It’s a balmy early October afternoon, and some 50 fourth-years are gathered in Kent Hall for the first day of a class that will span the next six months.

For students majoring in molecular engineering (often referred to by the acronym MENG), this course—Engineering Design—is a bit different from everything that’s come before. After three years of labs and problem sets, they’ll finally get to apply their skills to real-world problems.

This fall and winter, though they don’t know it yet, the students will end up making improvements to cancer treatments, the processes used to create lab-grown diamonds, and the sensors in automatic faucets. They’ll identify new uses for waste, both plastic and human. They’ll build specialized rigs to test the lubricants used in metal forging. Along the way, they’ll learn how to manage projects, work as a team, and overcome inevitable challenges.

The MENG faculty began envisioning this course soon after the molecular engineering major for College students was launched in autumn 2015. It’s common for engineering programs to have some kind of capstone design course in the final year, but often “they’re very cookbook,” explains Mark Stoykovich, senior instructional professor in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME): Students are all given the same task and expected to arrive at broadly similar approaches to tackling it.

“We knew that wasn’t really what we wanted to do,” says Stoykovich, who is also the director of undergraduate studies in PME. “We wanted to do something that was more in that UChicago vein of applying student creativity and allowing them the freedom to explore and implement their own solutions.”

So the instructors began looking for partners both within and beyond UChicago to serve as mentors—people working in industry and research who would bring problems from their own work for students to investigate. That network of professionals has grown over the eight years Engineering Design has been offered, as mentors have recommended the experience to others and alumni have come back to PME with projects suitable for current students.

Working on real engineering problems comes with an important caveat, Terry Johnson, senior instructional professor in PME, tells students on the first day of class: “We don’t know the projects are fully accomplishable,” so they should prepare to “embrace ambiguity, embrace a certain amount of anxiousness.” They won’t be penalized if they don’t solve the problem originally set for them, Johnson explains. Rather, their grade will be based on how they approach it.

To that end, students will attend weekly sessions on practical skills aimed at preparing them for future work as professional engineers: design principles, project management, technical communication, intellectual property, and ethics. “We try to time the topics to support milestones in the design process,” explains Xiaoying Liu, senior instructional professor and laboratory director in PME.

The introduction of these weekly sessions is one of several ways the engineering design course has evolved since its inception. What started as a one-quarter class eventually blossomed into a two-quarter sequence, and now “we have teams assigned from the very start of Autumn Quarter,” Liu says, giving students more time to work on their projects.

Back in Kent, Mustafa Guler, senior instructional professor in PME, briefly introduces students to the 11 projects available to them this year. “Due to the interdisciplinary nature of our department, we have a very diverse group of projects,” he says. Over the next week, he continues, students will submit a personal statement, indicate their preferred projects, and receive their assignments.

After reviewing some housekeeping items, the instructors take a moment to offer advice before they dismiss the class: Take client confidentiality seriously. Don’t ghost your team. Behave like the professionals you’re about to become.

“These are your projects,” Stoykovich says. “View them that way.”

SYLLABUS

MENG 21800–21900 Engineering Design I–II

Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering Instructors:
Mustafa Guler, Senior instructional professor and director of experiential learning
Terry Johnson, Senior instructional professor and master of engineering program director
Xiaoying Liu, Senior instructional professor and laboratory director
Mark Stoykovich, Senior instructional professor and director of undergraduate studies

Engineering Design is a two-quarter sequence for fourth-year College students majoring in molecular engineering. Students are divided into groups and assigned real-world engineering problems set by external mentors from a variety of industries. (Each group also has at least one of the course’s four instructors as an internal mentor.) Students have two opportunities to present their work: a midpoint presentation summarizing their progress after the first quarter and a final presentation after the second quarter.

By the numbers

2018 (first year): 13 students, 4 projects
2023–24 (largest cohort to date): 63 students, 15 projects
2024–25: 46 students, 11 projects

Getting to know Team 1

Students:
Trevor Hagan, SB’25
Symonne Liu, AB’25, SB’25
Rory McGann, SB’25
Gabrielle Solymosy, SB’25
Sanjali Subash, AB’25, SB’25

External mentors:
Adrian Defante, senior lead scientist, Hollister
Abe Janis, senior principal scientist, Hollister

Internal mentor:
Terry Johnson

The brief:
The five students in Team 1 were partnered with Hollister Incorporated, a medical device company focused on critical care, continence, and ostomy. (An ostomy is a surgery that creates an opening in the abdomen, called a stoma, through which waste leaves the body and drains into a pouch. Approximately 100,000 Americans undergo ostomies each year, due to conditions including inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, and traumatic injury.) The students’ mandate for the project was broad: Hollister instructed them to identify ways that human waste could be used to understand human health and disease states or to advance sustainability.

Getting started with Team 1

In mid-November, about halfway through the first quarter of Engineering Design, the students on Team 1 have read a raft of research literature about both ostomies and potential uses for human waste and brainstormed a long list of possible projects to pursue.

In today’s virtual meeting, they’re presenting what they see as the most promising ideas to their Hollister mentors, Defante and Janis, as well as their internal mentor, Johnson. These ideas include studying the microbiome composition in ostomy pouches or developing some sort of in-pouch microfluidic device to test for antimicrobial sensitivity.

Urostomates, people whose stomas divert urine from the body, are prone to recurrent urinary tract infections (UTIs), which can become resistant to common antibiotics over time. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing allows physicians to rule out antibiotics that won’t work against a particular infection and identify those that will. Right now, however, such testing is fairly slow—it can sometimes take up to 72 hours to get results. The small in-pouch device the team is envisioning could lead to quicker, more effective treatment.

Defante and Janis perk up at the idea. It has broad applicability, they point out: A faster antimicrobial susceptibility test would be useful not only for ostomates but also for anyone needing antibiotics to treat a UTI.

As the meeting winds down, Janis expresses enthusiasm but cautions the team not to worry about the “micro” aspect of their potential microfluidic device—or at least, not yet. “Miniaturization is a future engineer’s problem,” he says.

Johnson emphasizes that simplicity is key, especially if they hope to make a device that can be miniaturized. Right now, he says, they’re trying to design a Lamborghini, but “I would urge you to think of the Toyota Corolla of microfluidics.”

A day in the lab with Team 1

By early February, Team 1 has spent several weeks working on the microfluidic device for antimicrobial sensitivity testing they proposed in November.

Today, in a lab in Abbott Memorial Hall, they’re preparing to test a new design for that device, after a previous iteration failed. The goal is to create a chip with small, thin channels through which both bacteria-containing urine and an antibiotic can flow.

The process begins by printing the updated design onto a clear sheet that looks a bit like a transparency for an overhead projector. Eventually, they’ll transfer the design onto a round wafer made of silicon.

To prepare for the transfer, Symonne Liu and McGann are coloring around the design with black Sharpies. As they work, they tell me they recently attended the annual senior capstone conference convened by Hollister, where they learned that intermittent catheter users with spinal cord injuries often can’t feel the early symptoms of UTIs, leading to potentially dangerous infections. Liu has felt even more motivated about their project since attending the conference.

The Sharpies scritch along the clear sheet. “This is a high-stakes coloring project,” I observe. (McGann sets me straight: “It’s a medium-stakes coloring project.”)

In the room next door, Hagan and Solymosy are preparing the wafer on which the design will be created. It’s a complicated process that involves washing the wafer with acetone and putting it into a device called a plasma cleaner. There’s just one problem: Hagan can’t get the plasma cleaner to turn on.

Solymosy saves the day. “It’s not the big red button. It’s the little silver button,” she tells Hagan.

Having conquered unintuitive plasma cleaner design, they chat about the arc of the project so far. “Last quarter was a lot of thought labor,” Solymosy says—so compared to the other teams, they’ve spent less time in the lab.

Once the wafer comes out of the plasma cleaner, Solymosy carefully brings it under the fume hood, where she douses it with a syrupy-looking liquid and places it on a small machine called a spin coater.

This portion of the proceedings, I’m told, will be slow and “kind of boring”—but the students keep toiling, undaunted.

Getting to know Team 10

Students:
Genevieve Ansay, SB’25
George Rose, SB’25
Jona van Oord, Class of 2026
Lucas Zubillaga, SB’25

External mentors:
George Rose, CEO, Rise Reforming
Jona van Oord, COO, Rise Reforming
Lucas Zubillaga, CTO, Rise Reforming

Internal mentors:
Xiaoying Liu
Mark Stoykovich

The brief:
The students on Team 10 were partnered with Rise Reforming, an energy technology start-up company. But in a twist, three of the four students were also leaders of the company—a first for the engineering design course. CEO Rose, CTO Zubillaga, and COO van Oord cofounded Rise Reforming in spring 2023. In its early years, the company was a finalist in the Polsky Center’s College New Venture Challenge, took second place in the center’s Social New Venture Challenge, and received the EnergyTech University Prize from the US Department of Energy. 

Rise Reforming grew out of concern about what Rose calls “the plastic disaster.” Only a tiny percentage of plastic is recycled, leaving the rest to sit in landfills. But the chemicals that make up common plastics have many potential uses and could be upcycled.

As he began investigating those potential uses, Rose came across research that suggested it would be possible to convert plastic waste into a chemical called dimethyl ether, a common aerosol propellant. The conversion process has three basic stages. First, plastic waste must be broken down into constituent gases. Next those constituent gases must undergo catalytic reforming—a chemical process that transforms them into a different gas. Finally, the new gas is converted again, into dimethyl ether. The focus of the team’s work in Engineering Design was the second step of this process.

Getting started with Team 10

By Halloween the work of Team 10 is already heating up—to about 800 degrees Celsius.

To eventually make dimethyl ether, the students need to flow gases through a reactor housed inside a very hot furnace. Learning how to operate the furnace safely has been a major focus of their work so far, and the team—joined by internal mentors Xiaoying Liu and Stoykovich—starts their weekly meeting, held over Zoom, by reviewing safety procedures.

Stoykovich praises the students for starting the meeting with “a safety moment”: “It’s a good practice to do this every week.” He reminds the students of the three dimensions of safety to consider: safety for themselves, safety for the equipment, and safety for others who may come into the lab.

Rose highlights some important developments. Now that they’ve gotten the furnace working, “we could be ready to flow active gas into the system next week,” which is exciting. Plus, he says—switching from student to CEO—he had a positive meeting this week with the leader of an aerosol company. “If we can nail this proof of concept, we have customers waiting,” Rose adds. “Just to give the team motivation on this Thursday when motivation might be running low.”

“What do you mean? It’s Halloween!” Liu jokes.

Rose switches from CEO back to student once again: “It’s midterms.”

In the lab with Team 10

In early February, Team 10 has made strides. They’re now able to run gases into the reactor housed inside the furnace, a small brown box—currently sitting under a fume hood in a lab in Abbott—that looks a bit like a treasure chest. But this triumph was not without some heartache: On a particularly frigid day in January, a hot water pipe burst, flooding the lab with about two inches of water. (“They had to bring in some pretty special industrialized vacuums,” Rose tells me later. Thankfully, “it didn’t damage any equipment.”)

Today they’ve run into another, blessedly smaller, issue. Zubillaga thinks there may be a leak in a hookup attached to one of the gas canisters. Liu comes over to help, and Zubillaga shines his phone flashlight over the system. Together Liu, Zubillaga, and Rose arrive at a fix, allowing the team to prepare for a four-hour test run.

There’s one upside to babysitting their equipment during test runs, Rose and Zubillaga tell me—between their classes and running a company, they don’t have much downtime. These multi-hour stints in the lab mean they’ve finally got time to work on problem sets. They pull out notebooks and settle in for the afternoon.

Finals week

There’s a nervous energy in the air on the last day of Engineering Design. Final presentations will take place over two sessions: six teams in the morning and five in the evening. (Both are held in MeMo, short for Molecular Engineering Modular Offices, a temporary PME classroom and office space that will be used until construction on UChicago’s new science and engineering building is complete.) Before the morning session begins, students are pacing and running through their presentations one last time.

When 10 a.m. hits, the students shake off any finals-week fatigue that may be dogging them. One after another, each team gives a clear, crisp presentation.

The students are candid about what worked and what didn’t. Zubillaga, of Team 10, outlines the ambitious plan his team laid out for themselves in the fall, which was aimed at conquering the trickiest part of their overall project: the conversion of the gases that come from plastic waste into a new product that can eventually become dimethyl ether.

In the end, “there was a bit of a discrepancy between what we planned and what we actually ended up doing,” Zubillaga admits good-naturedly. They broke their work down into three phases; however, “we planned to finish phase one by the end of December, and we barely finished phase zero.” Still, they made good progress over the last quarter—they successfully completed phase one and will tackle phase two in the months ahead, as they transition from full-time students to full-time entrepreneurs.

His teammate Ansay concludes the presentation by recapping some lessons learned: “If you don’t plan time for iteration, you’re going to end up behind. It’s very important to realize that things aren’t going to go right the first time.”

Hours later, in the evening session, the members of Team 1 share their own experience of conquering setbacks and building in enough time to iterate. “Our mission,” Solymosy reminds the audience, was “to create a simple microfluidic chip that detects antimicrobial susceptibility with improved diagnostic speed.”

But, Hagan says, developing that chip took time. Their first two designs didn’t work—on the PowerPoint slide behind him, frowny faces appear over pictures of the two unsuccessful prototypes. For the third try, the team simplified their approach and “that worked very nicely,” Hagan sums up. “Smiley face with that one.”

Then McGann explains how the team used their improved chip design to successfully test for antimicrobial sensitivity—a process that involved flowing E. coli in a saline solution through the chip, alongside different antibiotics.

His teammate Symonne Liu sums up the project, from research to brainstorming to idea selection to design to testing: “I think we came a long way.”

A few weeks after final presentations, instructor Xiaoying Liu (no relation) says she agrees with that assessment. She vividly recalls the day Team 1 finally ran a successful antimicrobial sensitivity test: “Their faces were lit up,” she says. “It’s the kind of joy you wouldn’t be able to get without having gone through the learning process.”

Stoykovich, too, was full of praise for everyone in the class. “I’m really proud of this year’s students,” he says—especially of their final presentations. “I think Engineering Design is a great way to end their time in our undergraduate program.”

A mentor’s perspective

Abe Janis, senior principal scientist at Hollister, has been an Engineering Design mentor for almost as long as the class has existed. “In 2019 we sponsored our first project,” he recalls. That year students were tasked with finding a faster and easier way to run a common but cumbersome lab assay. Even through the massive disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, they kept working until the project was done.

Since then Hollister has sponsored at least one project a year at UChicago, in addition to projects at other schools around the country. The business case is clear-cut. Hollister’s investment is relatively modest, both in terms of time and money—“we purchase the reagents, and we meet with the students once or twice a week,” Janis says—and in return, the company benefits from the work of a group of tireless, committed students: “They’re working on this and thinking about this all the time.”

Janis and his colleague Adrian Defante have gradually developed a more expansive sense of what students can achieve. When working with undergraduates, “there’s a temptation to just offload work,” he observes. But if you already know what to do, “you should just go do it.”

More than grunt work, what companies need is an abundance of new, unexpected ideas. Research on innovation suggests that it takes a hundred concepts to identify one or two good ones. “I can get to a hundred ideas a lot faster with an army of students,” Janis says. “We’re getting a ton of really creative ideas that we’d never come up with ourselves.”

That’s why Team 1 got such a loose set of instructions, Janis explains. He and Defante didn’t have a correct answer in mind. They just wanted to see what this group of students, steeped in the particular culture of PME (“It’s so interdisciplinary”), would come up with. The antimicrobial resistance test they devised, he says, “I never would have expected.”

Through the engineering design course, Janis has developed a deeper relationship with UChicago: He’s become a visiting instructor at PME, and Hollister now sponsors Metcalf undergraduate internships as well as myCHOICE graduate externships. And he’s not keeping secrets about the benefits of working closely with students: “We actively promote this to other companies.”