Olin College Announces the Senior Capstone in Engineering Program (SCOPE) Projects For 2019-2020

The 2019-2020 Senior Capstone in Engineering (SCOPE) program officially got underway in September. Fourteen corporate partners have signed on to sponsor SCOPE teams made up of Olin seniors. It is SCOPE’s fifteenth year. 

The sponsors include: Amazon Robotics, Arthur G. Russell, Boeing, Boston Scientific, CUAHSI, Ford Motor, GE Healthcare, Microsoft, Pfizer, Santos Family Foundation, Sonos, Toyota, Valve Corp and Watts Water Technologies.

While there are some familiar names on this year’s list, with Boston Scientific the longest serving corporate partner for SCOPE engaging in 18 projects over the past 15 years, there are some new companies including Arthur G Russell, Pfizer, and Valve Corp.

For Olin seniors, SCOPE is the culminating experience of their education. In this full year course, students work in multi-disciplinary teams of four to five students, engaging in real-world engineering projects for their partnering corporate clients. The students are responsible for virtually all aspects of the project.

“Our SCOPE student teams this year are helping their sponsors by developing product enhancements, addressing manufacturing challenges, exploring new products, and improving user experience in a broad range of industries and services,” said SCOPE Director Scott Hersey. “The fact that the majority of sponsors return each year to ask a small team of engineering students to tackle a project of significance is an endorsement of the creativity, depth, and impact that Olin students have – highly unusual for undergraduate students.” 

This year students will work on a range of engineering problems including developing software to help safety officials with crash site reconstruction, improving measurement of atmospheric data, assessing and developing tools for successful human/machine interfaces, reducing the risk of Legionnaire’s disease, and working on accessibility for people with impaired vision.

Watts Water Technologies decided to sponsor a SCOPE project for the second year in a row. Joe Burke, Manager of Research and Technology explains why: “Last year the students developed a proof of concept and proved a hypothesis for a product in a really interesting space.  This year the students will take it to the next level, building a minimum viable product where the output will allow me to engage a product manager and get the product into customer’s hands. The students truly augment my team and our capabilities with their creative thinking.”

In addition to Hersey, there are three SCOPE faculty advisors: Alessandra Ferzoco, Visiting Professor of Measurement Science, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Alisha Sarang-Sieminski and Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science, Lynn Andrea Stein. 

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