Innovation Capstone: R&D Studio

The capstone is not a class with a project at the end - the project is the class. Working in small R&D teams, students from every pathway - engineering, computer science, and biomedical science - identify a genuine unsolved problem, prove with evidence that it matters, and spend the year designing, building, and testing an original solution they must defend before a panel of outside professionals.

The studio front-loads the research muscles the work demands: literature and patent searching, market and stakeholder research, study-design critique, statistical hypothesis testing, and hands-on investigation labs spanning physiology experiments, toxicology dose-response studies, and environmental field testing. Mid-year deep-dive studios let teams sharpen pathway-specific techniques - from molecular biology benchwork and epidemiological analysis to a full anatomical dissection practicum - chosen to serve their project.

The back half runs like a funded lab: proposals written in grant format, Gantt-charted milestones, budgets, prototype iterations driven by test data, a defensible research notebook, and finally a technical report, investor-style pitch, and formal defense with structured response to critique. Students leave with a portfolio piece that reads like professional R&D, because it is.