A team comprised entirely of Cullen College of Engineering students represented by team lead Sarai Juarez won third place at the 2026 National Capstone Design Conference hosted at Texas A&M University earlier this summer. This conference brings together over 200 participants representing over 65 unique institutions, of which 20 national finalist student teams are featured.
MyoStep — a project developed at the UH BRAIN Center and the first-ever collaboration between Cullen’s Electrical Engineering (EE) and Mechanical Engineering Technology (MET) programs — was awarded third place out of these 20 finalist teams.
Team members included electrical engineering students Asael Andrade, Brittany Garcia, Mohammed Kanpurwala, Adriana Rucoba and Rene Tijerina as well as mechanical engineering technology students Caleb Colby, Andres Gonzalez, Alexis Oliva Martinez, Aman Siddiqui and team lead Sarai Juarez. The team was also mentored by both MET professor Francisco Robles Hernández, Senior Member NAI, and Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor and NSF IUCRC BRAIN Center Director Jose Luis Contreras-Vidal, Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE.
MyoStep is “a pediatric soft exoskeleton that uses textile-based Nitinol shape memory allow actuators to assist and rehabilitate gait in children with cerebral palsy,” explained Juarez. “As a senior capstone project, it was the first-ever collaboration between the Mechanical Engineering Technology and Electrical Engineering programs at the Cullen College of Engineering: the mechanical team designed and fabricated the shape memory alloy actuator system, while the electrical team developed the closed-loop control and embedded systems architecture that controlled the actuators.”
As team lead, Juarez guided MyoStep from its early design phases through fabrication and testing. The conference’s summer timing meant that most other team members had graduated and moved on to industry jobs; Juarez was responsible for presenting the project solo — including preparing the poster and presentation and being ready to answer questions from the judging panel about all elements of the interdisciplinary project — but it was “worth it.”
“This project was a team effort. Since I was the only one that attended the conference, I was able to share the news with my teammates right after finding out. This was a project we devoted a lot of time and effort to, and we were very proud to see it recognized at the national level. It felt good to be able to tell the team that the work we built together held up against the best senior design teams in the country. It was the highlight of our senior year,” she said.
Another highlight was seeing “the caliber of work being done across the country” by other student teams.
“Every project on that floor represented the best of what judges saw that year,” said Juarez. “Getting to walk around and talk with students from other universities about their projects was incredible; a lot of the schools there have interdisciplinary engineering capstone design courses, where students from 2-4 different engineering disciplines form a group and design a solution to a real-life problem. UH doesn’t offer this in its capstone courses, so seeing how those teams approached cross-disciplinary design in practice was very interesting, and it also culminated into projects with a lot of depth.”
The experience also offered Juarez “a sense of where MyoStep’s EE/MET collaboration fit into a much bigger national conversation regarding the state of engineering education and how it is evolving, as well as how it can be improved.”