Huge congratulations to MDE student team Josh Blair, Zoe Zhang, Emily Guan and Yanning Hou for winning the MIT hard mode hackathon!
Project: Jira the Cat
A physical AI companion, tailored to each user with unique personality traits dynamically generated from real-time sensor data.
The concept - Anxiety-aware hardware in a familiar form, a cat, packed into a travel pillow to use on-the-go. Features include haptics for massaging, pressure sensing for petting, tail wagging and meowing for mood indication, and purring resonance for soothing noise cancellation.
#harvard #harvardmde #hardmodemit #harvardseas #harvardgsd
From coding self-driving cars to tackling Mars, droughts, and healthcare.
After 3 years as a Waymo software engineer, Luke Fiorante came to Harvard’s Master in Design Engineering to combine engineering, design, and data visualization to solve complex, real-world problems—from planning routes for NASA’s Perseverance rover, to building tools that anticipate future droughts, to helping doctors and patients communicate across language barriers.
“There’s a fundamental optimism in MDE’s philosophy that says big problems are worth tackling,” he said.
#Harvard #SEAS #HarvardSEAS #HarvardGSD #DesignEngineering #datavisualization #perseverance #drought #Harvard26
Big congrats to the MDE team for winning this year's ingenuity award at Harvard's President's Innovation Challenge.
Cryofab:
By treating ice as a programmable fabrication material, it opens up promising possibilities for biomedical fabrication and other applications where dissolvable internal architectures are needed.
Steffek shares his first year experience in the two year design engineering program across @harvardgsd and @harvardseas
Visit link in bio to watch more!
#harvardgsd #designengineering #harvard #harvardengineering #studentstories
No exams, just building…Steffek gives us an inside look into Harvard’s Masters in Design Engineering program
Visit link in bio to watch more!
#harvardgsd #designengineering #harvard #harvardengineering #studentstories
In September 2025, NASA selected its newest class of astronaut candidates—and we’re proud that Katherine Spies (MDE ’19) is among the ten chosen.
A former Marine Corps attack helicopter pilot and director of flight test engineering at Gulfstream Aerospace, Spies brings more than 2,000 flight hours and deep technical expertise to NASA.
Her path to the astronaut corps was shaped in part by Harvard’s Master in Design Engineering program, a collaboration between SEAS and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she learned to connect design, engineering, and human experience to tackle complex problems—on Earth and now beyond it.
From Gund Hall’s buzzing studio trays to NASA’s training facilities, that same spirit of curiosity, rigor, and collaboration continues to guide her work.
#Harvard #SEAS #HarvardSEAS #DesignEngineering #HarvardGSD #NASA #Astronaut #Space
Kate Spies, an MDE alumna, has been selected by NASA for the 2025 astronaut candidate class!
Kate grew up in Southern California, where she developed a strong interest in the aerospace ecosystem. With over 2,000 flight hours across more than 30 aircraft, she served as Director of Flight and Test Engineering at Gulfstream Aerospace prior to joining NASA.
“A big part of test piloting is risk management, and in order to identify risk, you’ve got to understand what you’re working on”, she said, speaking about her passion for the field of aerospace engineering and the role of curiosity in professional growth.
#nasa #harvardmde #aerospaceengineering
(Photo from Harvard GSD alumni website)
Growing up as an athlete, Sara Falkson never found a sports bra that fit or functioned the way it should. That frustration became the starting point for Robyn, the company she’s building from her SEAS design engineering capstone project. She’s designing sports bras for middle‑ and high‑school athletes, running body‑confidence workshops, and refining prototypes through athlete feedback. With launch planned for Fall 2026, Robyn is focused on reshaping how girls experience sport by giving them gear that finally supports them.
“We can build self-driving cars and scale AI, yet we still haven’t engineered a sports bra that actually supports girls,” she said. “It’s time to change that.”
#Harvard #SEAS #DesignEngineering #sports #apparel
MDE second-years Steffek Rainey, Diksha Chugh, and Hongbee Park recently traveled to Dubai to present their MDE studio project at the Dubai Future Foundation. They created ChoLab, a portable cholera testing device designed for low-resource settings. Their project was selected as one of the 100 humanitarian innovations displayed in the 2025 Prototypes for Humanity exhibition.
@dubaifuture@prototypesforhumanity
Plant systems aren't just things we design around, they can be active collaborators in making new material futures.
Harvard MDE student Hana Khurshid along with Harvard MDes student Isabelle Lee presented their paper "Woven-Root Tiles: Toward Fully Biodegradable Vertical Wall Elements" at the ACADIA 2025 Conference at Florida International University.
Their research explores how plant roots can act as living fabricators, growing through biodegradable scaffolds to form self-organizing material systems. By integrating computational design with biological growth, they propose a regenerative approach where material life cycles are guided by living processes. Creating a symbiosis between human and nature, this work imagines a future where we build with the environment rather than against it; allowing architecture to grow, adapt, and eventually return to the earth, rewinding our cities in the process.
The project is based on an independent study guided by Assistant Prof. Karen Lee Bar-Sinai, Ph.D., building on a seminar project guided by Assistant Prof. Jonathan Grinham at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Special thanks to Harvard MDE student Luke Fiorante for his contributions to the earlier phases of this research!
Their work contributes to the global dialogue on circularity; advancing material research that bridges ecology, climate resilience, and regenerative design toward more symbiotic futures between humans and nature.
Circular economy is in part driven by a decreased reliance on petroleum-derived materials in favor of regenerative feedstocks, particularly those which are traditionally considered waste.
2nd year MDE students Valentine Geze and Mitul Iyengar conducted research that focuses on one such petroleum material, carbon black, which is typically produced through the incomplete combustion of heavy petroleum products and natural gas.
Carbon black is utilized for its rich black pigment and physical properties in products ranging from car tires to cosmetics; this work proposes an exploration of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) as an alternative and regenerative carbon source for pigment applications.
This work was completed as part of coursework at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design under the guidance of Jonathan Grinham and with support from Leonard E. Palmer and Jina Choe.
Last month, they presented this research at the Circular Materials Conference 2025 in Copenhagen, Denmark, joining the global dialogue on circularity and connecting with people building toward a regenerative future for materials!
Meet the @jamesdysonaward national runner-ups! Kaew, Adrian, and Meihan are 3 second-year MDE students who spent their spring semester developing an agile hose carrier to help firefighters advance the firehose, making firefighting safer, faster, and more efficient.
