Requested:
$43,494
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$43,494
The Electrical & Computer Engineering Department seeks funding to: 1) continue to increase the availability and access to our computer labs and technology for all students taking classes in our department; and 2) update and upgrade dated equipment to reflect operating system and hardware improvements.
Requested:
$234,494
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$234,494
We are requesting funds to purchase a Leica BOND RX Stainer, both to replace an aging Leica BOND Max in our shared instrument core at UW Medicine in South Lake Union, and to provide new, cutting-edge opportunities for graduate and undergraduate researchers in medicine and cell biology. The Leica BOND series of stainers primarily utilize a biological assay called immunohistochemistry, abbreviated IHC, which allows researchers to visualize biochemical signals in cells within their structural context under a microscope. An example would be the ability to visualize the signal of actin, a common muscle protein, within the structure of a muscle cell by way of staining the tissue on a microscope slide. The physical stain is the result of antibody complexes detecting antigens within the tissue or cells; in the previous example, this would be antibody-actin complexes. This can give researchers critical understanding of where, when, and how proteins are being regulated in cellular or tissue microenvironments, which has an enormous scope of applications to contemporary research questions. The Leica BOND automates the staining step of this process, which ensures that the microscope slides are produced with consistent, reproducible, and efficient results. The BOND RX model is unique in that it expands on the capabilities of IHC by including other assays (detailed below in “Project Plan/Current State”). In total, eight new pre-programmed assays would become available to our shared instrument core by having this machine, with the potential to develop even more new assays utilizing the included Leica software. Our current Leica BOND Max stainer has been available at the Histology and Imaging Core (HIC) since 2009 for research projects. Since its inclusion into the program, we have helped graduates, undergraduates, and high school students, ranging in disciplines from materials science to infectious disease. Over the nine-year lifetime of this instrument, we conservatively estimate that over 100 graduate and undergraduate students have directly benefited from the use of this instrument. Additionally, we expect this number to continue to grow with the addition of a Leica BOND RX and its capability of innovative assays that can support an increased number of IHC projects. The broad applications of IHC and the availability of our instrument to research groups across UW campus have, however, taken a toll. The lifespan of the Leica BOND Max has been extended by careful maintenance, training, and use by our staff members, but even so, our current BOND has been susceptible to frequent and costly malfunctions in recent months, which prevents us from operating it efficiently to help as many student researchers as possible. The year before the HIC started purchasing the service contract for the BOND Max, we spent just over $20,000 in maintenance on the instrument. For example, a recurring issue is replacing the heating elements on the slide staining assembly (SSA) in the BOND Max. After 3 to 6 heating elements have gone out, Leica has to replace the entire SSA part, which costs $10,000 alone, plus labor and travel for the technician. Though our BOND Max is currently under a service contract, these critical repairs are happening more and more frequently, which limits the amount of time that we can run assays. Furthermore, the capabilities of our current BOND Max are severely limited in comparison to the BOND RX: we cannot provide opportunities to answer nuanced research questions with our current instrumentation. Immunohistochemistry is an industry standard for physically visualizing the spatial relationships between molecular signals in cells and tissues; thus, supporting access to IHC, and related techniques, is critical for a research institution like the University of Washington. Without shared instruments, the mere cost of immunohistochemistry and other highly-specialized instruments and assays would be simply out-of-reach for many groups and student researchers at UW. We know from our past nine years of experience with the Leica BOND Max that IHC answers meaningful research questions and provides young scientists with exposure to invaluable laboratory techniques.
Requested:
$57,471
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$57,471
The 2017 STF-funded Scan Station Update was a bigger success than expected. Scan volume more than doubled from the previous scan station fleet with some locations seeing lines form at the scanners. This proposal seeks to expand the capabilities we've found useful to Campus and to increase the ADA-accessibility for students who have disabilities.
Requested:
$20,799
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$20,799
The several composite shops on campus provide students with access to cutting edge technologies and hands on projects to apply concepts learned in the classroom. A very common type of composite is prepreg, or a premix between the fiber and epoxy stored in freezing conditions to prevent preemptive curing and students need a place to store this material for students to use. The main problem is the current freezers around campus, in the Mechanical Engineering department, Materials Science & Engineering department are all full. We are requesting funds to replace the broken freezer in Astronautical and Aeronautical Engineering department with one that is larger allowing for more storage of prepreg composites for students on campus.
Requested:
$225,479
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$225,479
This proposal requests funds to acquire an axial/torsional load frame for testing student-designed metamaterials in the Laboratory for Engineered Materials and Structures (LEMS) located in the Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics. Over the past five years, there have been more than 70 students trained in LEMS, 50 of which were undergraduates. Among them are 16 female and/or under-represented minority students. Also, those undergraduate interns received over 30 prestigious fellowships (e.g., NSF-REU, LSAMP, NASA Space Grant, and Mary Gates fellowships) and research awards (e.g., 1st Place Award for International Undergraduate Research Competition, AIAA SciTech Forum in 2017). Our undergraduate students have utilized the technologies we currently have available in LEMS to do highly creative and inspiring material and structural design work. Their work often led to technical publications in high impact journals like Nature Communications, where undergraduate participants have been listed as co-authors. Our undergraduate interns also leveraged this research experience to successfully find engineer positions in companies, like Boeing, Blue Origin, and SpaceX, after graduation. While the LEMS is well posed to provide material ‘design’ and ‘fabrication’ experience, the training on the aspect of material ‘testing’ has been hindered significantly by the lack of equipment. Particularly, our interns had a hard time conducting basic loading tests on the prototypes that they have designed. The current load frames available on campus often need financial support from advisors to cover shop charges, or they also have limited functionality in testing material prototypes. If we acquire the axial-torsional load frame, it would be the one and only free resource for students to use, that offers the versatile axial and torsional loading capabilities to test engineered materials. This equipment will be useful not only to students from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, but also to those from the Civil & Environmental Engineering, Material Science & Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Bioengineering departments. In these departments, the mechanics of materials and structures form one of core subjects of instruction. However, most courses tend to focus only on in-class lectures without demonstrations. This axial/torsional load frame will contribute to balance in-class and in-laboratory experience for our engineering-majored students. This will be useful to students in different disciplines as well, e.g., arts and design.
Requested:
$143
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$8,451
The end goal of an engineering education is to be able to design, build, and analyze an integrated system with a team. The best way to learn this process is to work on a technical project in a professional environment. The Washington Superbike team intends to design, build, and test an electric racing motorcycle, becoming the first team from the United States to compete internationally in the MotoStudent competition in Aragon, Spain. As a new RSO, we hope to acquire the necessary toolset to begin the engineering process.
Requested:
$88,353
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$88,353
The Department of Chemistry is requesting funds to provide a unique research and educational opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students through the purchase of two 48-core workstations for computational chemistry/biochemistry software development. These resources will enable students to develop novel algorithms for new and emerging computational frameworks, such as cloud, crowd, and quantum computing. Seeking to continue to provide increases in computing power, modern computational platforms have gone from multi-core infrastructure to cloud and crowd computing. Recently, the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy have put forth a Quantum Leap national initiative that aims to promote quantum computing research in natural sciences. Thus, increases in the computational modeling capabilities of science and engineering applications can only be realized if the software can take advantage of the growing number of cores in each microprocessor, distributed computing platform (e.g., cloud and crowd computing), and conceptually different computing infrastructure (e.g., quantum computing). A number of molecular science applications have been rewritten to take advantage of multi-core microprocessors, but progress has been uneven and focused on traditional supercomputing platforms using both SMP and MPI parallelism for intra- and inter-node computing. Although the gaming and data industries have been very successful with the cloud and crowd computing, scientific computing in chemical sciences has not adapted to these new computing platforms, leaving aside the quantum computing concept. Part of the problem has been a lack of training and opportunity in scientific software development in chemical sciences for effective programming techniques that are adaptive to modern computing infrastructure. Even today, more than a decade after the end of Dennard Scaling, few students in science and engineering are exposed to the knowledge needed to program parallel computers for high-performance scientific computing. This new platform will provide the most modern, powerful, and flexible computational resource available to students wishing to pursue scientific computing. The multi-framework software development enabled by this platform will allow students to gain invaluable experience with developing software for modern computational models, as well as empower students to become leaders in computational science on emerging computational systems.
Requested:
$76,000
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$76,000
We are requesting funds to purchase a benchtop electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectrometer for use by students and researchers across a variety of UW departments. The new spectrometer will fill a gap currently experienced by students for an EPR spectrometer that is fast to use and does not require expertise that would normally inhibit student researchers. This instrument will be an integral part of improving UW’s commitment to cutting edge research and accessibility of instruments to the student body. The benchtop EPR spectrometer will give UW students unique access to instrumentation that is usually only available for highly specialized researchers and will make the University of Washington stand out amongst its peer universities, many of which do not have the capability to allow undergraduates and non-specialized graduate students to investigate important questions using EPR. EPR is a technique that is able to probe systems that have an unpaired electron and collect a unique structural fingerprint of the molecule. This is used to characterize complex molecules and has broad applications in many fields of study from improving the next generation of solar cells, boosting the storage and efficiency of batteries, understanding disease mechanisms, to investigating quantum computing. The new availability of benchtop EPR spectrometers has extended the use of EPR in industry. Providing access to these instruments at the university level will give UW graduates a competitive advantage in industry. Furthermore, this instrument will bring EPR to more researchers throughout many departments at UW, bolstering UW’s status as a world-class research institution.
Requested:
$44,965
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$44,965
We propose to upgrade the oldest workstations in CBE studios by purchasing twenty HP Z2 workstations. These would replace twenty slow, failing iMacs purchased in 2013. Old iMacs that still run would be re-purposed to less compute- and graphics-intensive student use.
Requested:
$6,056
Status:
Funded
Awarded:
$6,056
The following proposal is for providing on-demand Language Resources and streaming world television, SCOLA through the Language Learning Center in the College of Arts and Sciences. SCOLA is a non-profit educational organization that receives and re-transmits television programming from around the world in native languages while also providing language learning content and on demand resources for students. SCOLA’s mission is to help people of the world learn about one another; their cultures, their languages, and their ideologies while emphasizing the importance and effectiveness of modern information technology as a means in overcoming barriers to global understanding.
Learn about the Student Technology Fee and the proposal process by attending a Workshop led by our staff and receive 1:1 support with your proposal.
Phone: 206-543-2975
Email: stfexec@uw.edu
Office: Husky Union Building 305B
