Senior Capstone Projects

Students present posters during the BME Senior Capstone Symposium.

Senior capstone projects give students the opportunity to design solutions to real-world problems with guidance from faculty, researchers, or industry mentors. Working in teams of three to four, students identify a need, develop a proposed solution, and refine their experimental approach or prototype throughout the semester.

The capstone experience includes:

Project development: Teams identify a problem, define project goals, and develop an experimental protocol or prototype.
Mentorship: Students meet with their faculty, research, or industry mentors every two weeks and provide monthly progress reports.
Hands-on project work: Students dedicate approximately 15 hours per week to their projects over the 12-week semester.
Final deliverable: By the end of the semester, teams produce a preliminary solution or a set of analyzed and contextualized data that demonstrates the results of their work.

Please contact Assistant Teaching Professor Angela Lai at angela.lai@tufts.edu if you are interested in mentoring a team or are a student with questions about the capstone.

Course Options

The Research Capstone is a two-semester course sequence built around an open-ended research question. Students develop an NIH-style research proposal, define and carry out an experimental approach, and complete a final paper structured in IMRAD format.
The Design Capstone is a one-semester course offered in the spring and centered on an open-ended design problem. Students develop project deliverables that may include CAD drawings, a traceability matrix, and a design verification or validation protocol.