December 2023

LEARN • BUILD • INNOVATE

SOLVING TOMORROW'S CHALLENGES TODAY

Our Vision: Premier Engineering College in the Nation, Recognized for Academic Excellence, Accessibility, Industrial Partnerships and Community Engagement

Lohr ERA Milestone

10 Years, 10 Milestones - How the College has Developed since Oct. 4, 2013

Ten years ago this fall, the College of Engineering became the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering to honor the man who had at that point given in excess of $10 million to college construction projects.

Lohr, a 1958 civil engineering major who made his mark in winemaking and home construction, was instrumental in fueling the College of Engineering construction boom that began in the late 1990s, including the construction of Architecture, Mathematics and Engineering Hall. In fact, it was at the Oct. 4, 2013, formal groundbreaking for the building that the college was renamed in Lohr’s honor.

The standard of excellence that has been an attribute of Lohr throughout his career has been mirrored by efforts within the college during the past decade.

With this final issue of Engineering Connection for 2023, it seems appropriate to reflect on the past decade and delineate 10 milestones within the college in the past 10 years.

After soliciting input from current and former college administrators, the milestones were narrowed to:

• Establishment of the concrete industry management program.

• Awards of excellence to faculty members by their peers.

• Growth in scholarships.

• Endowing the dean’s position.

• Student competition success at the national level.

• Advancing all three NASA student projects to the finals in 2023.

• Growth in academic programs.

• Growth in external research expenditures.

• Growth of endowed positions.

• Continued building construction.

2023 JacksBEST Robotics

JacksBEST Robotics Games Day took place on Friday, November 10th at the Oscar Larson Performing Arts Center. Thirteen High Schools competed on the Robotics Field, Exhibits, Notebooks, and in Marketing. The top two teams, Canistota and Mitchell Christian, will get to advance and compete in all areas or for the BestAward in Denver, CO. Additionally, the top two Robots, Mobridge-Pollock and Arlington High School, will also get to advance to Denver and compete on the Robotics field only.

Jacks Best completion is FREE for high schools and middle schools to participate!
• It is an Eight-week program

• No registration fees

• All supplies supplied by Jackrabbit BEST through sponsors

• Only costs incurred are travel, lodging, and meals

• No limit on number of students participating on team

• Only one team per school

How the Program Works

• Teams have eight weeks to design, build, and test a robot

• The game theme and competition field change every year

• Teams are provided with identical kits of parts and software to take back to their          school on Kick-Off Day

• On Game Day teams return with their robot to compete

• Two parallel competitions:

• Robotics Game: Includes the Robotics Competition and the team Project Engineering Notebook. Teams compete in a series of three-minute matches.
• BEST Award: Earned by the team that best embodies the concept of “Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology.” Includes the Robot Competition, Project Engineering Notebook, Marketing Presentation, Exhibit & Interview, and Spirit & Sportsmanship.

Papua New Guinea

Sixteen time zones, 8,000 miles and, culturally, a whole other world away, Papua New Guinea sits in the tropical Asian Pacific.

It’s so far removed from the mindset of Northern Plains dwellers that even Rajesh Kavasseri, an experienced world traveler, had to look up Papua New Guinea on the map before he and three other SDSU officials made the weeklong trip this fall.

Kavasseri, associate dean for research in the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering, traveled with Dean Sanjeev Kumar. They were met there by Jon Stauff, assistant vice president for international affairs, and joined a day later by Matt Miller, a chemistry professor and assistant head of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

With 5,000 kilometers of coastline, a 14,000-foot volcanic mountain and lush vegetation, Papua New Guinea is a tourist’s paradise. They weren’t there for that. Rather, the SDSU team was visiting the former Australian colony to explore educational connections in the island country of 10 million people that didn’t gain its first university until 1965.

While its estimated literacy rate was 64% in 2015, the country’s current government is putting an emphasis on increasing its STEM-trained populace.

SDSU Team Set to Lead NIH AIM-AHEAD Project

South Dakota State University has been selected to lead a research project on the National Institutes of Health-funded Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Consortium to Advance Health Equity and Researcher Diversity (AIM-AHEAD) program coordinated by the University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth. The project's title is “Developing Explainable Machine Learning and Computational Methods for Identifying Geographic and Racial Disparities in End-Stage Renal Disease.”

Break the Ice Finalist

NASA has narrowed the field to six in its lunar soil excavating contest, and a team of students from South Dakota State University is among the group left in the hunt for a $1 million top prize.
Conceived in 2020, the Break the Ice Lunar Challenge tasked innovators with creating robotic systems that can navigate the rugged terrain of the Lunar South Pole, dig up its icy soil and transport it to another location, where, in theory, water could be extracted from the soil.
There were two earlier design and prototype phases in which SDSU advanced. In the latest stage, SDSU was one of 15 finalists invited to give their prototypes a 15-day test.
Nine entities completed the 15-day durability testing, attempting to have their equipment excavate up to 800 kilograms (1,760 pounds) of soil daily for 15 consecutive days and then document their work by video and lengthy reports, which were due Oct. 27. When NASA announced the six finalists, only one other was strictly composed of college students.
NASA awarded the top three places and added three runners-up. SDSU, which competes under the team's name Space Trajectory, and Michigan Tech, which competes as MTU Planetary Surface Technology Development Lab, were both runners-up.

Up Coming Events

                          December 7th- 13th                        Finals Week

                          December 13th                                Last Day of Class Fall 2023

                          December 16th - 17th                     JacksBEST Championship in                                                                                         Denver, CO

                          January 8th                                      Classes Begin

2023 Brookings Parade of Lights

The College of Engineering's Joint Engineering Council (JEC) worked with BAJA, Formula 1 racing and Quarter Scale Tractor Student Groups to light up the Parade and represent South Dakota State University.