got better at soldering, I soldered most of this printed circuit board here,” Tcheng said. “It was rough at the beginning but I got a lot better. And I learned some modeling, which is what I was really interested in. I learned a lot of arduino coding, which I had done in class before, but not as fleshed out as this project and not with as many components.

“What I figured out from this is that I definitely don’t want to do mechanical engineering,” said Tcheng, laughing. “The track I’m in as a bioengineer is biosystems, so we’re more kind of more electrical engineering focused. This experience reinforced that I prefer that, and enjoy the soldering and programming.”

Yichen Xiang works on electrical
components of the team's device

For electrical engineering student Ariel Navarro, SEE not only helped him develop more skills using the tools and machinery at EnVision, but helped him see the reality of their limits, as well.

“At first it was a lot of knowledge to dig into, because there are so many different things to learn; we’re 3D printing, using CAD for parts, laser cutting. It was a little overwhelming,” said Navarro. “But thankfully we were taking it one step at a time. One of the things you don’t understand until you experience it, is that a lot of machines aren’t as precise as you think. And even though it’s just a little bit off, it can throw the whole piece off. Right now for example, we have to redo a component because the hole a pipe will fit in is just a little bit too big, and the pipe is wobbling inside. So even though we measured it, it’s not always exactly precise.”

The students also said they came away with a greater understanding of what it means to collaborate as a cross-disciplinary team.

Caitlin Kim uses the laser cutter
at EnVision

“I learned a lot, especially with teamwork,” said Tcheng. “Because we were here together four days a week, for 10 weeks.”

Navarro agreed, noting that no matter how technically skilled you are, communication is still key.

“Working on a project like this, I learned to communicate,” he said. “You’ve got to make sure you’re letting people know what you’re doing and your timing. You have to maintain constant communication when you’re working with other people.”

In previous years, SEE interns have worked with the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography to develop the aquarium’s first virtual reality exhibit; a sound-matching game to share complicated whale call research with the public; and an exhibit focused on the albedo effect and an interactive RFID system. The internship was cancelled in 2020 due to COVID-19.

STARS summer research program goes virtual

The ongoing pandemic didn’t stop students from gaining valuable hands-on research experience this summer through the SummerTraining Academy for Research Success (STARS) program at UC San Diego. Melissa Lepe, an aerospace engineering student at UC Irvine, got creative with her STARS mentor—UC San Diego structural engineering professor Ingrid Tomac— to find ways to gain data analysis skills while advancing our knowledge of mudslides.

“When there are forest fires, mudflows often occur after the fire,” said Lepe. “And in Tomac’s Geo-Micromechanics Research Group, we wanted to study the exact patterns of behavior during those mudflows, so we studied the soil particles and how they attach to air particles, to try and really see what we can learn about their movement, and what we can predict to establish better building infrastructure and warning signals for mudslides.”

 Since the research experience was virtual, Lepe and her graduate student mentor, UC San Diego structural engineering PhD student Wenpei Ma, tag teamed the research process. Ma would conduct experiments using very high resolution cameras in Tomac’s lab, and send some of the resulting images and footage to Lepe to analyze. 

“My graduate mentor is working on different types of samples, testing different types of sand to see how fine, coarse and medium sand behave during a mudslide. He takes high resolution footage of these particles moving around during tests so we can see how they bind with each other and make aglomerate, a combination of sand and air particles. He uploads the videos remotely to a drive, and I analyze them from here.”

 From this high resolution footage, Lepe is able to track these very small particles as they move during the experiment, following a single particle across a span of time to see how it behaves, which particles it is drawn to, or if particles in the aglomerate separate when they come in contact with another particle. Tomac’s team will use this information to try and answer questions about how the size of sand particles impacts the speed of mudslides; how gravity impacts different sizes and shapes of particles; and ultimately what we can do to mitigate the impacts of mudslides. 

In addition to this research, the STARS program provides students with GRE and grad school prep; a series of speakers on topics ranging from imposter syndrome to different paths to grad school and the breadth of careers possible with a graduate degree; leadership activities; and a community of students to support one another.

 “I’m a first generation college student so I didn't even know what to expect when it came to applying to graduate school,” said Lepe. “I thought the GRE was just another SAT, and in some ways it is, but there are other components. So having the GRE class definitely helped me see what to expect, but also learn ways that I could effectively study and approach the exam.” 

Lepe said the community building aspects of the STARS program, even virtually, were also particularly helpful.

 “It’s more than just a one summer research program--it’s about finding a community with other like minded individuals and finding ways to build up one another and potentially become more than just people you met during the program, but a resource in the future or someone you could reach out and talk to. It’s definitely about making connections that are more impactful than one summer.”

 Lepe, who has conducted research on renewable energy and power plants at UC Irvine, plans to earn a PhD with a focus on energy systems and propulsion in aerospace, working toward energy alternatives to create more sustainable airplanes. 

 Learn more about the STARS program: https://grad.ucsd.edu/diversity/programs/stars/index.html