Jenn Pocock

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Expanded BioE Buzz summer camp brings high schoolers to life sciences

Jennifer Pocock — Tue, 21 Oct 2025 17:56:23 +0000

Expanded BioE Buzz summer camp brings high schoolers to life sciences Jennifer Pocock Tue, 10/21/2025 - 13:56

New offerings and a healthy dose of competition left campers happily humming along.

BioE Buzz students work on a polymer testing challenge at the 2025 summer camp. Photo provided.

When the 2024 BioE Buzz camp was declared a success, the �鶹��Ƶ organizers used the momentum to level up in 2025. Its inaugural year boasted one week of experiments, tours, lectures, and activities for 16 high school juniors and seniors.

This past summer, however, introduced a new element that lit the fire for bioengineering-curious kids: competition. Expanded to two one-week sessions for 32 students, the camp’s codirectors Khadija Zaidi-Rashid and Liszt Yeltsin Madruga randomly assigned them into teams.

“We would do lab tours, meet faculty experts, and have seminars in the mornings,” said Zaidi-Rashid, an assistant professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the College of Engineering and Computing. “After lunch, we would separate them into their groups, where they would develop a certain skill and work on a team challenge.”

One day, the kids used 3D printing to model a bone that couldn’t break. The next, they mixed polymers to see which could suspend a steel ball. Another day saw them swabbing campus benches, rocks, and trashcans to find out which would result in the petri dish with the richest bacteria culture.

“They were very creative in working with our parameters,” said Yeltsin Madruga, a research assistant professor in bioengineering. “We told them they could not swab anything biological, like humans. They pushed this by swabbing a bench they saw animals climbing on, or the bottom of a person’s shoe.”

All of the projects were tested live on the final day of camp in front of the campers and parents, where the winners were announced. The prize? A one-week internship in the students’ department of choice.

According to Zaidi-Rashid, both the competition and the prize were huge hits with campers. “At the beginning of the week, we took them to the EDGE ropes course to encourage team development. They were immediately psyched about the competition, asking if they could get points for finishing the course,” she said.

The camp’s hands-on aspect was also motivating. One camper returned for a second year at the urging of his parents. “At first, he wasn’t excited," said Yeltsin Madruga. “He was afraid it would be a repeat from last year. At the end, he came up and told me, ‘I thought it would be an adult’s idea of educational…like lectures.’ He was happy to be wrong!”

And the fact that the reward could help them in their careers and get aspiring bioengineers to take a deeper look at George �鶹��Ƶ was a win for campers and the college alike. “Many of the campers arrived on the first day wearing college t-shirts and sweatshirts—and none of them were from �鶹��Ƶ,” said Zaidi-Rashid. “On the last day, they were all wearing �鶹��Ƶ apparel, and lots of them were interested in our programs because they saw what we could actually offer.”

The most rewarding, however, was helping the kids build community. “On the first day, the students were very quiet. By the end of the camp, they were all very friendly and chatty,” she said. “In high school, it’s hard to know who has your same future aspirations, so it was nice to see them find their people.”

Topics

Summer Camps

K-12 Partnerships

GCI-Grand Challenge Initiative

U.S. Department of Defense

Bringing safe water to the table

Jennifer Pocock — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 21:55:22 +0000

Bringing safe water to the table Jennifer Pocock Tue, 09/30/2025 - 17:55

New �鶹��Ƶ researcher goes beyond engineering to connect communities.

Smith visits a well with a handpump in Apac district, Uganda with colleague Paska Anyapo Sizzela, Senior Sanitation Officer for International Lifeline Fund. Photo by James Winter

Fresh water is not just the foundation of life; it’s also at the center of every society. From ancient watering holes that brought all the animals to the yard to municipal systems that bring refreshment from tap-to-glass, water connects us all.

Daniel Smith is a water treatment engineering expert who advocates for clean water and sanitation in both large municipalities and tiny rural communities. The newly appointed assistant professor of environmental engineering and water resources in the Dewberry Department of Civil, Environmental, and Infrastructure Engineering brings experience working with organizations in Honduras, Uganda, Bangladesh, and across the United States—just to name a few.

What makes him really interesting, though, is how he blends social sciences with his engineering research. He's implemented research on a phenomenon called social capital, which is a way to measure how much a community trusts—or distrusts—one another and its effect on infrastructure management. “That was an amazing concept to me as an engineer.”

In communities with high social capital, he found, it's easy to get widespread buy-in for community-managed infrastructure. “They tend to raise more money, have better communication with less misinformation, and better implement training programs,” he said.

The projects are easier to get off the ground, gain trust and enthusiasm, and create a “virtuous circle” where the buy-in creates better living situations, which raises social capital overall, and allows for openness to further improvements.

In communities with low social capital, however, communication is difficult, projects are hard to get going, and a vicious cycle starts, which leads to even less trust and buy-in overall (and poorer water quality). In those cases, he's worked on communication methods to help raise community trust.

As a new face in civil and environmental engineering, Smith is still in the process of setting up his water quality lab at the Potomac Science Center. When it’s finished, he will bring his nonprofit and research collaborations with water utilities in the Northern Virginia and Washington, D.C., area and nonprofit organizations, such as AguaClara Reach in Honduras and International Lifeline Fund in Uganda, to George �鶹��Ƶ.

In This Story

Daniel W. Smith

Learn about Sustainability at George �鶹��Ƶ

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water quality

clean water

Potomac Science Center

Research

Sustainability

�鶹��Ƶ students ran with the big dogs at defense hackathon

Jennifer Pocock — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 16:22:00 +0000

�鶹��Ƶ students ran with the big dogs at defense hackathon Jennifer Pocock Thu, 09/11/2025 - 12:22

When the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) convened the first round of its high-tech competition at Fuse at �鶹��Ƶ Square, they should have known it would end with a strong George �鶹��Ƶ showing.

From left to right: Ricardo Vega, Chris Martin, Noah Kabiri, Van Tran, Phuoc Nguyen, and NDIA judge. Photo provided.

The NDIA Hackathon is an internationally renowned competition that welcomes teams from every sector—not just colleges. That means that some of the country’s greatest minds in professional national defense industries and the military line up against ambitious young students to see who has the best vision for securing our future.

In this case, that project came from a team of George �鶹��Ƶ students led by Noah Kabiri, a newly minted sophomore in computer science, with an idea for context-based visualization. How the team came together was kismet.

Kabiri met Chris Martin, a senior in cybersecurity engineering, when looking for someone to join him. The two happened to be working at the same table as Ricardo Vega, a George �鶹��Ƶ PhD student in electrical engineering, who had teamed up with Major Phuoc Nguyen from the Department of Defense (DoD) and Van Tran, CEO of Advanced Cambridge Technologies.

“Halfway through the competition we realized that we were all doing similar things and using similar platforms. We decided that we would be a more competitive team if we combined,” Karbiri said. “We got together and swept the competition.”

Each team in the hackathon had to come up with a product that would be marketable and meet some need for the DoD. They then had to market, present, and sell the product to a panel of non-technical judges from the industry and military. Kabiri’s team, SpecDOps Force, addressed a need in the ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) category.

Their product was an SaaS (software as a service) that takes footage and video feeds from anywhere—drone surveillance video, infrared, geospatial satellite images, security cameras, body cams, and more—and analyzes the environment.

“We had machine learning detection models pick up objects like vehicles, weapons, and faces,” Kabiri said. Their software is important because it can determine threat levels based on environmental contexts. “For example, if you were deploying it on a mission in the desert, detecting firearms would be normal because everyone has firearms in war. If you put it in an airport, however, seeing firearms would be bad.”

Out of the 683 registered participants, the George �鶹��Ƶ-led team took third place. They were separated from second place by hundredths of a point—it was extremely close. This is gratifying, considering that first place went to a well-established corporate team from a major tech company and second place went to a mix of government contractors. Compared to that, an ad-hoc team headed by George �鶹��Ƶ undergrads is nothing short of incredible.

Kabiri hopes that there is a future for their innovation. While the competition only looks for proof of concept over the 72-hour project period, he thinks that he can take it forward. “I don’t see any other products out there that are context-driven. It’s also really adaptable,” he said. “Right now I’m researching how to add walking gaits onto it, where you can determine who someone is based on how they move.”

Though Kabiri is still deciding exactly where to specialize his studies or whether he should pick up a second major in math (it’s only the beginning of his second year, after all), he seems to be headed in a productive direction.

Topics

Hackathon

competitions

Military

Artificial Intelligence

invention

CEC students

Biomedical internship yielded lively experience

Jennifer Pocock — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 18:22:51 +0000

Biomedical internship yielded lively experience Jennifer Pocock Fri, 08/22/2025 - 14:22

Jacob Lockey improved his pipette and professional skills in his summer at Athari Biosciences.

Jacob Lockey (right) with his Athari Biosciences mentors, Sanskruthi Sreepangi (middle) and Mahaniya Srinivasan (left).

When Lockey, a bioengineering major through the bachelor’s accelerated master’s program at �鶹��Ƶ, accepted his internship at Athari Biosciences, he knew that he would have a different experience than his fellow students at larger companies.

Athari is a small health equity accelerator lab in Sterling, Virginia, that performs biomedical R&D, lab testing, and educational services. Lockey is interested in nanomedicine, especially researching nanocarriers.

“A nanocarrier is a nanoparticle that has been engineered to hold something—in some cases, a drug—and deliver it to a target, such as a cancer cell,” he said. “The internship was very useful for stuff I’d be doing in the future.”

Lockey worked on several different projects, including helping calibrate a robot that automates assays (experiments or tests). He also optimized and built different assays, including one using E. coli bacteria to see how it would react to novel antibacterial drugs. This allowed him to explore options for new drugs that could not only kill E. coli bacteria but also make it less likely to become drug resistant.

“My favorite part overall was the last day,” he said. “Athari hosted a friends and family presentation day. We got to present our work in what would be a real scientific setting, but it was with the C-suite at Athari and our friends. It was the culmination of everything we did at the company all at once.”

Lockey said that George �鶹��Ƶ prepared him “a million percent” for the internship through both his technical classes and the soft skills he gained during group work and hands-on projects. “The biggest thing I’ve gotten from school was approaching problem solving and thinking like an engineer. Going from an academic setting to a corporate setting, �鶹��Ƶ did a great job in helping us get there.”

And when he got there, the experience was top-notch. “Athari was very warm and welcoming,” he said. “Taking on interns is a big lift for a small company, but they put a huge emphasis on training and developing the next generation. I learned tons of new skills that I didn’t think I’d get to learn.”

Some of these included wet lab experience, assay development, and testing. Not to mention pipette work. “I have shaky hands and they really helped me. By the end, I was pipetting like a pro.”

Topics

CEC internships

Biomedical

internships

CEC students

Bioengineering students spend the summer exploring career pathways at AstraZeneca

Jennifer Pocock — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 17:35:31 +0000

Bioengineering students spend the summer exploring career pathways at AstraZeneca Jennifer Pocock Thu, 08/14/2025 - 13:35

George �鶹��Ƶ prepared students for real-world experiences ahead of their senior years.

Ayham Elayan (top) and Eileen Robles (bottom) spent their summers gaining professional experience. Photos provided.

Ayham Elayan and Eileen Robles, bioengineering students graduating from �鶹��Ƶ’s College of Engineering and Computing in December, spent their summer breaks at AstraZeneca—one in operations, and one in the lab. Their experiences demonstrate two of many possible paths in bioengineering.

Elayan is interested in entering the biotech industry when he graduates this winter. He went to AstraZeneca hoping to explore different aspects of the pharmaceutical industry and ended up working on the tech transfer team.

“My team was responsible for the transfer of knowledge of drug manufacturing between sites. If AstraZeneca wants to open a new manufacturing site, for example, we figure out what action or equipment needs to be taken or installed,” he said. “We also make sure that the equipment works and is standardized and nothing affects the medication quality.”

Elayan said that the experience taught him just how many different teams and steps it takes to get reliable drugs to the public. “There were two best parts of the internship. The first was taking my first steps into the industry and getting a lot of exposure and experience,” he said. “The second was meeting so many different people with tons of experience that they shared with me. It’s a global company and I’ve gotten to work with people from around the world.”

Robles’s experience was less strategic and more hands-on, which excited her. “Bioengineering is such a broad field with so many different pathways,” she said. “It was great to experience something you can’t learn in a classroom.”

She interned in a wet lab, working on improving methods to purify a specific protein used in medicines. “I compared two different resins that help capture the protein, tested them for unwanted contaminants, and analyzed the results. The goal was to figure out which resin would work best for making the purification process more efficient, helping ensure future medications are safe and effective.” She said that she hasn't worked on much faculty-led lab research in during her degree program, so the internship expanded her interests and confirmed that "I value hands-on experience.”

Robles said George �鶹��Ƶ was helpful in preparing her not just through relevant classwork, but also by assigning hands-on group work. “That [team work] really helped me to work in this type of environment where you have to collaborate with different people,” she added.

Both Robles and Elayan emphasized that the professional teams they joined were supportive and made them excited for life after graduation. “Everyone there really respects each other and wants to help you out,” Robles said. “I spoke to employees who have moved between different roles. It helped me approach my career with more flexibility and less pressure to find the perfect job immediately.”

Topics

CEC internships

internships

CEC students

Powering Progress

Katarina Benson — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 16:57:12 +0000

Powering Progress Katarina Benson Mon, 08/11/2025 - 12:57

When �鶹��Ƶ opened the doors to its highly anticipated Life Sciences and Engineering Building in Manassas, Virginia, it was more than the unveiling of a new academic space—it was the beginning of a new transformative era for the university and the region.

Situated at the heart of the university’s Science and Technology Campus, this state-of-the-art facility will empower students across a wide range of disciplines to explore, innovate, and push the boundaries of science and engineering.

Designed to meet the growing demand for highly specialized instructional labs, smart classrooms, and support spaces, the building is already enabling greater hands-on learning in disciplines like athletic training and kinesiology, microbiology, chemistry, engineering, forensic science, robotics and autonomous vehicles, and more.

“The Life Sciences and Engineering Building marks a major state investment in our outstanding George �鶹��Ƶ faculty to educate and inspire our students—Virginia’s next generation of inspirational leaders, researchers, innovators, and problem solvers,” says George �鶹��Ƶ President Gregory Washington.

This addition also provides increased university access for students in Prince William and Fauquier Counties, the western part of Fairfax County, the cities of Manassas and Manassas Park, and beyond, which is why the General Assembly and the Prince William County delegation, led by Delegate Luke Torian, were eager to help make this building a reality. Torian, who is chair of the Virginia House Appropriations Committee, and the delegation were instrumental in helping to secure strategic support and state funding for the building.

Inspiring the Next Generation

Mechanical engineering major Andrea Dortch is working with Narly, a lighter-than-air vehicle, in the multistory aviary. Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

Encompassing 132,000 square feet of space, the building is designed to promote collaboration and engagement among students and faculty. The ground-level engineering labs and student design competition bays open directly onto the campus’s exterior pathways, allowing visibility for the work happening inside.

One of the first groups to take up residence was Patriot Motorsports, a club for students who want to explore the inner workings of automotive vehicles. Over the course of the spring semester, seniors in mechanical engineering revved it up a notch with their capstone project—designing a control system for the club’s Formula SAE race car.

And race cars aren’t the only vehicles in the building. This new space boasts a multistory aviary lab where students can test blimps, drones, and anything else that needs extra airspace to move around. One capstone project taking advantage of the lab is an autonomous flapping wing lighter-than-air vehicle, developed by mechanical engineering Professor Daigo Shishika’s students.

This spring, engineering capstone teams were also using the prototyping space on the second floor to collaborate on projects. “Once the first-floor machine shop is complete, this space will also be used for staging and constructing physical prototypes,” says George �鶹��Ƶ mechanical engineering professor Charles White.

Photo by Evan Cantwell/Office of University Branding

One of the building’s special features is the blending of laboratory and teaching spaces. All the mechanical engineering labs, including the first-floor advanced manufacturing and wind tunnel labs, contain student desks and IT lecture setups so that seminars can turn into hands-on demonstrations where students can practice in real time.

And these areas barely scratch the surface of what the building has to offer. For mechanical engineers, in addition to the wind tunnel and advanced manufacturing labs, machine shop, robotics lab, and prototype studio, there is a 3D print studio, a materials characterization lab, a sustainable energy and photonics area, and a thermofluids lab.

For civil engineers, there is a dedicated space for the American Society of Civil Engineers concrete canoe competitions. Bioengineers have access to cutting-edge studios as well, including a tissue engineering lab.

Anchoring Prince William’s Innovation District

As an epicenter of innovation, creativity, and opportunity, the Science and Technology Campus plays a critical role in helping George �鶹��Ƶ generate solutions for the world’s most pressing issues. Strategically located in the technology and innovation corridor that runs from Washington, D.C., to Richmond and encompasses the George �鶹��Ƶ ecosystem of campuses, Small Business Development Centers, and community college partnerships, the SciTech Campus is also an anchor for Prince William’s growing Innovation District, which includes the development of two residential and commercial town centers directly connected to campus.

“This facility, and the advancements it will produce, further establishes the Science and Technology Campus, and this Innovation District, as an anchor of the economic corridor that runs from �鶹��Ƶ Square in Arlington to the Fairfax Campus to here in Manassas, further entrenching George �鶹��Ƶ as a major driver of the prosperity of our region and state,” says President Washington.

The SciTech Campus opened in 1997 thanks to a university partnership with the City of Manassas and Prince William County, and it has far exceeded its initial goal of fostering groundbreaking research across disciplines. The campus is also home to the Virginia Serious Game Institute; the Biomedical Research Laboratory, one of 13 regional biocontainment laboratories established through the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and the Forensic Science Research and Training Laboratory, one of only eight human donor forensic science labs in the United States.

In June, Governor Glenn Youngkin announced that the commonwealth will invest $2.6 million in the Innovation District, which is jointly led by George �鶹��Ƶ, Prince William County, and the City of Manassas and anchored by the Science and Technology Campus.

“The planned town centers will create a stronger link between the campus and the surrounding community,” says Colby Grant, BS Health, Fitness, and Recreation Resources ’05, director of administration and operations for the SciTech Campus. “Combined with the new Life Sciences and Engineering Building, these developments further establish the campus as a dynamic hub for science, technology, the arts, entertainment, and recreation.”

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Five George �鶹��Ƶ cybersecurity students hack their way to Boston

Jennifer Pocock — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 14:38:39 +0000

Five George �鶹��Ƶ cybersecurity students hack their way to Boston Jennifer Pocock Thu, 07/31/2025 - 10:38

The Country to Country (C2C) Capture the Flag (CTF) contest is an international competition that issues challenges to code, decrypt, search, hack, and reverse engineer their way through as many challenges as possible.

(C2C) CTF contestants gathered from across the globe to solve pernicious problems. Photo provided.

�鶹��Ƶ 500 students from nearly 100 countries, ranging from inexperienced freshmen to PhD candidates in cybersecurity, competed individually in the qualifying rounds. Only the top 100—including five from �鶹��Ƶ—were accepted into the finals. Four went to Boston for the competition, held this year at Northeastern University.

The College of Engineering and Computing students Gael Abboud, Sanjay Kumar Samala, Nhat Le, and Jonah Wilbur represented the green and gold, but were all placed on different teams. (Amaan Abbas also made the cut but could not attend.)

“The organizers were amazing,” said Abboud, who is a graduate student pursuing her master's in systems engineering through the Accelerated Master's Program. She explained that they try to make it a truly international and cooperative competition. Ideally, each team would contain people from different countries.

“Somehow, I ended up on a team with two other people from Virginia,” Abboud said with a laugh. “They came from Virginia Commonwealth University and William and Mary.”

Her Virginia-strong team did the state proud. Over a day of competition, they sometimes worked together and sometimes apart to solve as many problems as possible from across various skill sets.

It’s not just coding. Abboud described one of the challenges. “It was open-source intelligence, which is really just fancy Googling. They set a scene where we had to find a very certain scooter repair shop in Boston. They told us that it was near a metro stop and in sight of an Indian restaurant. Seems like it should be easy, but it wasn’t!”

They also had to track down things like the price of the building and the vice president of the company that sold it more than 60 years ago. “No one solved that one.”

In the end, Abboud’s team landed in fourth place: an admirable showing when the contestants represent some of the best from around the globe. “I was so disappointed,” she sighed. “There was less than one point separating us from the third-place team.”

Abboud said that she loved every minute and would tell anyone curious about hack-a-thons to try qualifying for this Capture the Flag event.

“It may seem intimidating, but there are challenges for any skill level,” she said. “You don’t know what it will be like if you don’t try. Don’t stress if you don’t know something. People are happy to walk you through how they solved it.”

Learn more about the College of Engineering and Computing

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