Chair's message

Dear ME Community,

As engineers, we are always striving to reach new heights. Often, the expression is figurative, referring to a better product design or, perhaps, the next phase of our careers. For the Tufts rocketry team, the expression is very literal, as they worked throughout the past year to prepare for the Spaceport America Cup, where university teams from across the globe sent their rocket high into the atmosphere. The team’s efforts culminated in June with a launch achieving an astounding 9,500 feet. This is a great example of Tufts students channeling their energy and learning to achieve a goal as a team. You can read more about the rocketry team in this issue.

In a different sense, the Department of Mechanical Engineering reached a new height this spring in terms of our first-year major declarations. We saw roughly 100 students declare as mechanical engineers and 12 declare as human factors engineers, which will make for the largest sophomore cohort in department history. To match this soaring enrollment, we are working hard to grow the faculty in parallel. Markus Nemitz joins the faculty this year as an assistant professor who specializes in 3D-printed robots. We will soon launch new faculty searches to further expand our expertise in robotics and computational mechanics. Under the leadership of teaching faculty Gary Leisk and Briana Bouchard, we are also working hard to realign our core facilities in Bray Lab to add more capacity for hands-on projects.

Soaring to new heights is indeed an important theme for engineers, but so is maintaining balance. When we’re pulled in many different directions—including commitments to work, family, and the community—it’s hard to decide where and how to spend time. That kind of balance is not something we teach in a feedback control class! But hopefully our students, with warm support from faculty and staff, are finding ways to balance all of their conflicting demands during their time on campus. I wish you both new heights and balance in your own life.

Best wishes,
Jason Rife
Professor and Department Chair
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Tufts University