By Raji Nataranjan,
Special to Rice News
This summer, the Rice Center for Engineering Leadership (RCEL) took a significant step in strengthening Rice University’s premier graduate education by launching the Summer Engineering Innovation Program (SEIP), a 10-week interdisciplinary initiative where graduate students collaborated with engineering leaders from industry and community organizations to solve real-world engineering challenges. Held on campus from June 2 to Aug. 8, the inaugural program reflects Rice’s proactive approach to shaping a highly skilled and competitive workforce.
The program was spearheaded by Uyiosa Abusomwan, professor in the practice in the Master of Engineering Management and Leadership (MEML) program at Rice, and Fred Higgs III, vice provost for academic affairs, faculty director of RCEL and the John and Ann Doerr Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Bioengineering at Rice.
Few companies, nonprofits or startups offer hands-on internship programs geared toward solving real-life engineering problems, making it a challenge for students to gain industry experience.
“For years, I was disheartened to see several of our brilliant graduate students unable to find or participate in good engineering internship opportunities for various reasons,” Abusomwan said. “As an industry veteran, I’m keenly aware that there is a critical need to train and nurture the next generation of engineers and problem-solvers in all work sectors, whether they are large corporations, nonprofit organizations or fledgling startups.
“My resolve to find a solution to this vexing issue was further strengthened this spring when some of my MEML students mentioned that they were still looking for summer internship opportunities and others said they needed mentors with industry experience who can guide them as they developed their original startup ideas.”
Abusomwan and Higgs co-developed the SEIP program to bridge that gap. They identified transformative digital technologies that are driving growth across different industries and will play a critical role in the next few decades: Artificial Intelligence (AI) was at the top of the list along with cloud computing, blockchain, automation and others. They partnered with sponsors who presented engineering challenges that students could solve using those technologies. The structure of SEIP ensures that students, given the summer’s gift of time plus mentorship, can quickly progress from ideation to prototyping and demonstration.
The internship experience aims to give students the opportunity to apply the technical knowledge and skills they learned in Rice classrooms and labs to real-life engineering problems while also equipping them with valuable interpersonal skills such as teamwork, communications and leadership along with offering networking opportunities, which are critical to succeeding in today’s workplaces.
Thirteen professional master’s students and one doctoral student representing a broad range of engineering disciplines were selected to be part of the inaugural SEIP cohort. For the first two weeks, students attended bootcamps and lectures by experts in cutting-edge technologies like AI, cloud computing, digital engineering, model-based systems engineering and intelligence-based systems. For the next eight weeks, they worked in multidisciplinary teams under the guidance and mentorship of industry sponsors to prototype solutions to real-world engineering problems.
“This program is a win-win for our sponsors, for our Rice engineering students and ultimately for the city of Houston,” Higgs said. “The SEIP connects industry sponsors with master’s level engineering students who form teams to build technology-based minimum viable products. Each team is led by a graduate engineering manager — a student pursuing advanced training in technical management through Rice’s MEML degree program — while engineering individual contributors from traditional fields such as electrical and computer engineering, computer science, bioengineering and statistics apply their technical expertise. Together under the guidance of sponsor mentors, they move quickly from ideation to prototyping and demonstration.
“As a stipend-supported program, SEIP is effectively a summer internship that equips Rice engineering graduate students with real-world innovation experience. While sponsors gain a valuable first look at potential solutions, students gain industry exposure that can help them land jobs — or even create jobs for themselves and their classmates here in Houston.”
The four projects for this year’s cohort were sponsored by SLB, a global technology company driving innovations in energy; the city of Houston and Department of Public Safety; and two Houston-based startups ⎯ Biosphera, which turns carbon into sustainable solutions, and ShelfSmart, a student-led entrepreneurial venture whose goal is to optimize inventory and store operations using AI.
Laurent Alteirac, technology manager at SLB, mentored the Levarix project sponsored by the company. The BioBoost project, sponsored by BioSphera, was guided by its co-founders Marya Cokar and Jacob Arredondo. The DMV-Agent.AI project, designed to streamline the city of Houston’s title registration process, received mentorship from two local auto title agencies, ZEIM Logistics and JECC. The student-led startup project, ShelfSmart, conceived by Patrick Magno and led by Divya Dadi, was mentored by Rice professional master’s students Magno and Matthew Moleres.
Program participants also received mentorship and were able to attend topical presentations from industry experts such as Arjun Srinivasan, director and head of data science at WESCO International; Siddharth Dhar, vice president of product management at Innowatts; Robert Franklin III, managing partner at RFS Consulting, a financial technology and compliance company; Collins Obiosa-Maife, senior manager at Accenture with expertise in Industry 4.0; James Otieno, management data strategist at ENGIE Resources; and several others.
At the end of the program, the four student teams presented their projects to industry experts and the Rice community at the SEIP Demo Day, a project showcase and networking event organized by RCEL at Rice’s Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science Aug. 7.
“I was blown away by the final products these students presented,” Alteirac said. “I saw tremendous growth and evolution in these students in a short time. Going from ideation to presenting innovative, creative and fully functional products in just 10 weeks is quite impressive. Kudos to Rice and RCEL leaders for their vision in developing a unique program that offers graduate students a rare opportunity to utilize the knowledge and problem-solving skills they have acquired in classrooms to collaborate with industry leaders to find solutions for real-world projects.”
Learn more about 2025 SEIP participants, mentors and projects here.
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Photos and video by Brandon Martin/Rice University