The Industrial Assessment Center at Arizona State University, known as IAC@ASU, conducted its 500th assessment at a wastewater treatment plant in the Phoenix metro area in December.

Brennan Iannone, an ASU senior majoring in cybersecurity, is the first recipient of the $500 vCISO Cybersecurity Scholarship from Fractional CISO.

“I want to help defend organizations and people from cyberattacks by protecting hardware, networks, servers and data from potential breaches,” Iannone says. “I am interested in analyzing structural risks, engaging in ethical hacking to test for weaknesses, and researching cyberattacks on a high level to identify patterns and develop solutions. I want to keep the bad guys from taking information of innocent people and using it to ruin their names, credit, and lives.”

This scholarship will support and encourage the development of the next generation of cybersecurity professionals. The success of these students is critical in meeting the rising tide of cybercrime. In 2019, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 1,200 incident reports per day, totaling billions of dollars in losses.

Fractional CISO’s vCISO Cybersecurity Scholarship makes $1,000 in annual scholarships available to selected currently enrolled students pursuing cybersecurity degrees full-time in the United States. A $500 scholarship will also be awarded to the winner of the second contest.

To qualify, students must be at least 18 years old and studying cybersecurity as their major or postgraduate area of focus at any accredited undergraduate or graduate institution within the United States.

Learn more about the vCISO Cybersecurity Scholarship and apply with an essay for the second $500 scholarship by Thursday, December 31, 2020.

Deepanjan Ghosh, a biological design engineering graduate student, recently earned a 2020 Baxter Young Investigator Award for impactful research on a tissue repair and wound healing technology that prevents post-surgical complications and improves surgical outcomes.

Ghosh is a researcher in the Rege Bioengineering Lab, directed by Professor Kaushal Rege. The lab team works on developing new materials for improving human health, including new methods of tissue repair using nanoscale chemical interactions. Ghosh’s research centers on developing photothermal (light and heat) and immunomodulatory (modulating the immune system) biomaterials for soft tissue healing and repair.

“Although wound closure products like sutures, staples and tissue glues are clinical gold standards, each of them has its own inherent limitations,” Ghosh says. “The need for more efficacious wound closure and repair products is a big research push both in university and industry research labs.”

Tanner Yorgason, a doctoral student studying materials science and engineering, has won an Idaho National Laboratory Graduate Fellowship, a two-year program that supports students completing their dissertation research.

Yorgason completed an internship with INL in 2018 at the lab facility while working toward a master’s degree and found the experience to be a gateway into the fellowship program.

It has been about a month since the start of the Fall 2020 semester. Faculty and students all had expectations for this semester, whether it be the first or last or somewhere in between. Here in the graphic information technology program, those expectations are nothing short of being met. The program is already taught entirely online and on campus classes often have an iCourse offering, so this isn’t completely grey water. 

The Society of Women Engineers has recognized Elizabeth Jones of Arizona State University for her impact on the Society as well as the engineering community with the SWE Outstanding Collegiate Member Award.

On August 30, Arizona State University’s award-winning robotics submarine team, Desert WAVE, competed and won second place overall in the 23rd International RoboSub Competition.

In lieu of an in-person competition, teams were evaluated on a video, website and technical design report. Desert WAVE had top finishes in all of these categories.

• Overall Final Ranking: Second Place
• Website: Second Place
• Technical Design Report: Third Place
• Video: Fourth Place

Thirty-three teams representing Brazil, Canada, Egypt, India, Mexico, Norway, Poland, Singapore and the United States participated in this year’s competition.

Learn more about Desert WAVE. Read about their journey to the 2020 virtual competition and their notable 2019 competition results.

Lidija Buchanan, a chemical engineering student, won first place in the Changemaker Challenge with her Engineering Projects In Community Service, or EPICS, project. The team, of which she is currently the sole member, aims to ease one of Phoenix’s food deserts by making fresh produce more accessible. The win earns the project $10,000 for further development and implementation in the community.

Projects and internships set computer science students apart from one another when applying for jobs. They provide real-world development experience to complement theory-based courses.

As the COVID-19 pandemic interrupts the plans of many computer science students and graduates to build skills through internships, two Arizona State University alumni have a solution: Quaranteam.

Dhantin Kumar and Kaan Aksoy, who both graduated in May with computer science degrees from the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, were inspired to help their peers who lost summer internships to take advantage of personal projects as an alternative to further develop their skills.

Learn more about Quaranteam

Matthew Aguayo (left) and Aashay Arora pose atop the Agribusiness Center building at Arizona State University’s Polytechnic campus. Aguayo and Arora founded EnKoat, a startup venture developing coating materials that reduce energy consumption by insulating buildings outside heat or cold. Photographer: Connor McKee/ASU

EnKoat, an advanced materials venture founded by ASU alumni Aashay Arora and Matthew Aguayo, recently won a $225,000 National Science Foundation Phase I Small Business Innovation Research award, a highly selective seed funding program known as SBIR.

The award supports the further development of EnKoat’s energy-efficient building coatings. The venture’s energy-saving technology embedded in paint, plaster and stucco can save up to 30% on heating and cooling costs. The coatings can be applied to interior or exterior walls or roofs of new buildings, or as retrofits to existing structures.

Earning a Phase I SBIR award will allow EnKoat to demonstrate its coating technology’s feasibility and performance, bringing it closer to commercialization.

This year, EnKoat has earned a number of awards, including selection into the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator and the Joules Accelerator, and a runner-up award in the 2020 EarthX climate-tech prize competition.

As doctoral students, Arora and Aguayo worked with Narayanan Neithalath, a professor of civil, environmental and sustainable engineering, to develop a concrete pavement with phase change materials that is resistant to cracking when exposed to high temperatures. Phase change materials turn from solid to liquid and vice versa to store or release heat. This led Arora and Aguayo to explore how phase change materials could keep buildings cool, which resulted in their venture EnKoat.