Engineering student team behind top design in Canada

By Phoebe Dey

Edmonton—At first they were just four engineering students who didn’t know each other, never mind anything about an eye disorder called strabismus. But this week they earned a national honour for designing an implant to help treat the disorder.

“The whole experience at nationals was quite surreal,” said Jeb Molcak, a member of the team of mechanical engineering students who won top honours at the Canadian Society of Manufacturing Engineer’s National Design Competition in Halifax. “We competed against nine other universities with projects varying from a battling robots game to a city transit bus design. Our design was one of the most innovative and also incorporated creativity.

“It was an honour to represent the university and be recognized for our hard work.”

At the beginning of the school year, Molcak, Ryan Galloway, Michael Otto and Benjamin Sunderland all had one mutual friend who suggested they would make a good team. So after a mass e-mail with everyone’s contact information, the group met for the first time and buckled down.

Molcak pushed his group toward a biomedical project. A transfer student from biochemistry, he has loved the medical industry. “The one thing we all really liked was that we were creating a device from scratch,” said Molcak. “The doctors had a problem and it was up to us to create a device to fix this problem.”

Drs. Kourosh Sabri and Kam Kassiri, from the U of A’s Department of Ophthalmology, explained that although surgeries on people with strabismus—a condition where the eyes are not properly aligned with each other—are common, success is not always guaranteed. Forty per cent of patients need additional surgeries. The doctors wanted a device to implant that would align the muscle properly and be much less invasive, minimizing the surgeries or in the best case, eliminating them.

“None of us knew about the disease but once we started working on it we realized we had friends who had strabismus,” said Galloway. “We had a strong group of guys who were always motivated and strived for success because we really wanted to make this device usable for people.”

By the end of their fourth-year design course, the team created two prototypes, and had their names listed as inventors on a patent application. “We’re pretty excited about it all,” said Galloway. “We’re going to try to continue on the project to take it to the next step and help the doctors as much as we can. We want to see it become successful.”

The group’s team advisor, Dr. Yongsheng Ma, said this particular group was one of the most enthusiastic he has seen. “I was impressed by their self-motivation and organization,” said Ma, who teaches in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “They had a lot of brainstorming ideas, the right amount of curiosity and the basic principles of engineering nailed down.”

Before getting to Halifax, the team walked away with the overall award at the department’s Capstone Honours Awards Banquet, splitting $1,000 among the team and taking home a $2,000 planetary-geared truck hub trophy that is fully functional and come with a set of tools to disassemble them.

At the awards banquet in Edmonton, the team was one of four chosen to present their designs. Professor Curt Stout and retired professor Dave Budney originally started an endowment to fund the event in 1999, to recognize excellence in engineering design. Individual sponsors and industry contributed to the endowment, including the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (Edmonton Chapter), Shell, Universe Machine, Agrium and others.

“We wanted to change the dynamic from winners and losers to a celebration of design and I think it’s motivating for students,” said Stout. “On the last day of class, I was speaking to one student and asked him why he puts so much time and effort into the course. He said he wanted to do well for the industry sponsors, he didn’t want to let his teammates down and he hoped to win a capstone award.

“The group who won this year did an excellent job on a project that helps people and I’m glad we could recognize it.”

 

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