Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center focuses on educating students to solve problems for science and industry. Many students have worked on issues relating to Oregon’s many fisheries, the shipping industry, as well as studying coastal and ocean ecosystems and marine life.
At the Hatfield Innovation Lab, also known as the iLab, students bring this multidisciplinary approach to engineering for the marine environment with exciting results for youth, industry, and the marine sciences.
“Marine spaces are an awesome testing ground for young engineers because it’s so harsh and there are so many problems and there’s so much need for development,” said Drummond Wengrove, manager of the iLab, which started in 2020.
Undergraduate students apply for paid internships in the lab where they work on a project that also provides them with workforce training. Some of the interns in the program have come from rural or inland areas without exposure to marine environments and industries. It’s a program that broadens their horizons while making them better scientists and engineers. “Sometimes in the engineering world it takes years to find out you miscalculated something,” Wengrove said, adding that the ocean’s harsh environment tests engineered objects and gives feedback faster.
The program shows students the breadth of the industry, Wengrove explained, as well as the variety of jobs available to them after graduation.
To date, fifteen interns have gone through the program thanks to an early grant from the Roundhouse Foundation. It’s been so successful that other groups have joined on to sponsor the program, bringing in a larger group of interns to solve more problems for organizations like National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or fishing industry groups that partner with OSU.
One intern from rural Montana built and welded a custom camera mount for an infrared camera. The project’s goal was to find out whether infrared could be used to detect marine mammals. Another upgraded equipment used for near-shore investigations, designing and building a method for the system to both dive under water and resurface. When the equipment developed a water leak, the intern was able to fix the issue and get it back in the water quickly.
“A lot of talent gets drained into Silicon Valley or spaces that are showy and loud and don’t show the day-to-day of what we need,” Wengrove said. The iLab has helped recruit and keep talent nearby. One online student attending Hatfield from rural Missouri got an internship which allowed him to move to Oregon. “He would have done his whole degree remotely except that we gave him a job to come out here,” Wengrove said. That student wound up working with the local watershed council and getting a job with a watershed group in Oregon after graduation.
Because the internship program hires students based on their applications rather than their suitability for a particular project, interns come from varied backgrounds and skill sets. “I get biology students, computer science students, fish and wildlife, and so on,” Wengrove said. They may not be engineers when they start the program but the flexibility of the iLab’s internship matchmakes their current skills with a project where they can grow and learn. It makes for an environment of exciting problem solving and collaboration.
The Roundhouse Foundation has funded another three years of the iLab program and Drummond is excited to see what will come out of each new round of interns who now can rely on each other, as well as their instructors, for support, ideas, and innovation.
