An alumnus who aligned his passions for diving and oceanography with mechanical engineering, Glenn Piper, '80, spoke with ME about the value of hands-on learning.

The UWashington Hyperloop team is taking part in Elon Musk's competition to design a pod that can travel at transonic speed within a vacuum tube. After winning the Safety Subsystem Technical Excellence Award this January, the team will advance to the next leg of the competition, set to take place in January 2017 at SpaceX.

The Boeing Advanced Research Center, or BARC, is providing UW students with the opportunity to get real world engineering experience as they tackle tricky problems alongside UW professors and industry leaders from Boeing. This winter, BARC launched an aircraft engineering class co-taught by UW faculty and Boeing engineers.

The Burke Museum plans to display a giant Columbian Mammoth in its new building, set to open in 2019; however, only 20% of the mammoth’s bones survive. So museum staff have partnered with College of Engineering students and instructors who are taking advantage of 3-D printing technology to reproduce the rest of the mammoth.