Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory
In 2022, I found a call for engineering help on a project to help with removing trash from the Baltimore Harbor as part of the Clean Currents Coalition. The task was to add a retrofit an encoder to Mr. Trash Wheel, a floating conveyor belt that scoops trash out of the harbor, so that a Bluetooth camera could accurately sample the trash to feed into a machine learning model. Easy enough!
By asking for pictures of the conveyor belt, we were able to create an endcap for the shaft of the conveyor belt, and an Arduino sitting inside a weather resistant housing could be magnetically placed on the steel structure supporting the shaft. After confirming that the Bluetooth worked with the software team in Santa Barbara, we sent the prototype to Baltimore and it worked! As time went on, it surpassed all expectations, surviving the harsh winter and reliably talking to the camera even a year later.
It was great doing this one-off job with them, and I would love to do more work like this in the future. There is a lot of work out there
Community engagement
Throughout undergrad, working, and graduate school, I have enjoyed doing scientific outreach with young students in the community. Currently, I volunteer with the Materials Research Lab at UCSB. Science is fun!
While science certainly has better PR than subjects like math, I want to show people how fun science and engineering can be. Fundamentally, science is about discovery, and engineering is another way to express your creativity. Whether it’s making bouncy balls out of glue and borax, or acoustic levitation of Styrofoam pellets, it’s supposed to be fun!
