How I've leveraged Interdisciplinary Collaboration to build up Cornell University Sustainable Design

Recently, I had the privilege to speak at Syracuse University as part of a speaker series for young Americans promoting social change. The event was sponsored and put on by the White House, and I had the opportunity to meet some white house officials, as well as some inspiring students who were doing work to better their communities.

I was specifically asked to come speak about the work I did to develop Cornell University Sustainable Design, and how we’ve used interdisciplinary collaboration to further our ability as students to impact both local and global communities with respect to increasing environmental sustainability. The entire event was 3 hours long, with lots of great speakers, but my part was about 10 minutes, and it starts at 36 minutes into the video linked below.

Click here to Watch the Event Recording (I start at 36 minutes in)

Speaking about the future of personal fabrication

It’s no secret that I’m excited about 3D printing. I work on developing electronics for Cornell’s personal printer, the Fab@Home, I own two MakerBot printers, and I’ve worked for MakerBot, designing electronics for their open-source 3D printers. Recently, one of Ithaca’s local news stations reached out to me and other members of the Cornell Creative Machines Lab about the future of 3D printing. In the embedded video below, we sat down with them to discuss the upcoming disruptive impact of 3D printers. Check it out!

I explain all about 3D Printing and personal fabrication

For the last several months I’ve been collaborating with about 8 other students as well as Cornell University’s Entrepreneurship department to develop a new way for students to bring their amazing ideas into reality. At Cornell, we have 7 seperate undergraduate colleges, each with amazingly smart people. Unfortunately, these students often don’t meet each other, and as a result, hundreds of potential entrepreneurial ventures are never formed. That’s where The PopShop comes in. We’ve opened the PopShop co-working space as a one month experiment right outside Cornell’s main academic campus. The “shop” is a bit like a cross between a hackerspace and startup incubator, with student entrepreneurs and innovators from all over campus working in the space every day! For the next month, we’ll have programming almost every day, with tons of great lectures by successful entrepreneurs, “office hours” where attendees can learn about things ranging from web developing to financial analysis, and social events. We only opened a week ago, but the space has already been a big hit (maybe it’s because we give unlimited free popcorn to everybody who works here). In addition to managing the space, I’ve been using it as a creative outlet to work on 3D printing, a solar tracking project, technology for hotel check-ins, and just some general hacking. Other students are working on art projects, apparel lines, smartphone-equipped laser tag guns, political tracking websites, microcontroller projects, microfunding plans, and more. I’ve started collaborating with hotel management students, economics students, art majors, architects, etc. I’m really excited to see what we’ll be able to do with this space, and I’m hoping its success will allow us to gather funding and keep it running well past the experimental month.

Already this week, we’ve been featured in the Cornell Daily Sun, and have been featured in one of their videos. We’ve had several talks, ranging from web development to outsourcing concerns, all led by student entrepreneurs who have worked intimately with these problems. Yesterday, I hosted a digital fabrication and 3D printing workshop, where I invited Cornell students and members of the community to come checkout my MakerBot 3D printers and to learn how they work. It was a blast, and there are some great pictures from the event below!

CUSD Team Leaders with Rick Fedrezzi, President/CEO of the USGBC

This was quite the week for Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD)! As I’ve talked about before, CUSD is a student-led design-build team working to redefine the way we think about sustainability. In the past, we’ve built schoolhouses and solar powered-homes. We’re currently working on an on-campus research facility (the SRF) and a sustainable community in Nicaragua. This week, SRF was awarded both a $1000 grant from the Cornell Alumni Association, and a $10,000 grant to perform geothermal heating/cooling research. Props to the many excellent CUSD team members who helped to prepare these grant proposals!

Perhaps the most exciting experience of the week was getting the opportunity to meet with Rick Fedrizzi, President and CEO of the US Green Building Council (USGBC). You might not be familiar with the USGBC, but you’ve probably heard of LEED certification, the rating system developed by USGBC for evaluating the sustainability of new and existing construction. LEED is a global standard against which design, construction, and operation of green buildings can be compared. Fedrizzi was visiting campus to give a talk about the USGBC, and CUSD was the only student group to meet with him during his whirlwind tour of the campus (especially Cornell’s LEED-certified Human Ecology Building). The meeting was a great success, and I look forward to the ways in which CUSD will be able to coordinate with the USGBC in the future, especially as we continue design of our on-campus research facility. As our meeting was wrapping up, Rick said to us: “You’re group is not normal. Students interested in sustainability don’t do this – they don’t actually act on it. But you are, and that’s absolutely amazing.” [Rough quote from memory]. Needless to say, that made my week!

"Every1 Deserves to have a Safe Haven"

The Every1 Campaign aims to prevent unhealthy sexual contact, empower survivors, give voice to those who choose not to label their experience, challenge common misconceptions, and encourage the community to talk about how to have healthy communication and sex. I’ve been able to contribute to the effort by participating in the photo campaign, helping to edit the introduction video, developing the social media presence, and developing/maintaining the website. I officially launched the website earlier this week, and am excited to be participating in a campaign that encourages such an important discussion to take place on college campuses.

The Every1 Campaign is certainly a bit out of my usual area of expertise, but I was excited to get involved along with many other student leaders on Cornell’s campus. The campaign is starting an important conversation on Cornell’s campus that I hope will decrease the quantity of non-consensual sex, and will encourage healthier sexual habits.

Teaching about Anodes, Cathodes, and Redox Reactions

This past Sunday a group of other CUSD students & I were invited to lead some workshops for young students at the USS Intrepid Museum in New York City. We held two demos, working with kids to build molecules out of gumdrops, and making potato batteries to turn on LEDs. The whole day was a ton of fun, and I really enjoyed teaching the several hundred kids who filtered through about electron flow, redox reactions, and series/parallel circuits. It’s great to see so many young kids excited about engineering and science! Check out some pictures from both our workshops, and around the Intrepid Museum, below:

This research was featured in IEEE Spectrum on 02/21/2012
This research was featured on the Wired Magazine’s “Beyond the Beyond” Blog on 02/21/2012
This research was featured on the Make Magazine Blog on 02/21/2012
This research was featured on the BoingBoing Blog on 02/22/2012
This research was featured on the Engadget Blog on 02/23/2012
This research was featured in the Cornell Chronicle on 02/27/2012
This research was featured on the Ponoko Blog on 03/01/2012

Me, inspecting v3 of the Truss Reconfiguration Robot that I helped design (Photo courtesy: Lindsay France/University Photography)

This past week, we finally uploaded the video for the “machine metabolism” robot that I helped develop in Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab over the past few years. The project was directed by Professor Hod Lipson, my research advisor, with the mechanical and iterative design being done by Franz Nigl, a former visiting scientist, and Shuguang Li, a former visiting Ph.D. student. I was responsible for the development of the electronics platform, and the software (written in C for an Atmega-based microcontroller) that was used in the robot shown in the photo above.

You can learn more about the goals of this project (and why we call it “machine metabolism”) on the lab’s research page, or in my portfolio. In short, this robot is capable of traversing a truss structure and reassembling it into a different configuration. Future implications include repair on the international space station, improved construction-zone safety, and autonomous skyscraper construction. Check out the video below to see it in action!

An overhead rendering of the proposed research facility

A rendering of the facility on an Ithaca evening

A rendering showing the facility's semi-exposed basement level

By far, my largest time commitment at Cornell is serving as Chief Executive Director of Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD). Our Sustainability Research Facility (SRF) is our current long-term project, and I serve as team leader (we have other international projects and local projects as well). SRF has the lofty goal of designing and building a first-of-its-kind “living laboratory” for interdisciplinary sustainability research on Cornell’s Ithaca campus. You can learn more about the goals of the project on the official website.

As of this semester, the team is comprised of about 150 students from over 20 majors around Cornell, and about a dozen faculty advisors. Recently, a subset of our architectural team completed renderings of what our 18,000 sq ft facility might look like. Be sure to go check out all the renders on the SRF blog. The Cornell Daily Sun recently ran a piece about the progress we’ve made in the last year, and our full-team workathon last week resulted in the creation of some amazing ideas for the facility. This semester, we’ll be completing structural drawings, building 1:1 prototypes of components of the building, and cranking up fundraising and outreach to turn this building from renders into a reality. I can’t wait to see the impact that the SRF will have on sustainability research at Cornell and around the world. The mere process of designing it has already imparted all of our student members with a wealth of experiential knowledge that a classroom could never provide.

The SudoGlove Gesture Controller, which I initially developed with several other Cornell students a few years ago seems to attract the TV spotlight. I’ve been continuing to develop music synthesis and software control interfaces for the glove since its previous TV debut on the Discovery Channel last April. This video focuses on the flexibility of the system, and potential future implications of the technology. Check out the embedded video below, visit the InsideScience website, or look for it on your local news station this week!

The First Annual Cornell Startup Fair was Star Wars-Themed

Yesterday was Cornell’s first annual startup career fair. Given Cornell’s recent winning of the NYC Tech Campus Bid (with which I was also heavily involved), the startup fair was very well timed. About a year ago, while meeting with some members of Cornell’s Career Services Offices, I was expressing my dismay at the fact that the ordinary career fairs at Cornell are all for huge companies, students must dress up, and you don’t really get the opportunity to connect with the companies you might be interested in working for. So, after a few months of planning by lots of amazing people, we made the startup career fair into a reality! Approximately 40 startup companies (mostly from the NYC area) attended to recruit amazing Cornell talent. During the course of the fair, I managed to simultaneously work as a volunteer and as a recruiter representing MakerBot Industries (I consult for them part time and worked for them last summer). The fair was a huge success, with thousands of students packing the engineering atrium for about 5 hours. Checkout the local news coverage below (I was featured in the piece), the wrap-up video (featuring MakerBot) below, and this article from the Cornell Daily Sun (in which I was quoted).