Every academic year, the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering celebrates student academic achievement by choosing an Outstanding Senior and an Outstanding Junior. Not only do the chosen represent hard work and dedication, but also passion and intellectual curiosity. They serve to inspire.

For 2017-2018, the two students are: Biomedical engineering senior Megan Goh and chemical engineering junior Christine Stroh.

These are their stories.

For engineering graduate students bound for careers in academia, there’s probably no better honor than to be accepted into the Institute for Scientist & Engineer Educators (ISEE) Professional Development Program (PDP), a three-part series that teaches you how to teach, create a curriculum and then put it to work.

In the summer of 2015 UH biomedical engineering student Pietro Cicalese found himself surrounded by astonishing squalor in Haiti. The area was densely populated yet there was no water or medical resources for the sick. And the houses – if you could call them that – were shacks.

“I have never seen anything like that. It was very eye opening to see poverty of that scale,” said Cicalese.

Of all the concepts that a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering has to grasp, grasping is at the top.

Aside from attaining knowledge itself, most students attend college to find a path forward in their lives, searching for a career that suits them. At the Engineering Career Fair, that job is made easier as company representatives from the Houston area drop in to offer opportunities, mentor students and share stories of how they went from being a college student to a company employee.

Every year, as a marketing activity, the leadership board of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers at UH, recently named outstanding large chapter of the year by the national organization, brainstorms to create the next slogan that typifies their mission.

A biomedical engineering professor and doctoral student published a paper in the journal PLOS One that reveals new insights into the synergistic relationship of two proteins that are key drivers of immune responses following an infection.

UH biomedical engineering doctoral student Nathaniel Piety, who studies under Associate Professor Sergey Shevkoplyas, has been awarded for his work by the AABB (formerly known as the American Association of Blood Banks) at the AABB Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida in October.

This summer, four biomedical engineering graduate students from the UH Cullen College of Engineering traveled to Seferihisar-Izmir, Turkey for the 15th International BIO-X Summer School program on Biocomplexity, Biodesign, Bioinnovation, Biomanufacturing and Bioenterpreneurship.