Yale Engineering School Creates Center for Engineering Innovation & Design

The Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science has announced the creation of a new Center for Engineering Innovation & Design. Conceived to infuse SEAS curricular and extracurricular activities with a continuum of cutting-edge design experiences, the Center will also expose Yale students in all majors to principles of innovation and the practice of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Establishing the Center for Engineering Innovation & Design is the latest step by School of Engineering & Applied Science Dean T. Kyle Vanderlick toward securing Yale's premier place in engineering education. "The Center will play an essential role in promoting a culture of engineering on the Yale campus that will attract and retain top engineering students," said Vanderlick. "By enabling engineering faculty to bring hands-on design experiences into the classroom, the CEID will contribute to SEAS' ability to produce a uniquely Yale brand of 'Y-shaped' engineers who apply intellectual depth and breadth to innovate engineered solutions with purpose."

Design industry veteran John Morrell will direct the new center, which will commence activity at the start the 2011-2012 academic year. Morrell joined the Yale mechanical engineering faculty in 2006 after serving six years as Director of Systems Engineering for Segway. Previously, he worked for Dean Kamen at DEKA Research and Development Corp. as the Lead Control Engineer on the iBOT self-balancing mobility device.

Plans to create a dedicated 8,500-square-foot CEID facility within the School of Engineering & Applied Science are currently underway. The center will house an inventory of state-of-the-art machine tools, instruments, and equipment to support biomedical, chemical, electrical, and mechanical engineering projects, including design, modeling, manufacturing, and testing activities. Innovative in form and function, the CEID will be an open and accessible space in a high-profile facility featuring areas for instruction, team meetings, computer-aided design, fabrication, and assembly. Spanning graduate and undergraduate education, the Center's offerings will include introductory design courses open to all Yale students and multidisciplinary capstone design courses for engineering majors.

Professor Morrell's oversubscribed undergraduate mechanical engineering classes—in which interdisciplinary teams work to effectively and efficiently design and build innovative technologies—are exemplary of the activities to be undertaken in the new Center. "When engineers work with liberal arts majors, they start to realize that product development constraints aren't always technical—there are cultural, political, and socioeconomic influences at play," said Morrell. "Conversely, liberal arts majors who work alongside creative, technically savvy engineers gain an appreciation for the rewards and challenges of the innovation process."

Since 2006, students in Morrell's design-intensive courses have conceived, constructed, and tested a wide variety of engineering projects including a hybrid race car, a heavy-lift model airplane, an energy-harvesting door-opening device, and a universal power coupling device to power farm machinery in Africa. "The Center for Engineering Innovation and Design will capitalize on Yale students' intense desire to create something of purpose," said Morrell. "While many projects can satisfy the criteria of being 'engineered,' the projects at CEID will be driven and supported by real challenges that face society—energy, health, poverty, and climate, to name a few."

A steering committee of SEAS faculty will assist Morrell in defining the Center's purpose and establishing its scope. Construction of the permanent Center for Engineering Innovation and Design is expected to be complete in September 2012. Until then, CEID activities will take place in existing space in the Engineering School.