Student Profile

Meet Indigo Ramey-Wright, a senior at San Jose State University, majoring in Mechanical Engineering.

All the way from Santa Cruz, Indigo’s journey into engineering began in middle school when she discovered her love for Math and Physics. During her senior year, a new class, “Intro to Engineering,” was offered, where it explored fundamentals and worked with AutoCAD. While she only took it to work with her favorite teacher one last time, she soon realized the subject was slowly becoming her favorite as well. The excitement of applying physics and math alongside her creativity to understand how things interact fueled her determination and solidified her choice in engineering.

Choosing the SJSU College of Engineering was an easy decision for Indigo. The university’s supportive and accessible environment, along with dedicated advisors and professors who want to see students succeed in both classroom and professional settings, made her feel valued and set her up for success. The contrast with her experience at a larger university highlighted the importance of personal support and accessibility in her decision to choose SJSU.
Indigo is a recipient of the Silicon Valley Engineering Scholarship, a vital financial support that enables her to pursue higher education independently. Grateful for the opportunity, she acknowledges that she wouldn’t be where she is academically without the scholarship helping to relieve some monetary burdens.
Reflecting on her SJSU experience, Indigo wishes her pre-college self to get involved earlier. Despite starting during the pandemic, she wishes she had explored campus and club options sooner after the return to in-person activities. Currently a member of the Formula SAE team, she values the sense of community and teamwork it provides.

Looking toward the future, Indigo plans to continue her education and is passionate about Electric Vehicles. Aspiring to work as a Technical Program Manager or focus on process control and improvement within the industry, she envisions leading a team during the production season when a new vehicle launches.

Indigo Ramey-Wright’s story is one of dedication, passion, and the pursuit of excellence. As she continues her journey at SJSU and beyond, we know that her passion for Mechanical Engineering will leave a mark on the technology industry after graduation.

SJSU is Part of the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Project – Giving Hispanic and Low-Income Students a Hand Up!

David Parent demonstrates engineering concepts to Gavilan Community College Students as part of Project Engineering Success. Photo by Eugenia Ayala-Servellon.

When it comes to education, there can be many barriers to success, particularly for Hispanic and low-income students. First-generation students might not know about office hours, for example, or the best classes to take at a community college in order to transfer to SJSU and graduate in four years. Read the full story on the SJSU Blog written by Cassie Myers.

Black History Month Celebrates Lanny Smoot of The Walt Disney Company

Image courtesy of The Walt Disney Company

Renowned Disney Imagineer Lanny Smoot, known for his groundbreaking contributions to technology and invention, is set to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, a first for a Disney Imagineer. Smoot, a Disney Research Fellow, boasts a remarkable career spanning nearly three decades and over 100 patents, making him one of the most prolific Black inventors in the U.S. On May 9, a ceremony in Washington D.C. will be held to formally honor Smoot and fellow Class of 2024 inductees.

Smoot’s career highlights include iconic creations like Madame Leota’s “floating” ability in the Haunted Mansion, the extendable lightsaber for Disney Live Entertainment, and the Magic Playfloor on the Disney Cruise Line. His innovative work extends to international Disney parks, such as the Fortress Explorations adventure at Tokyo DisneySea and the interactive koi ponds at Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel.

However, the standout exhibit chosen by Smoot for his Hall of Fame induction is “Where’s the Fire?”, where he uses “X-ray flashlights” to melt away life-sized model rooms, emphasizing fire prevention through engaging challenges. Smoot is also the recipient of multiple Thea Awards, awarding individuals in the themed entertainment industry, and one of his current projects is called “HoloTile Floor”, a shared virtual reality experience.

Before his illustrious Disney career, Smoot earned degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University and worked at Bell Laboratories, contributing to early video-on-demand technology and video conferencing which is still the blueprint for many devices we use today. Smoot’s induction into the Hall of Fame marks a historic moment for Disney Imagineering and celebrates Smoot’s enduring legacy in the world of invention and entertainment.

HP event

For the first time since 2019, HP’s Bay Area Black Employee Business Impact Network is proudly hosting Black Students Day (BSD) for college freshmen and sophomores!

BSD offers Bay Area students a unique exposure to careers at HP in a variety of fields and help build pathways into their chosen careers with HP, including:

• Educational workshops
• Panels
• Site tours
• Informal networking

Students can speak directly to HP personnel and ask questions about their personal experiences, career choices, and educational paths. BSD helps students bridge their academic experiences to their professional goals through communication with business leaders and exposes them to opportunities at HP to achieve those goals.

BSD will be held on February 09, 2024, at HP headquarters in Palo Alto from 9:00 am – 2:30 pm.
Registration deadline: February 05, 2024
We look forward to hearing from you and hopefully meeting you at BSD 2024!

Artificial Intelligence: A Double-Edged Sword for Environment and Climate by Prof. Ahmed Banafa

Artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force in the 21st century, reshaping industries, influencing social interactions, and even venturing into the realm of environmental protection. However, its impact on the environment and climate remains a complex and multifaceted issue, riddled with both promising opportunities and potential pitfalls. Understanding these nuances is crucial for harnessing the power of AI for a sustainable future.

Read the full article…

Spartan Racing

What do you get when you combine sunny weather with the Spartan Racing team?  A whole lot of fun!  This past weekend (January 27 and 28), the Spartan Racing team hosted “Driver Day.”  This was an opportunity for recently graduated alumni who worked on the SR-14 electric vehicle, sponsors and a few select others to put their driving skills to the test.  The air was buzzing with excitement as corners were turned and drivers were all aiming for the best lap times.  Visit the team’s website to stay up to date with their activities.

We were deeply saddened to learn of Charles W. (Chuck) Davidson’s passing on March 25, 2021, and the college community is mourning his loss. An avid reader and lifelong learner, Chuck was a student of life and an ardent supporter of San José State University. 

San Jose Spotlight journalist Janice Bitters wrote of him in 2019, “Charles Davidson arrived in San José [from Eastern Oklahoma] a broke 21-year-old in 1952 seeking a way out of poverty and he’s spent the last 67 years forging his own lucrative path in the world. But he’s also quietly become one of Silicon Valley’s most unsung philanthropists.”

Chuck graduated from Civil Engineering (1957) after working nights in local railroad yards and attending classes during the day. An entrepreneur who founded and managed five thriving companies, he built thousands of homes, was a pioneer in creating and enabling affordable housing, and provided San José State with the largest private grant in its history: $15 million to the College of Engineering. 

“I’m not a saint by any stretch of the imagination, so don’t get the wrong idea about me,” Davidson told Bitters. “I’m a normal human being. I’ve had lots of good luck along the way and lots of good people around me.”

He also holds an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from SJSU. In 2007, the California State University Board of Trustees approved naming our engineering college after him in perpetuity. Chuck was quoted as saying: “I don’t believe the money I have earned is wholly mine. Providence has allowed me to be the manager and trustee of this money, and philanthropy comes with that responsibility — taking care of your employees, your business partners, your family, and your community.” 

Chuck was a founding member and chair of the Tower Foundation, the philanthropic arm of San José State. Throughout the years, he faithfully attended Spartan football games and served on the Tower Board.

Chuck has deeply enriched our lives, and the lives of our students: past, present and future. He will be greatly missed.

Read the campus announcement

Read more from the San Jose Mercury News

(L.to R.) Mark Heinen, Omron account manager – NoCal; Lou Freund, ISE professor emeritus, adjunct professor – CIM lab director; Tom Pham, ISE adjunct professor – CIM lab specialist; Yasser Dessouky, ISE department chair.

The Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) Lab in room 194 is now sporting an Omron Banner as well as a Hornet robot that is fully installed and working, looking a bit like an upside down spider. 

The College of Engineering is grateful to Omron for the company’s support of our engineering students. Omron’s VP of Marketing at the time, Matt Trowbridge, gave an SVLS talk a couple of years back (you can watch it here), visited the lab with faculty, and facilitated a key equipment grant to the college. Omron has continued to show significant support since then.

Lou Freund, CIM lab director and ISE professor emeritus, described the robot donated by Omron. “The Hornet, with its vision system, is a gantry mounted device that can “see” items, reach for them, grab them (with suction or grippers) and move them to another location (orienting as it goes).  It’s fun to watch, and we plan to have it very active during future open house events.” Find out more about the robot’s features here and here.  

He added, “Ours is mounted on a much larger gantry, and can slide along the gantry if it needs to be placed overhead in a different location.” Students will be able to work in the lab just as soon as SJSU gives the green light for post-pandemic safety and health.

A global solutions provider and an 80-year old company, Omron provides sensing, control, safety, vision, motion and robotics technologies for the automotive, food and beverage packaging, semiconductor, electronics, life sciences and infrastructure industries.

Pressure build-up (piston effect) in front of high-speed vehicles in tunnel.

Ever since Elon Musk proposed the concept of high-speed transportation using Hyperloop in 2013*, the efficient form for short-haul travel has been studied and modeled in the Mechanical Engineering department at San Jose State. The Hyperloop is a concept for the high-speed ground transportation of passengers traveling in pods at transonic speeds in a partially evacuated tube. It consists of a low-pressure tube with capsules traveling at both low and high speeds throughout the length of the tube.

The benefits of Hyperloop are immediately apparent: as an example, to travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a typical aircraft’s gate-to-gate travel time is one hour and 28 minutes, but the actual flight time is only 58 minutes while the remaining 30 minutes are taken up with taxiing, take off, landing, and arrival at the gate. Hyperloop pods could alleviate some of these inefficiencies by traveling in near-vacuum conditions, allowing them to maintain much higher speeds.

However, when a high-speed system travels through a low-pressure tube with a constrained diameter, such as in the case of the Hyperloop, it becomes an aerodynamically challenging problem. Airflow tends to get choked at the constrained areas around the pod, creating a high-pressure region at the front of the pod, a phenomenon referred to as the “piston effect.” 

Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Vimal Viswanathan and graduate student Aditya Bose just published their paper, “Mitigating the Piston Effect in High-Speed Hyperloop

Transportation: A Study on the Use of Aerofoils,” in the journal Energies 2021, 14, 464.

Comparison of the stream lines around the two pods. The phase 2 pod (with fins) led to fewer eddy currents compared to the phase 1 pod.

Papers exploring potential solutions for the piston effect are scarce. The SJSU team studied the aerodynamic performance of a Hyperloop pod inside a vacuum tube, using the Reynolds-Average Navier–Stokes technique for three-dimensional computational analysis. Then they added aerofoil-shaped fins to the aeroshell as a potential way to mitigate the piston effect. The results of their study showed that the addition of fins helps in reducing the drag and eddy currents while providing a positive lift to the pod. Further, these fins were found to be effective in reducing the pressure build-up at the front of the pod.

Viswanathan and Bose had been invited last summer to contribute to this first-ever special issue journal on Hyperloop transportation. “This is only the fourth paper published in English on the aerodynamics of Hyperloop, as well as the first three-dimensional CFD study on the Hyperloop,” said Viswanathan. “We used the Spartan Hyperloop team’s design for the study.”

*Musk, E. Hyperloop Alpha; Spacex: Hawthorne, CA, USA, 2013.

While California would address many issues in the development of 20th century state higher education, it can safely be said that San Jose State University and its College of Engineering’s challenge against certain restrictions in 1953 created a watershed in the development of the state university system’s role in California education, and made a significant and positive impact on what state schools could offer to meet the growing needs of the public.

As you read this timeline of developments between 1946 and 1960, it is helpful to know that the American Engineers’ Council for Professional Development (ECPD), established in June 1932, was an engineering professional body dedicated to the education, accreditation, regulation and professional development of the engineering professionals and students in the United States. ECPD grew and has changed its name to ABET, Inc. and its focus solely to accreditation.

1946: An Engineering program was founded at San Jose State College (SJSC), with Ralph Smith as its first full-time professor
1947: The state Board of Education first authorized engineering as a major with an AB degree.

1948: First graduating class of Engineering students– 3 degrees granted, 2 in comms, 1 in construction. That year, the Strayer Committee produced a survey of the Higher-Education needs of California. Results were against state schools offering professional engineering programs or programs that could be accredited by the ECPD. The state political lobby was against it, in part because many of the politicians came from University of California (UC) schools.

1949: Construction, Production and Communications majors were converted into BS programs, while Aeronautics and IT remained AB majors.

During the 1950’s, the California Board of Education prevented California state/normal schools from offering masters degrees. SJSC offered something more like a professional vocational degree. In 1950 and ‘51, meetings were held among representatives from the state department of Education, state colleges and UCs to resolve Engineering issues in state schools.

1952: Accreditation, graduate study and research were considered the business of the University of California schools only. State colleges were told to concentrate on training “practical engineers,” that is, technicians. Many industries in the valley, however, were not hiring grads without full engineering degrees, or would hire engineers who started at SJSC, but completed a full degree elsewhere in the valley (Santa Clara or Stanford).

1953: State Department of Education and the UC Regents unanimously approved restricting state schools from seeking ECPD accreditation, grad study, and engineering research, in an agreement called “Engineering Education in the State Colleges and the University of California.”

1956: There were now 946 students in the SJSC Engineering college. All curricula except Aeronautics were revised to meet ECPD standards, and functional names were changed. Construction became Civil Engineering, Production became Industrial Engineering, Electronics changed to Electrical. At this time the General Engineering program was created, so that there would still be a general engineer’s professional training track. Also during this year, Aeronautical Maintenance and Aeronautical Management were changed to BS degrees. Although accreditation was not possible at this time, the San Jose State professors tried to make them as close as possible to the accredited programs offered elsewhere.

Dean Norm Gunderson

Dean Norman O. Gunderson later said, “I became totally involved in the problem almost immediately upon my assumption of the Headship of the Division of Engineering and Mathematics in the summer of 1956 — the title Dean wasn’t granted until some years later. An industry representative walked into my office to inquire about the future availability of graduate work and accredited undergraduate programs — these were important lures when recruiting new engineering employees for the rapidly expanding industrial complex of the Valley. I explained the dilemma posed by the ’53 Agreement — and we were off and away into the exciting two years.”

1957: Application and Sales Engineering were phased out, and the Engineering Metallurgy (later to be called Materials Engineering) program was created. IBM’s request for a graduate program in Electrical Engineering at SJSC kicked off another battle to get the restrictions lifted for state schools. With the participation of local industry and government leaders and the assistance of Assemblyman Bruce Allen, Gunderson became the main state college voice for granting accreditation to state engineering degrees.

“As part of the strategy of dramatizing the harm done to us because of not being able to be accredited, I even wrote a detailed proposal for a $100,000 grant from the Atomic Energy Commission for a training reactor which was available only to accredited institutions.” — Dean Gunderson

1958: A Joint Staff study (headed by UC, DOE and Santa Clara U leaders) offered a compromise — they recommended that restrictions against seeking accreditation be lifted for state schools, but that they still not be allowed to create graduate programs. This concession was unacceptable to the San Jose leaders, and Bruce Allen counterproposed with AB 1, a bill proposing two changes to the state education code, broadening the state college charter to include training in engineering, science, and math, and to establish, with state BOE approval, courses of instruction leading to masters degrees in engineering.

As support for AB 1 grew, and the biases of UC-alumni politicians were no longer sufficient to defend the 1953 decision, the UC and state legislators came together to turn AB 1 into State Concurrent Resolution No. 9, which called for immediate granting of permission to state schools to seek accreditation and create graduate programs in colleges where there was local demand for advanced engineering education. SCR 9 passed quickly in April 1958. Now, State schools were granted permission to seek ECPD accreditation and offer masters programs. Having already made some programs as close as possible to accreditable status, San Jose quickly prepped for and hosted an ECPD site visit in Nov. 1958.

1959: As a result of AB 1 and SCR 9, San Jose was able to establish its first masters program, in Electrical Engineering. As a result of the ECPD site visit, ECPD granted accreditation to San Jose’s Civil and Electrical Engineering programs.

Still, conflict between state colleges and the UC had intensified over a host of issues, and resolution had been kicked back to the state legislature. The host of bills, amendments and resolutions on public higher education got streamlined into Assembly Concurrent Resolution No. 88, introduced by Dorothy Donahoe. It called for an immediate Master Plan for Higher Ed in California, and a survey team was formed to review and resolve all the issues in public higher education. In late 1959, the Regents and the State Board of Education approved the team’s findings.

Spring 1960: Legislation containing all the key features of the Master Plan was ratified in the State Assembly,
and named the Donahoe Higher Education Act of 1960. Signed into law by Governor Edmund Brown Sr., the Donahoe Act removed state colleges from the governance of the State Board of Education, and created the California State College system, with its own chancellor and board of trustees appointed to govern it. It also created the Coordinating Council for Higher Education, consisting of members from the UCs, state schools, junior colleges, private colleges, and members of the public.