STEM outreach

Autonomous blimps take flight at EagleBank Arena: 2nd annual Airborne Robotics Cup inspires future STEM innovators

Nathan Kahl — Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:04:00 +0000

Autonomous blimps take flight at EagleBank Arena: 2nd annual Airborne Robotics Cup inspires future STEM innovators Nathan Kahl Tue, 09/08/2026 - 15:04

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The floor of EagleBank Arena buzzed with high-tech aerial excitement on August 15 as 91�� hosted the culmination of the second annual Airborne Robotics Cup (ARC 2026). The STEM outreach competition ran an intense 12-hour tournament featuring dynamic, lighter-than-air autonomous blimp “soccer” matches.

Lighter-than-air vehicles prepare for battle. Photo credit Yidi Huang.

ARC was founded and organized by Ningshi Yao, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and director of the Control, Intelligent Autonomy, and Optimization (CIAO) Lab. It was co-organized by the Capital Youth Outreach Club (CYOC).

The initiative serves as a core component of Yao’s National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. As part of the award’s integrated education plan, it translates university research in robotics, control theory, and autonomous systems into transformative hands-on learning for K-12 students, with vital venue, equipment, and organizational backing from the College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) and the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center (MARC).

The tournament received enthusiastic support and on-site participation from CEC leadership and its academic departments. Ariela Sofer, divisional dean of the Volgenau School of Engineering, kicked off the morning session by encouraging students to pursue curiosity and explore the expansive possibilities within engineering. During the evening awards ceremony, Amarda Shehu, associate dean for research, celebrated the students’ accomplishments and underscored the transformative impact of early engagement with robotics and artificial intelligence, alongside Alex Sprintson, ECE chair, who recognized the exceptional ingenuity and technical rigor demonstrated by the competitors.

Alex Sprintson, ECE department Chair; Ariela Sofer, divisional dean of the Volgenau School of Engineering; student Ningshi Yao; student Aaron Liu; and Capital Youth Outreach Club co-organizer Jun Zhao. Photo credit John Liu.

Adding to the strong departmental support, Pelin Kurtay, ECE associate chair, attended to engage with participants and cheer on the young roboticists. Leigh McCue, chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering, joined the morning awards session to deliver encouraging remarks on multidisciplinary engineering and present awards to the winning teams across the morning’s two competition groups.

Building on last year's debut success, ARC expanded exponentially in 2026. The program received more than 180 applications, and through a highly competitive selection process, 16 talented finalist teams comprising more than 80 middle and high school students earned spots in the tournament.

Rather than a standalone one-day competition, ARC represents a comprehensive two-month summer engineering program. Over the past seven weeks, students dedicated their weekends to four intensive in-person training sessions and four hands-on practice sessions at MARC. Led by Yao, alongside ECE PhD student Ahnaf Asif Khan, graduate student Yojan Gautam, and former George Mason Aspiring Scientists Summer Internship Program participants Adam Bhatti and Harry Yu, the mentorship team taught students foundational mechatronics skills from the ground up, including soldering, assembling basic blimp kits, embedded programming, and custom 3D printing.

Student leadership and authentic engineering problem-solving took center stage throughout ARC2026. Reflecting on the engineering hurdles of lighter-than-air robotics, Lucas Liu, a junior from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and captain of Team 14, noted, "Working with blimps taught our team very quickly that every single gram matters. Through constant iteration, we redesigned parts and switched to lighter microcontrollers, bringing the total weight down to 70% of the original."

Aaron Liu, captain of Team 12 and representing his team from Luther Jackson Middle School, echoed the value of hands-on troubleshooting, "Building and flying a robot is a lot more complicated than watching one fly. Engineering problems don’t always happen when it's convenient, and solutions don't come linearly. You just have to keep going one step at a time," said Aaron.

Reflecting on the broader impact and purpose of the initiative, Yao emphasized the long-term growth of the participants. "ARC is far more than just a competition," said Yao. "It is a launchpad for lifelong skills, including problem solving, critical thinking, teamwork, leadership, and resilience. Today is a celebration of taking ideas from concept to reality, embracing setbacks, and learning through hands-on trial and error."

Winning teams celebrate their achievements alongside faculty and mentors during the awards presentation. Photo credit Yidi Huang.

That transformative experience resonated strongly with families across the community. "Your continuous support, patience, guidance, and extra effort meant so much to them and to us as parents," shared Sisi Jou, parent of Team 15 competitor Skylon Jou. "Skylon already said he definitely wants to participate again next year and hopes to come back even stronger!"

Building on the tremendous energy and success of this second edition, the CIAO Lab and its partners are already preparing to expand ARC for summer 2027 by increasing team capacity, broadening community outreach, and continuing to cement George Mason as a premier hub for youth robotics innovation.

Topics

lighter-than-air robotics

Electrical and Computer Engineering

STEM outreach

EagleBank Arena

robotics

Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center

National Science Foundation

Students

George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine

Jennifer Anzaldi — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 22:39:16 +0000

George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine Jennifer Anzaldi Tue, 01/14/2025 - 17:39

Ukraine’s health care system has been hit hard amid the ongoing war. Power outages, staffing shortages, and the destruction of hospitals have added up to a drastic reduction in available care for the already-vulnerable population. In a desperate attempt to bridge the gap, Ukraine’s Ministry of Health opened the country to telehealth solutions from overseas. But will these prove to be a successful substitute for at least some necessary services, or turn out to be no better than a tech Band-Aid?

Answering that question is where Mariia Petryk, assistant professor of information systems and operations management at the Costello College of Business at 91��, comes in. In her spare time, she works as volunteer director of analytics for TeleHelp Ukraine (THU).

Mariia Petryk

Founded by a cross-disciplinary group of Stanford students shortly after the war’s inception, THU was designed to succeed where other telemedicine initiatives in crisis-affected areas have failed. The founders worked tirelessly to assemble an international volunteer network comprising medical professionals, translators, interpreters and administrative “health navigators.” Aware that medical consultations were only part of the patient journey, THU’s founders sought to address the entire continuum of care.

Petryk stresses that while the project originated at Stanford, the technical team included “people from Chicago, Boston, other California schools…some very active volunteers were in Australia, South Korea, Canada and other countries.”

Petryk, herself of Ukrainian descent, was honored to lend her data science expertise to this worthy project. As analytics director, she manages a dozen or so number-crunching volunteers who measured and documented THU’s impact upon Ukraine’s displaced population during the initiative’s first full year.

As Petryk explains, “The Russian invasion created a humanitarian crisis where a lot of people were internally displaced. And when people relocate to a new place, they don’t know where to go for health care. They also are at higher risk for many issues, including mental health problems. And they don’t know where to turn to treat chronic diseases they may have.”

THU’s primary focus during its first year was delivering much-needed services to this population of war-ravaged internal exiles.

Petryk’s analytical work gave rise to a recent case study of THU published in Journal of Global Health. The paper’s other lead author was Aditya Narayan, a Stanford medical student and THU’s director of implementation and evaluation.

Their findings describe some impressive early successes. THU facilitated more than 1,200 virtual patient appointments from May 2022 to May 2023 alone. Despite often-chaotic conditions, patient attendance rates were above 70 percent for nine of the 13 months studied. As the first year wore on, the THU team found ways to prevent no-shows—for example, employing the popular texting platform Viber to communicate with patients and assigning an individual health navigator to each patient.

Even more impressively, 96 percent of patients reported that their health complaints were at least partially resolved during their visit.

The paper argues that aspects of THU’s model could be adapted for use in other humanitarian contexts. In its initial growth phase, THU had access to advanced technological infrastructure and a wide network of medical providers, by dint of its academic origins. This implies that partnerships with academia could be critical to replicating THU’s success outside Ukraine.

Petryk remains proud of THU’s impact and her role in helping define it. “Based on actual appointments and how much that amount of care would cost at a hospital, THU delivered an estimated $1 million worth of services in its first 13 months,” she says.

Looking ahead to THU’s future, she says, “I can only wish to see this ‘start-up,’ as it were, go for the IPO.”

For more information and to explore volunteering opportunities, visit THU’s website.

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Mariia Petryk

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Calvin Mackie’s mission is to get more kids interested in STEM

John Hollis — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 19:30:40 +0000

Calvin Mackie’s mission is to get more kids interested in STEM John Hollis Mon, 10/11/2021 - 15:30

Dr. Calvin Mackie hopes to inspire more kids to STEM. Photo provided

Calvin Mackie’s youngest son was in the third grade when he came home and suddenly announced that he wasn’t interested in science anymore.

That didn’t sit well with Mackie, a former mechanical engineering professor, or his wife, who’s a pharmacist. So he knew he had to do something. It wasn’t long before he’d converted his garage into a temporary lab and had begun the kind of hands-on experiments on the weekends that would better engage his son.

His son, who is now a freshman at Howard University, was getting all As at one of Louisiana’s top magnet schools the following year when his friends began inquiring about how he’d come to know so much about science.

“Right then and there, he realized he’d been exposed to somebody and things that his friends were not,” said Mackie, the founder of the nonprofit STEM NOLA. “He really believed that if his friends had [this same exposure], they would be just as bright as him.”

It wasn’t long before a group of his son’s friends began showing up to Mackie’s garage on Saturdays as well.

It was then that Mackie had an epiphany of sorts, realizing that he had something to offer the larger New Orleans community.

“If [my son’s] friends were not being exposed, then think of the rest of the kids,” Mackie said.

Putting up $100,000 of their own money, Mackie and his wife, Tracy, founded STEM NOLA in 2013 in the hopes of making a positive difference for the larger New Orleans community in which they lived and help meet the demands of the 21st century.

A nonprofit organization with a mission to expose, inspire and engage the communities in STEM opportunities, STEM NOLA provides participants an interactive, hands-on learning experience that allows students and future innovators and entrepreneurs of all ages to gain added confidence in their abilities and chart a potential course for a career in a STEM field.

Students enrolled in STEM NOLA learn about 3D printing, coding, technology, engineering, robotics, animation, app development, gaming and much more.

His passion for STEM and inclusion is why Mackie will meet with students, faculty and staff at multiple events on Wednesday, Oct. 20, as part of the Investiture events for Mason President Gregory Washington.

He said it was important to him to be at Mason to celebrate as Washington, his good friend of 30 years, realized a lifelong dream. The two men first met in Atlanta back in 1991, when Mackie was president of Georgia Tech’s Black Graduate Student Association and trying to recruit Washington to come there for his PhD program.

They immediately hit it off thanks in large part to a shared love of STEM, and the two men have since worked together on a number of occasions with the aim of increasing STEM numbers among underserved communities.

“His dream was to be a college president, impact lives and set the direction of an institution,” Mackie said. “It’s important for us to acknowledge and celebrate when goals are met and made.”

Since 2014, STEM NOLA has served more than 80,000 students across 47 states and five different countries, most of whom have hailed from underserved or low-income communities. Nearly half of the participants are female, with more than 80% eligible for free or reduced-priced school lunches.

“It’s making a lasting impression,” Mackie said. “Our commitment is to give all children that which my wife and I and others have given to their kids. We’ve established a level of execution and operation that I don’t want to see change because everybody deserves it.”

Mackie has made the most of all the tools available to him to share his message, including his young brother, Anthony Mackie, the popular Marvel actor who recently became the first black Captain America.

Calvin Mackie said he hopes to eventually create a credit-to-career pipeline that allows for ample access to STEM for all students, no matter their family’s socioeconomic status.

“My ultimate goal is to have a million kids doing STEM on Saturday, every Saturday,” he said.

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STEM

STEM outreach

Investiture

Office of the President

Campus News

STEM Fusion classes draw students from throughout Northern Virginia

ckearney — Thu, 12 Mar 2020 09:00:54 +0000

STEM Fusion classes draw students from throughout Northern Virginia ckearney Thu, 03/12/2020 - 05:00

Mason alumnus Sarom Leang (standing), who participated in the EIP Program from 1993 to 1998, teaches a computer programming class at STEM Fusion. Photo by Lathan Goumas/Office of Communications and Marketing.

Betzy Balladares, a senior at Patriot High School in Nokesville, Virginia, was spending her Saturday in class on 91��’s Fairfax Campus. She was there, she said, to learn as much as she could to prepare for college.

Balladares, who is currently deciding which university to attend, will be the first in her family to go to college. She came to the United States from Peru when she was 8.

“I want to go to a good college to encourage my little brother,” Balladares said. “I want to be a good role model.”

Balladares was participating in one of five STEM Fusion Days held every year to help empower students to excel in their math and science coursework. During a recent cold February day, about 350 middle and high school students from throughout Northern Virginia attended a variety of classes. Some of the classes helped students review topics they were learning in school or prepared them for upcoming coursework. In addition, students were able to attend classes on new topics, such as cybersecurity and video game design.

The STEM Fusion program is part of Mason’s Early Identification Program (EIP), an extensive outreach effort to more than 650 first-generation college-bound students in the Northern Virginia area. Established in 1987, EIP is a multiyear college preparatory program for middle and high school students who will be the first in their families to attend college.

“STEM Fusion Days expose students to careers in STEM and provide math and science enrichment in coursework that students are currently enrolled in at their base school,” said Khaseem F. Davis, EIP’s director. “We provide math and science support from content experts who deliver the material in fun and engaging ways.”

Honors College senior Jesse McCandlish (right) has served as a tutor in math, science, and programming for the EIP Program during her time at Mason. Photo by Lathan Goumas/Office of Communications and Marketing.

Nawal Ali, an eighth-grade student at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Virginia, said the STEM classes “help me get prepared for school.”

In addition, she’s made friends with other students.

“They are all like me, they come for the same reason—that they believe they can do better things in life,” Ali said.

“Teaching provides me with an opportunity to give back to the same program that helped me embark on an academic journey that has resulted in my professional career as a computational scientist,” said Mason alumnus Sarom Leang, BS Chemistry ’04, who participated in the EIP Program from 1993 to 1998 and teaches a computer programming class at STEM Fusion. He is currently working for EP Analytics.

EIP participation begins in eighth grade. To participate, students are nominated by a school counselor and apply at the end of seventh grade. Students who successfully complete the program and meet Mason’s admissions requirements are guaranteed admission.

During the school year, Mason students tutor and mentor EIP participants. EIP participants also participate in an intensive three-week academic enrichment program in the summer. In addition, students from Mason’s Honors College help EIP participants in the college application process.

“The majority of our students come from groups historically underrepresented in college,” Davis said. “Mason’s EIP helps provide students with access to excellence.”

In fall 2019, the program had 223 participants enrolled from Fairfax County Public Schools, 143 from Arlington County, and 129 from Prince William Country, along with students from Alexandria City, Manassas Park, Manassas City and Falls Church City.

“It’s a little intimidating getting to college,” Balladares said. “My parents don’t know anything about the process, but I have the help of EIP, thank goodness.”

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Early Identification Program (EIP)

STEM outreach

Campus News

STEM outreach

Autonomous blimps take flight at EagleBank Arena: 2nd annual Airborne Robotics Cup inspires future STEM innovators

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George Mason professor furthers impact of telemedicine in Ukraine

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Calvin Mackie’s mission is to get more kids interested in STEM

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STEM Fusion classes draw students from throughout Northern Virginia

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