STEM Education

Injuries and internships have marked Julia Lieberman and set her on a path to combining her love of neuroscience, neural engineering, and coding with her passion for building community. And it all started with a concussion.

A team of students from SCU’s BioInnovation and Design Lab are receiving outstanding mentorship while getting a flavor for working with a real customer in the biomedical industry. Participating in weekly design sprints—a proven method for rapidly validating, testing, and prototyping ideas based on feedback from real customers—the Broncos are developing data analysis and visualization platforms to help Silicon Valley-based Aromyx Corporation on its groundbreaking quest to digitize human taste and smell for disease detection and improved product quality.

Ethical, Pragmatic, and Intelligent Computing is everything to computer science and engineering lecturer and researcher Navid Shaghaghi. His EPIC Lab was created to advance the use of Ai and IoT technologies to benefit humanity. Earlier this year, the lab was abuzz with work on HiveSpy, a labor-saving apiary monitoring system.

With plans well underway for the ambitious new Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation, STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) will be at the heart of SCU's campus. In preparation, engineering faculty, campus administrators, and architects have been feverishly working to ensure our engineering students’ educational needs are met or exceeded during the construction process.

Nanomaterials represent a whole new world of possibility across a range of scientific studies, including medicine and engineering. But how exactly do these tiny particles, whether natural or man-made, interact with their environment?

A $100 million gift establishes the Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation, a state-of-the-art facility for transformational STEM education at Santa Clara University.

To “advance scientific and technological innovation in service of humanity” is one of the goals of Santa Clara University’s Integrated Strategic Plan. How does an institution set out to make itself into a formidable generator of knowledge and human advancement? One answer lies in the University’s STEM initiative.

While Santa Clara’s STEM initiative focuses on bringing together multiple disciplines, it also expands and deepens connections with the rest of the University. The best research depends on low walls between disciplines—and the new STEM complex will shrink them even further.

Fact: The total capacity of all the digital storage devices manufactured in a year is insufficient to handle the volume of raw data that humans can now produce in a year. And it’s not only a problem of storage. How can we process and manage this flood of data effectively, securely, and ethically?

When Tim Healy looks toward the future’s needs, he sees an opportunity for Santa Clara. With SCU’s STEM initiative, the University enhances its ability to educate students to work in teams that combine expertise from multiple disciplines. According to Healy, these “convergent teams” will be increasingly sought after by companies, institutions, and states around the globe.

Consider this scenario, posed by Tesla Motors and SpaceX founder Elon Musk: Someone directs an artificial intelligence to eliminate spam email messages, only to have it determine that, because humans create spam, all humans should be eliminated. Is this a mistake? Or is AI merely doing its job very well?

Could there be a future where video games are prescribed by doctors? Following the senior design project of Bryce Mariano ’15 (web design and engineering major, studio art minor) and Paul Thurston ’15 (computer science and engineering major) a future where video games can heal may be rapidly approaching.

When Jonathan Tadros '15 combined the study of engineering with his love of photography, the result was a national award. Tadros sees a connection between his photography—which he continued to develop as a member of SCU’s yearbook staff—and civil engineering.

Imagine a product engineered to technical perfection—but with two critical flaws: no one wants to buy or use it. That’s what engineering professor Chris Kitts aims to prepare students to avoid with his Design Thinking Pathway, one of more than 20 thematic clusters of courses that enhance the Core Curriculum at Santa Clara.

In our increasingly visual and technological culture, in which the only constant is rapid change, where can students turn for essential skills? One SCU answer—unlikely as it may seem: the practice and history of fine arts.

The business world—in which decisions are often based on calculated pragmatism—might not seem like a welcoming setting for spiritual practice. But as an educator specializing in leadership and innovation in the ’90s, André Delbecq learned otherwise.

When physics professor Richard Barber enrolled in David Popalisky’s “Dads Don’t Dance” workshop in 2002, little did he know the effect it would have on his life—and on future physics students. As he experienced the weight of his body interacting with the dance floor, he couldn’t help but think of all the physical principles demonstrated by his movements. And as the workshop progressed, the idea for a new course was born.

In his course "Chaos Theory, Metamathematics and the Limits of Knowledge: A Scientific Perspective on Religion," Aleksandar Zecevic attempts to bridge the gulf between science and religion, using the language of chaos theory, mathematics and quantum mechanics to broach sensitive theological questions.

Now in its 11th year, the iGEM competition challenges student teams to solve real-world problems with biological systems that they design, build, and test using interchangeable sequences of DNA. A pair of SCU Law students teamed up with the LA Biohackers, a community laboratory in downtown Los Angeles.