An innovative new course, Innovation and Entrepreneurship for Defense, challenges dynamic student teams to develop solutions to critical problems in the U.S. Department of Defense and intelligence community submitted by a variety of sponsoring organizations. Encourage.
This course combines engineering and entrepreneurship for critical defense applications and is available to both graduate and undergraduate students. Undergraduate students can earn ENGR 3195-034 and graduate students can earn ENGR 5300-010, which is nationally known as Hacking for Defense® (H4D).
This course takes a project-based approach, taking students out of the classroom and into the community, where they interact with defense industry experts.
Organizers liken it to a “miniature” undergraduate senior design capstone project in the School of Engineering.
“Students don’t have to stick to a particular field,” says Alexander Gray, Naval Security Graduate Fellow at the UConn-URI Naval STEM Coalition. “Our goal is to make connections inside and outside of engineering in all disciplines.”
Gray said the course focuses on soft skills, roundtable collaboration and limitless imagination.
By bringing together engineering, venture capital, and policy planning, students solve real-world dilemmas facing military and defense contractors across the national security field.
To begin the 2022-2023 course, students participated in a project with Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NIWC) – Atlantic. This project focused on satellite communications and their information gathering limitations.
The Navy was looking for improvements due to limited available bandwidth and lost or weak signals.
Engineering students Drew Cietek, Zachary Young, Matthew Li, John Santangelo, and Usama Sheikh are looking for greater growth potential with flexibility, increased safety, and no size constraints. We needed to develop a state-of-the-art solution.
The team created an innovative communications solution called Husky Watch. It combines advanced features of phased ray and drone technology, such as those used in Starlink.
“Having a mix of undergraduate and graduate students was really important,” says Cietek, who holds a PhD in materials science and engineering. candidate. “The undergraduate students really rose to the challenge and took the project to a new level.”
H4D is one of several courses in the Faculty of Engineering dedicated to innovation and entrepreneurship.
“Typically, I think of courses as falling into two categories: lecture or lab,” Cietek says. “But this course was something new. I can say there was a foundation in networking. I’ve spent some time in the industry and this was a great introduction to what real industry problems look like in the real world.” It’s the closest experience to crab.”
According to H4D organizers, more than 3,000 students across the country worked on 850 problems. Those students went on to found 54 startups.
Organizers say the program allows program sponsors in the Department of Defense and the intelligence community to increase the speed with which their organizations solve specific mission-critical problems.
The national H4D organization also offers an alumni network, which Cietek says has been very beneficial to him.
Gray encourages students to enroll in fall 2024 courses.
No prerequisites are required, but undergraduate students will find this course most beneficial if they are at the junior or senior level.
If you are a student interested in enrolling in the course, or a company or organization interested in sponsoring a project, please contact UConn-URI Naval STEM Combined Naval Security School Research Associate Alexander Gray at grey@uconn.edu. For more information about NIUVT, please contact her, Lisa Donegan, NIUVT Global Program Director, at lisa.donegan@uconn.edu.
The H4D program is supported by BMNT, Inc. and the Common Mission Project.
