A Note from Ali Khabari, Dean of the Wentworth School of Engineering

As we prepare to welcome about 600 engineering students in Fall 2025—the largest first-year engineering cohort at Wentworth—it is imperative to reflect on the achievements of our students, faculty, and staff during the 2024-25 academic year, including the significant rise in our ranking on the U.S. News & World Report list of Best Undergraduate Engineering Programs, as well as the continued growth in engineering enrollments. These milestones reflect the excellence and dedication that drive our students, faculty, and staff forward. 

Sincerely, 

Ali Khabari 

Dean, School of Engineering 

Externally Funded Projects and Scholarly Activities: 

In the 2024-25 academic year, the staff and faculty were involved in many externally funded projects: 
 

• The School of Engineering received a grant of $100,000 from the Richard H. Lufkin Memorial Fund to support student scholarships for the new robotics program.    

• Mahmut Reyhanoglu received a NASA SBIR Phase I funding of $150,000 in collaboration with Converter Source LLC for the project titled “Sensorless Position Estimator for Reciprocating Linear Actuator Hardware (2025–2026).”   

• Saurav Basnet received a grant of $46,350 from the City of Boston to cultivate leafy greens using aeroponic technology and demonstrate the feasibility and community impact of a year-round, high-efficiency vertical farming system in an underutilized facility within Mission Hill.   

• Afsaneh Ghanavati received the FY25 Empower Massachusetts Innovation and Capacity Building grant of $25,000 for the Microgrid Feasibility Study for Urban University Campuses and their Surrounding Communities to Address Power Reliability.  

• The School of Engineering received another grant of $98,190 from the Richard H. Lufkin Memorial Fund to implement an entrepreneurial mindset in first-year courses through guided discovery.    

• Mary Machado was awarded a $5,000 grant from MIT Sea Grant for her proposal, “Sensing the Microplastic Through the Reads: The Creation of a Genetic Sensor to Track Environmental Changes in Extracellular DNA.” 

•  Saurav Basnet and Kapil Gangwar received the Fall 2024 Launch Grant, and. Salil Desai received the Spring 2025 Spark Grant.  

• Altair made an in-kind contribution to Serdar Tumkor’s course material and research in Design and Manufacturing by providing an Academic Edition license (a commercial value of about $90,000) and giving full access to Altair’s learning materials, tutorials, and technical support.  

• Uri Feldman received the Engineering Unleashed Fellow from the Kern Family Foundation and was awarded a $10,000 grant.    

• James McCusker secured funding ($5,000) from Teradyne for his senior design students to work on a Cartesian robot that enables autonomous testing and evaluation processes, thereby eliminating human error.  

• The Kern Family Foundation awarded $25,000 to foster an entrepreneurial mindset, funding 22 professional development opportunities for faculty members to attend workshops and conferences on this topic, as well as a grant to the School of Engineering to support entrepreneurial mindset activities within the school. Additionally, six faculty members were selected to participate in the Kern Family Foundation’s 2025 Summer Mini-Adventures in Entrepreneurial Minded Learning (EML), each receiving a travel grant and stipend. 

• Gautham Das was granted U.S. Patent No. US12091330B2 for his invention titled “Apparatus and Process for Removing PFAS and PFAS Compounds from Water.”  

• Mahmut Reyhanoglu published his sixth book titled Advances in Robust Control and Applications, InTech, London, UK, 2025.  

• Mahmut Reyhanoglu is also in the process of publishing his seventh book titled Modeling and Control of Autonomous Systems. 

•  Saurav Basnet received the 2025 IEEE PES Chapter - Outstanding Engineer Award for outstanding contributions to establishing pathways for higher education in power systems and complete revitalization of the students’ branches of IEEE at Wentworth Institute of Technology. 

• Kapil Gangwar received the SME Distinguished Faculty Advisor Award. His research includes advanced manufacturing techniques such as friction stir welding, electron beam additive manufacturing, and direct energy deposition.  

• Mansour Zenouzi was reappointed as an ABET Engineering Accreditation Commissioner.  

• Jayshri Kulkarni serves as Vice Chair of the IEEE Microwave Theory & Technology /Antennas & Propagation Society, Boston Section. Anuja Kamat serves as Vice Chair of the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, and Saurav Basnet serves as Education Chair of the IEEE Power and Energy (PES) Boston Chapter.  

Outreach Activities: 

• The School of Engineering hosted the 2025 Girls Who Engineer Magic, welcoming 39 middle school students to Wentworth for a hands-on STEM exploration. The event was organized in collaboration with the student chapter of the Society of Women Engineers and the Girl Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts. 

• In partnership with the Ron Burton Training Village (RBTV), the School of Engineering hosted the 2025 RBTV STEM Exploration Day. This event welcomed 55 high school students to participate in several STEM activities led by the engineering faculty and staff. 

• The School of Engineering co-hosted the 34th Annual Model Bridge in partnership with the Boston Society of Civil Engineers. The event invited 50 high school and middle school teams to participate in a hands-on experience of designing a bridge while adhering to specific engineering constraints. 

• The School of Engineering hosted the Future City Competition, in partnership with the Boston Society of Civil Engineers, where student teams in grades 6 to 8, develop a virtual city (using SimCity), researching and designing a solution to a city-wide issue, and then building a scale model of their city using recycled material. 

• The School of Engineering participated in offering pre-college courses in the ImpactLab summer program. The camp sessions include Introduction to Robotics Engineering, Engineering Explorations, Introduction to Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Nuts and Bolts of Mechanical Engineering courses.  

• The FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship 2025 was held on Wentworth Campus in Spring 2025.  

• The School of Engineering participated in RAMP, which is a seven-week Summer Bridge Program in which students took apart and then put together an engine.  

Students and Professional Societies Accomplishments: 

• The Wentworth Institute of Technology Aerospace Club (WITAero) received a glass award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and Rawsen Mitchell received second place for both his paper and presentation at the AIAA Region I conference in Montreal. 

• Wentworth Institute of Technology’s underwater robotics team, WUROV, concluded a successful 2024-25 season, earning a prestigious individual award at the MATE ROV World Championship, which was held last week in Alpena, Michigan.  Belinda Truong was recognized as an “Engineering Presentation MVP” for her outstanding skills in communicating the team’s complex engineering work to a panel of judges.  

• The Wentworth Sounding Rocket team participated in the second-annual Argonia Cup in Argonia, Kansas. The team successfully launched a two-stage high-power rocket in a Kansas cornfield. 

• Engineering students participated in the MassRobotics Form & Function Robotics Challenge and presented their project, “Robotic arm and hand for ASL communication.” 

• Belinda Truong, an Electrical Engineering senior, was awarded the Grants-in-Aid of Research (GIAR) grant by Sigma Xi, the international Scientific Research Honor Society, in Spring 2025.  

• John-Mark Fakhri (BELM senior) served on the panel at the IEEE Life Member Evolution conference titled “Mentorship Impacts: Important Perspectives on Mentoring Through the Lens of Students to Life Member” at Tufts University.   

• A couple of students, with the support of our partner foundries, D.W. Clark and CPP-Wollaston Alloys, Boston, participated in the 2025 Cast in Steel Competition during the American Foundry Society’s Metal Casting Congress in Atlanta, and two other students entered the 2025 Aluminum Extrusion Design Competition with a design titled “City Rack-Bike Rack/Charging/Storage,” for the Aluminum Extruders Council ET Foundation. 

• Four Biomedical Engineering students participated in Harvard Surgical Program in Innovation (SPIN) where they collaborated with surgical residents at Beth Israel Medical Center to build prototypes of medical devices aimed to benefit surgeons and their patients.  

• Society of Manufacturing Engineering (SME) students Cameron Melchin and Andrius Nenortas have secured funding for the SME 2025 Chapter Funding through their collaborative efforts, under the supervision of professor Kapil Gangwar. 

• Biological Engineering senior Abby Maher was selected for Sci-Mix (signifying that her poster was in the Top 10 percent of posters submitted in the division of Colloids) at the American Chemical Society Meetings and Expositions.    

• Wentworth Engineering students were awarded the “Best Undergraduate Poster, Second Place| and “Best Undergraduate Poster, Third Place” at the American Society for Engineering Education, Northeast section (ASEE-NE 2025) held at Bridgeport University in Connecticut (March 22, 2025).  

• About 10 Wentworth students participated in the Colleges of the Fenway (COF), Muddy River Symposium (April 8, 2025). The students presented posters of their project work related to sustainability. Wentworth computer engineering students Brian Carriero and Nick Dosremedios were awarded the “Sustainability Science Award” at the Muddy River Symposium. 

• Kyle Leger, Joseph Harounian, and Trout Marnel presented the dynamic simulation of a nonlinear PCB frame on a PocketQube satellite at the 2025 SmallSat Education Conference, held at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Wentworth’s PocketQube, Leopard-Sat-1, successfully passed the fit check, a preliminary flight test to ensure it fits properly within the flight deployer.  

• In April 2025, the students from the Wentworth American Society of Civil Engineers won first place at the Concrete Frisbee Toss competition by the ASCE Northeast Student Symposium. 

• All 14 Civil Engineering students who took the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) exam through NCEES achieved a 100-percent pass rate in Spring 2025.