Senior engineers unveil latest creations at annual conference

KALAMAZOO—Senior engineering students at Western Michigan University will unveil imaginative and often highly technical projects this month during the 52nd Conference on Senior Engineering Design.

The students will showcase and demonstrate their projects from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 16, at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences on WMU's Parkview Campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Among the many innovative projects that will be shown are plans for a new design for the Weesaw Park Trail for nature lovers, a calibration device for a surgical navigation camera and a bicycle generator monitoring system to measure the energy that a person created and used.

Seniors will present the projects, which they completed to solve problems facing business and industry. Many of the projects are sponsored by southwest Michigan companies, including Denso North America Foundation Inc., Kellogg Co., Otsego Paper Inc. and Pfizer Inc., and by state and local government.

Participants hail from a variety of disciplines, including civil and construction engineering, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, industrial and manufacturing engineering, mechanical and aeronautical engineering, and paper and chemical engineering. The conference is held twice each year, in April and December, to showcase the work of graduating seniors in the engineering disciplines, who are required to complete a real-world capstone project.

For more information, visit the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at wmich.edu/engineer or contact Tamara Bergman at tamara.s.bergman@wmich.edu or (269) 276-3248.