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Two student engineering teams at SDSU spent their senior year on capstone design projects at Sanford Underground Research Facility. One team built a new mine rail cart for hauling liquid nitrogen underground. The other built a drone for inspecting hard to reach vertical shafts at the former gold mine at Lead. Both teams gained valuable experience they will take into their future careers.

The ����Ӱ�� Robotics Club came home with best design honors after competing at the Vex Robotics World Championship in Dallas May 9-11.  VEX competitions make up the largest and fastest growing robotics engineering platform in the world with divisions for elementary and middle schools, middle and high schools and VEX U for colleges and universities. This year’s Vex U game involved placing rings onto various stakes — some stationary and others mounted on mobile goals that could be moved to corner zones to either double the team’s points or result in negative scoring,  In addition to winning the design award, the ����Ӱ�� entry placed 13th out of 54 teams in the math division, one of two divisions in the Vex U competition.

����Ӱ�� saw its first cohort of elementary education students graduate May 10, making history after the South Dakota Board of Regents approved the program at SDSU two years prior. The inaugural class included 11 women who started their studies in other programs but ultimately decided a major in elementary education at SDSU was the right fit for them.

The first law of thermodynamics is energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only change forms. Whether energy can be retired and what form it will take when retired is about to be tested by ����Ӱ�� physics professor Larry Browning, whose 35-year career at SDSU will officially wrap up May 21. This spring was the final semester in a 50-year career of teaching science.

Greg Heiberger, associate dean of academics and student success in the College of Natural Sciences at ����Ӱ��, will serve as interim dean of the Van D. and Barbara B. Fishback Honors College.

Seven members of the professional staff at ����Ӱ�� will be honored for their quality work at the SDSU Professional Staff Advisory Council annual meeting May 14. The event, from 2:30 to 4 p.m. in the Woster Celebration Hall at the SDSU Alumni Center, will include an all-staff social with the program and awards beginning at 3 p.m. A Zoom link will be available for those who cannot attend in person.

Research doesn’t always land on the lab bench or in a test chamber. Sometimes it’s found in the library, inside the covers of seemingly dry volumes of codified law, peer-reviewed trade journals or stuffy legislative hearings. For Lydia Loken, a senior agricultural and biosystems engineering major at ����Ӱ��, her research had nothing to do with microscopes or spectrometers. She was poring over literature and news report to generate a 31-page report on balancing private ownership and public interest of nonmeandering waters overlaying private property in the South Dakota prairie pothole region. Loken completed the project as a part of the college’s research requirement for graduates and undertook the report as one of the college’s 12 Future Innovators of America.

When the speed of sound isn’t fast enough, there is hypersonic travel — speeds five times the speed of sound. Doing so is quite possible. Engines have been designed to do so for at least a decade. But for those engines to operate optimally, there’s a world of physics challenges. That’s where Jeffrey Doom, an associate professor in the mechanical engineering department at ����Ӱ��, comes in. This summer he will make his fourth trip to the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, to undertake simulations and observe physical experiments.

A heavy-duty cart designed to transport heavy loads in deep underground mine tunnels was the top project presented at the April 22 Engineering Expo at Raven Precision Agricultural Center. The transporter was built by ����Ӱ�� mechanical engineering students Braden Hanson, Luke Degen, Haley Evenson, Alli Krantz, Phil Baker and Tyson Boeve on behalf of the Sanford Underground Research Facility, the former Homestake gold mine in Lead that now is a physics research facility.

Three student teams from ����Ӱ�� have advanced to the finals of two different NASA contests in the coming weeks. All are mechanical engineering students. The Gateways to Blue Skies competition advanced eight teams to Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, May 20-21. Both of SDSU’s entries in the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concept-Academic Linkage contest were selected for the finals of the small lunar servicing and maintenance robot division in Cocoa Beach, Florida, June 2-4. A total of 14 teams were selected in three divisions.