College of Science, Engineering and Technology

Photos by Slaven Gujic GCU News Bureau The Friday afternoon ceremony at Grand Canyon University winter commencement featured graduates of the College of Education, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Science, Engineering and Technology, and College of Theology.    

It didn’t quite look like the typical finals week in instructor Li Tan’s Principles of Mechanical Design class. Students in his class took over the courtyard area outside of the College of Science, Engineering and Technology Building Tuesday to test the results of their class project — to design remote-control cars. Teams of four used SolidWorks to design their vehicles and then put them through the rigor of a speed race course and obstacle course. “They had to pass all the different terrains to satisfy the design concept. During this process, they’re able to learn the basic principles of design,” said Tan.

Bill Palowski served in the Air Force for 23 years. Christina Herman was a GCU student who changed her major three times and wasn’t sure what she wanted to do as a career. But after immersing themselves in four months in GCU’s Java Certificate Program, the new coders both were hired, before graduation, by a large technology consulting firm. They are examples of the success of the program, which made its debut this year. Palowski, Herman and five other Java boot camp students are finishing the camp Friday and held a showcase this week for industry leaders.

When GCU biology professor Dr. Galyna Kufryk saw that some of her microbiology students were struggling with the math in her course, she turned to GCU math professor Dr. Filippo Posta, who helped her put together a self-paced math lesson students could take that targeted the microbiology concepts she was trying to teach. After three years of collecting data, the results are impressive. Exam scores went up by 10.5 percent, on average, in the group of students using the math guide. Kufryk and Posta presented their findings at the recent Association of American Colleges & Universities conference in Atlanta.

“There’s real science going on … there’s real innovation,” Provost Dr. Hank Radda said during Wednesday’s Undergraduate Learning Community and Research Symposium. Student presenters spoke to the audience about everything from the Desert Owl Population Improvement Project to the Bible Virtual Reality Project and one team’s attempt to help nonprofits digitize their paper surveys.

“Why is There a Robot in My Operating Room?” We’re not sure why, either. But high school students found out why on Health Sciences, Engineering and Technology Day, where they learned about biomedical engineering (the reason there’s a robot in your operating room), discovered “The Unseen but SHOCKING World of Engineering,” stopped by a suture station, toured the cadaver and DNA labs and more. More than 950 high school students attended HSET Day Wednesday on the GCU campus.

Editor’s note: This story is reprinted from the November issue of GCU Magazine. To view the digital version, click here.  By Lana Sweeten-Shults GCU Magazine Grand Canyon University biomedical engineering junior Gabriela Calhoun wanted to do more than just deep-dive into a typical anatomy project for her undergraduate research. She wanted to move mountains. “I said, ‘Let’s do something more.’ We have so much potential as engineers and STEM students to make an impact. So why don’t we?” Calhoun’s biotechnology undergraduate research group found the “more” they were searching for when one of the students in the group started painting a picture of what his mother, a nurse in Rwanda, sees daily. She had told him about amputee after amputee in her care. It was a problem that resonated with the undergraduate researchers. The team learned that a small cut would lead to an infection and eventually the amputation of a finger or a hand, a foot or a leg. They wondered, could they engineer a better bandage to prevent infection? Could they save someone from losing a limb because of something as treatable as a minor cut? Could they change the course of someone’s life? “It was really important […]

GCU Magazine Biology professor Dr. Daisy Savarirajan asked students in an end-of-course survey about the impact of faith-science integration on their personal faith. Here are a few of the answers: “I feel that, as a Christian school, it is very comforting to know that GCU does not object to integrating its Christian worldview into its curriculum. I feel this is especially important for a science course, like this class specifically. As a basic science course, I feel that it is very important to have a biblical foundation, as this course will provide a baseline for future science courses. I can also appreciate the fact that a prayer was said before most classes. This is something that does not happen in most schools and is very comforting to see here at GCU. Overall, I found the integration of faith and Scripture into the course to be an excellent idea and very beneficial for me personally all throughout the entire semester.” **** “This course showed me how God and science go together. There was a time where I felt like I lost my faith. And since, right now, we are learning about all the diseases, it reminded me of how I started […]

GCU Computer Science students are adding a modern twist to the Bible by using virtual reality to bring some of its most famous stories to life.

Albert Einstein introduced a whole new game in physics with his general theory of relativity, proposing new concepts of space and time. He imagined the existence of gravitational waves rippling through the fabric of space and time and saw black holes as bottomless pits of such gravitational intensity that not even light could escape from them. His concept about gravitational waves is something he said existed, but he didn’t think it could be proved. Then in 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detected two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away, confirming Einstein’s theory about gravitational waves. Amber Strunk spoke about the engineering marvel that is LIGO recently to students in the College of Science, Engineering and Technology.