McKelvey School of Engineering

Engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have found that a neural model based on the act of a bug smelling something showed emergent properties, properties similar to those seen in an insect’s antennal lobe, an important area for its sense of smell.

Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that understanding brain activity as a network instead of readings from an EEG allow for more accurate and efficient detection of seizures in real-time.

Using recent satellite observations, ground monitoring and computational modeling, researchers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have released a survey of global pollution rates. There are a couple of surprises, for worse, but also, for better.

Engineers at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis have developed high-power, direct borohydride fuel cells that operate at double the voltage of conventional hydrogen fuel cells.

On May 30, 2020, WashU alumnus Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley became the first astronauts in NASA’s history to launch from a commercially built and operated spacecraft, the SpaceX Crew Dragon. For the Demo-2 mission, the two are testing the spacecraft’s transportation system for future missions.

Life-changing innovations continue to emerge from the university thanks to creative faculty research, cross-collaboration and the aid of the Office of Technology Management.

In his book The Genealogical Adam & Eve: Surprising Science of Universal Ancestry, S. Joshua Swamidass, MD, associate professor of Pathology & Immunology in the School of Medicine and of Biomedical Engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering, uses science to show that Adam and Eve could have existed and that theology and science don’t lie nearly so far apart.

Denise Saim, a 27-year employee at the McKelvey School of Engineering, died suddenly May 26, 2020, at her home of an apparent heart attack. She was 64.

A new technique developed in the lab of Matthew Lew at the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis measures the orientation of single molecules. It is enabling, for the first time, optical microscopy to reveal nanoscale details about the structures of these problematic proteins.

Research from the McKelvey School of Engineering shows that energy constraints on a system, coupled with an intrinsic property of systems, push silicon neurons to create a dynamic, at-a-distance communication that is more robust and efficient than traditional computer processors. And it may teach us something about biological brains.