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Speaking at the White House Young America Series

May 5, 2012 | 0 comments

Speaking about Sustainable Design at the White House Young America Speaker Series

How I've leveraged Interdisciplinary Collaboration to build up Cornell University Sustainable Design

Recently, I had the privilege to speak at Syracuse University as part of a speaker series for young Americans promoting social change. The event was sponsored and put on by the White House, and I had the opportunity to meet some white house officials, as well as some inspiring students who were doing work to better their communities.

I was specifically asked to come speak about the work I did to develop Cornell University Sustainable Design, and how we’ve used interdisciplinary collaboration to further our ability as students to impact both local and global communities with respect to increasing environmental sustainability. The entire event was 3 hours long, with lots of great speakers, but my part was about 10 minutes, and it starts at 36 minutes into the video linked below.

Click here to Watch the Event Recording (I start at 36 minutes in)

The Future of 3D Printing

April 28, 2012 | 0 comments

On The News

Speaking about the future of personal fabrication

It’s no secret that I’m excited about 3D printing. I work on developing electronics for Cornell’s personal printer, the Fab@Home, I own two MakerBot printers, and I’ve worked for MakerBot, designing electronics for their open-source 3D printers. Recently, one of Ithaca’s local news stations reached out to me and other members of the Cornell Creative Machines Lab about the future of 3D printing. In the embedded video below, we sat down with them to discuss the upcoming disruptive impact of 3D printers. Check it out!

Pop In and Start Up at the PopShop!

April 15, 2012 | 0 comments

 

3D Printing Workshop

I explain all about 3D Printing and personal fabrication

For the last several months I’ve been collaborating with about 8 other students as well as Cornell University’s Entrepreneurship department to develop a new way for students to bring their amazing ideas into reality. At Cornell, we have 7 seperate undergraduate colleges, each with amazingly smart people. Unfortunately, these students often don’t meet each other, and as a result, hundreds of potential entrepreneurial ventures are never formed. That’s where The PopShop comes in. We’ve opened the PopShop co-working space as a one month experiment right outside Cornell’s main academic campus. The “shop” is a bit like a cross between a hackerspace and startup incubator, with student entrepreneurs and innovators from all over campus working in the space every day! For the next month, we’ll have programming almost every day, with tons of great lectures by successful entrepreneurs, “office hours” where attendees can learn about things ranging from web developing to financial analysis, and social events. We only opened a week ago, but the space has already been a big hit (maybe it’s because we give unlimited free popcorn to everybody who works here). In addition to managing the space, I’ve been using it as a creative outlet to work on 3D printing, a solar tracking project, technology for hotel check-ins, and just some general hacking. Other students are working on art projects, apparel lines, smartphone-equipped laser tag guns, political tracking websites, microcontroller projects, microfunding plans, and more. I’ve started collaborating with hotel management students, economics students, art majors, architects, etc. I’m really excited to see what we’ll be able to do with this space, and I’m hoping its success will allow us to gather funding and keep it running well past the experimental month.

Already this week, we’ve been featured in the Cornell Daily Sun, and have been featured in one of their videos. We’ve had several talks, ranging from web development to outsourcing concerns, all led by student entrepreneurs who have worked intimately with these problems. Yesterday, I hosted a digital fabrication and 3D printing workshop, where I invited Cornell students and members of the community to come checkout my MakerBot 3D printers and to learn how they work. It was a blast, and there are some great pictures from the event below!

CUSD Pulls in Some Major Grants and Meets with Rick Fedrizzi (President/CEO of the US Green Building Council)

April 8, 2012 | 5 Comments

CUSD and Rick Fedrizzi

CUSD Team Leaders with Rick Fedrezzi, President/CEO of the USGBC

This was quite the week for Cornell University Sustainable Design (CUSD)! As I’ve talked about before, CUSD is a student-led design-build team working to redefine the way we think about sustainability. In the past, we’ve built schoolhouses and solar powered-homes. We’re currently working on an on-campus research facility (the SRF) and a sustainable community in Nicaragua. This week, SRF was awarded both a $1000 grant from the Cornell Alumni Association, and a $10,000 grant to perform geothermal heating/cooling research. Props to the many excellent CUSD team members who helped to prepare these grant proposals!

Perhaps the most exciting experience of the week was getting the opportunity to meet with Rick Fedrizzi, President and CEO of the US Green Building Council (USGBC). You might not be familiar with the USGBC, but you’ve probably heard of LEED certification, the rating system developed by USGBC for evaluating the sustainability of new and existing construction. LEED is a global standard against which design, construction, and operation of green buildings can be compared. Fedrizzi was visiting campus to give a talk about the USGBC, and CUSD was the only student group to meet with him during his whirlwind tour of the campus (especially Cornell’s LEED-certified Human Ecology Building). The meeting was a great success, and I look forward to the ways in which CUSD will be able to coordinate with the USGBC in the future, especially as we continue design of our on-campus research facility. As our meeting was wrapping up, Rick said to us: “You’re group is not normal. Students interested in sustainability don’t do this – they don’t actually act on it. But you are, and that’s absolutely amazing.” [Rough quote from memory]. Needless to say, that made my week!

Launching the Every1 Campaign

March 14, 2012 | 0 comments

Advocating for the Every1 Campaign

"Every1 Deserves to have a Safe Haven"

The Every1 Campaign aims to prevent unhealthy sexual contact, empower survivors, give voice to those who choose not to label their experience, challenge common misconceptions, and encourage the community to talk about how to have healthy communication and sex. I’ve been able to contribute to the effort by participating in the photo campaign, helping to edit the introduction video, developing the social media presence, and developing/maintaining the website. I officially launched the website earlier this week, and am excited to be participating in a campaign that encourages such an important discussion to take place on college campuses.

The Every1 Campaign is certainly a bit out of my usual area of expertise, but I was excited to get involved along with many other student leaders on Cornell’s campus. The campaign is starting an important conversation on Cornell’s campus that I hope will decrease the quantity of non-consensual sex, and will encourage healthier sexual habits.