Draper President Keynotes National Society of Black Engineers Conference

Dec. 2, 2011 - PRLog -- CAMBRIDGE, MA – Draper Laboratory officials discussed professional development in the engineering field, as well as ways to use technology to assist local communities, during a National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) northeastern regional conference last month.

Draper co-sponsored NSBE’s Region I Fall Conference, which ran from Nov. 17-20 in Danvers, Mass., and included more than 800 student and technical professional attendees.

During a keynote presentation, Draper President James Shields talked about career opportunities at not-for-profit research labs, which offer scientists and engineers the chance to help solve important national problems.  At Draper, engineers have the opportunity to prove novel concepts through prototyping and demonstration in realistic operational environments.

Draper also sponsored a competition at the conference where students competed for a $2000 award by answering design challenges in areas including navigation, miniature radios, and model-based engineering.  Senior Draper engineers judged the contestants’ submissions.

Byron Williams, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology, won for his paper on computer-based models to enable fast trade studies to choose the best set of systems when responding to a tornado in an urban area, as well as a terrorist attack on a U.S. ship.

Other Draper participation in the conference included a workshop led by Sarah Brown, who serves as the national chair of NSBE’s Technical OutReach Community Help (TORCH) initiative.

Brown, a Draper Lab Fellow, NSF Graduate Research Fellow and Ph.D. student at Northeastern University, is working with a Draper internal research and development team to create a computational model for emotion.  She discussed how local NSBE chapters can promote science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in their areas.

For more information about NSBE, please visit www.NSBE.org.

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Draper Laboratory is a not-for-profit, engineering research and development organization dedicated to solving critical national problems in security, space systems, biomedical systems, and energy.