When people think of mechanical engineers at Johns Hopkins they may think of a male-dominated lab with robot pieces littered on the floor. Many would be surprised to know that the department’s Vice Chair, who is in charge of the Mechanical Engineering Freshman Design Competition each year, is in fact Professor Allison Okamura.
After overseeing this year’s Freshman Design Competition, in which students designed a device powered only by a mouse-trap and rubber band to deliver a payload (a credit card-sized object) across a finish line, Okamura sat down with The News-Letter to chat about her work at Hopkins and beyond.
The News-Letter (N-L): How long have you been teaching at Hopkins and what do you teach?
Allison Okamura (AO): Since 2000. So 10 years and a couple months.
When I first started out I was teaching mostly a junior level class, but about five years ago our department decided to revamp the freshman curriculum.
Instead of regular semester-long courses we now have a year-long sequence that includes Bio, Physics, with a bunch of labs. It’s very hands-on.
We decided to design this integrated course sequence and I took it over. And it’s been a lot of fun.
N-L: Why did you volunteer to take on this new curriculum?
AO: My department is very fair about distributing load and I knew it was something that I could do, I had the right kind of background and expertise.
Some people are very theory-oriented and I’ve done things like that before, like run a design competition. I knew it was a class that I would enjoy teaching. Working with freshman is always fun.
N-L: So you’ve taught both freshmen and upper classman. Do you prefer one or the other? What are the differences?
AO: Well, the freshmen come in with no preconceived notions. No one’s told them what they can’t do. If you put the freshmen versus the seniors in a design competition the seniors wouldn’t necessarily win because the freshman come in with so many new ideas and they’re so enthusiastic and they’re so excited with being at college for the first time.
N-L: Have you noticed any changes in the design competition since the first time it happened five years ago?
AO: I think the projects get harder from year to year and there are more Youtube videos of projects.
People always make mousetrap cars but we try to put a twist on it.
There’s a lot more resources for students these days and as I teach it, too, I get better and better at warning students about the pitfalls.
I have a sense that things work better now than when I taught it four years ago. I think it’s a matter of both my experience and the resources available to the students.
N-L: What were you doing before you came to Hopkins?
AO: I was getting my PhD. I came straight out of graduate school. I’m from California originally.
N-L: You’re in charge of the Freshman Design Competition. Did you start this annual event?
AO: We had freshman design competitions beforehand but they weren’t quite as elaborate or as integrated into a whole lab sequence.
This class continues in the spring so the students are constantly building, designing and applying what they learn.
N-L: Some have said that after the first semester about half of the students in the Mechanical Engineering Department drop out. Have you found this to be true?
AO: Not at all! Actually what’s interesting about mechanical engineering is that at the end of the freshman year we usually have more students than we started with.
Definitely as with any major people will drop but we get more from other majors than those who decide to leave. At least in the freshman class it’s probably no more than 10% leave and then we get more than that joining in the sophomore year.
At some universities it is the case that they do the ‘look left, look right: only one of you will be here in four years.’ We don’t try to weed out students in classes. They wouldn’t be at Hopkins if they didn’t have the aptitude. So if they have the interest we want to encourage them to stay in the major.
N-L: What’s your favorite part of working at Hopkins?
AO: My favorite part of teaching at Hopkins is working with students on a more individual basis.
I obviously like lecture classes where you can do fun big projects like the design competition, but the most fun has been working with an individual student, the one-on-one interaction; really seeing someone develop over the years as they work in my lab or in class and seeing them go off into graduate school; go off and do great things.
N-L: And what has been the most challenging part of working at Hopkins?
AO: Challenges? The most challenging thing is balancing the different things you have to do; it’s a juggling act. And you don’t have a boss to tell you what to do first.
You have teaching and research, getting grant money, advising students.
Then there’s the service aspects. You’re on all kinds of committees and in your research field you run conferences, you review papers.
Sometimes I feel like I have ten different jobs. And all parts are fun but it’s hard to decide what’s going to be my priority at a certain time.
It’s a challenge balancing all the different things that you have to do.
N-L: What field of research is your specialty?
AO: I’m more in the experimental side of research. My research has to do with the field of robotics.
The place where you’re sitting now and this building is the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics, the LCSR. It’s an interdisciplinary group of faculty.
I’m a Mech E but we have biomedical engineers and computer scientists; we’re a group of faculty all interested in robotics and the sensing technology that goes along with robots.
My research style is fairly collaborative. I like to work with not only my own students but other faculty members in my field and different fields. We’re all very collegial and we all have very complementary expertise.
I have two major themes: haptics, which is anything having to do with the sense of touch, like technology that allows us to interact with virtual environments and feel them or feel what a robot is feeling.
The other theme is application in biomedicine, like surgical robots and devices for neural rehabilitation. And most of my projects combine haptics and medicine. For example, how do I make a haptic tele-robot that allows the doctor to feel the patient even though he’s operating with a robot and not his own hands? Or if you have a patient with a movement disorder that has trouble making certain reaches, how can you design a robot that can help him learn those movements?
N-L: That sounds like something I’ve seen on “House!”
AO: I work with a company, which makes a very successful robot that was featured on “Grey’s Anatomy.” They’re used clinically here at the medical campus. These robots exist and they’re being used. They’re very good for healthcare. And I’m trying to make them even better.
N-L: What do you do in your spare time outside of Hopkins?
AO: My family is very important to me. I have a husband who works here in mechanical engineering, and two kids. I have one baby, a five-month-old.
I like to play ice hockey, I’ve played on various teams and I also like to run. I started playing ice hockey in California during grad school. Well, I started with roller hockey and then took up ice hockey and so when I moved here I looked for a women’s league. I can’t think about work all the time. You can’t think about anything else when you’re playing hockey.
When I said I like to run, well, I ran the Baltimore marathon a few years ago, right before my first child was born and I’m aiming for a half marathon in the spring.
N-L: Any plans for the future? Do you plan on continuing with teaching or focusing on research?
AO: I really like the academic enterprise. I love being part of a university; I am sure that I’ll be a professor twenty years from now, doing the things I’m doing.
My big question is how far I want to go into administration. Right now I’m vice chair and after that comes chair and so on and so forth. And it’s a decision I’m trying to make. I’m in an early- to mid-career stage and it’s a good time to decide whether I want to be an administrator. If I did I would miss not being able to work as closely with students.
