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Tenth birthday party wraps up exceptional mechanical engineering Senior Capstone Day.
A live band played from one of the bay doors at the newly opened Life Sciences and Engineering Building on George Mason’s SciTech Campus. The whole building came alive on Cinco de Mayo 2025—there was a lot to celebrate.
Studio spaces buzzed with excitement as students in suit-and-tie and evening gowns demonstrated four years’ worth of learning. On display were projects as varied and imaginative as the students themselves: swimming blimps, racecar engines, wind tunnels, next-gen recycling and data cooling systems, robotic boats, and so much more.
The annual Mechanical Engineering Department’s Senior Capstone Day was so successful that a panel of judges could not choose just three top teams for best projects. Instead, two tied for first place: Team NanoSolutions (Hydrogen Nano Sensors) and Team LDAM (Design and Fabrication of Low-Dimensional Auxetic Materials). Two others tied for third: Team Occoquan Otters (RoboBoat Build) and the Naval Composite Engineering Team (Composite Gauge Panels).
While Capstone Day is always a festive event, it was just the first thread on the bolt. That’s because Mechanical Engineering at George Mason turned 10 years old. Entering its second decade, the department will find itself hard-pressed to match the level of success it’s earned since opening in April 2015—but it’s up to the challenge.
Dean Ken Ball was the department’s original champion. “You can’t have a comprehensive engineering school without mechanical engineering,” he said. “It’s a three-legged stool: electrical, civil, and mechanical engineering is the stable base.”
Since its humble first class with just 12 students enrolled along with then-Chair Oscar Barton and the first faculty member Colin Reagle, it has exploded to more than 450 students, 17 faculty, and glossy new state-of-the art labs.
Jeff Bynum was the first and only to graduate from the department in 2016, having transferred from civil engineering. “I was at both the top of my class and the bottom of my class,” he joked. In the nine years since graduating, he has followed an interesting and enviable career track, starting as an explosives tech engineer (“I got to blow stuff up for a living”) and landing now at the Navy as a “rocket scientist,” as he said.
“This department is going to open doors in your career and serve you for the rest of your life,” he told the class of graduating seniors, before offering a few final words of wisdom. “You don’t need to know everything—I definitely don’t! But you do need to know how to ask for help. Don’t let your ego get in the way of getting your team built and your project done.”
As the school year draws to a close, there is no advice more befitting a scrappy start-up that grew to a world-class department with the help of dedicated champions.