Author: Sara Ornelas

A reception to celebrate Valerie Pittier’s retirement on July 7 has been canceled. We apologize for the inconvenience.

When the Make48 invention and maker challenge comes to Wichita State University on June 24, two of the eight Wichita teams are comprised entirely of Wichita State University students.

Team Baby Cactus consists of Juan Blasetti, junior in computer science; Jerome Teoh, a recent aerospace engineering grad; Grant Johnson, a freshman in computer engineering; and Katie Hefner, a senior in engineering technology and general business.

The second team — Veni, Vidi, Vici — is comprised of Felipe Lima de Oliveira, a junior in mechanical engineering; and Rafael Leite, a graduate student in mechanical engineering. Both Felipe and Rafael are from Brazil.

Joe Jabara doesn’t call his class Hacking 101, but his students do learn how to develop effective attacks on computer systems.

The course is actually called Applied Computing Intermediate Design Project, and this past spring its students carried out phishing attempts against a targeted group of Wichita State faculty, staff and students.

Working in teams, students created emails based on the same principles that hackers use to get recipients to open an email, click on a link and enter log in credentials. Student efforts were successful: Out of 128 targets, 40 opened a phishing email, 10 clicked on a link and four entered log in credentials.

Adding to its myriad points of pride, Wichita State University has been named the most affordable, LGBTQ-friendly college in the state. 

Student Loan Hero, a company that helps student loan borrowers make well-informed repayment decisions, took its statistics on the most affordable colleges and universities and paired it with information from Campus Pride, which developed an Index to examine LGBTQ acceptance on college campuses based on policies, administrative support, campus community involvement and other factors.

A widely acclaimed program for aircraft inspection, maintenance and airworthiness research is landing at Wichita State University’s National Institute for Aviation Research (NIAR) after a 30-year history at Sandia National Laboratories.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airworthiness Assurance NDI Validation Center (AANC) is focused on aircraft safety and reliability; development of advanced design and maintenance; evaluation of new and enhanced techniques; technology transfer; and rulemaking guidance. It will move to NIAR’s Advanced Technologies Laboratory for Aerospace Systems, maintaining its name and affiliation with the FAA. The planned move supports shifts in structure at both Sandia and the FAA.

Logan Brown, a Kansas entrepreneur and Harvard Law School student, loves her home state so much that when she decided to pay it forward, she partnered with Wichita State University to help propel women in business.

Brown is the owner of Spencer Jane, a clothing company founded out of a frustration from the lack of comfortable, professional clothing available to women. Spencer Jane is named after two of her grandparents that had a family farm in Kansas. Brown began her company after she was unable to find a job interview suit that fit her needs. The Spencer Jane brand has become a go-to for professional women, and she was recently featured in Fortune Magazine as part of the “Startup Year One” series.

The Office of Strategic Communications in Morrison Hall will be closed for staff development on Friday, June 25. The office will reopen at 8 a.m. Monday, June 28.

The W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University has partnered with the WSU Alumni Association to launch the college’s first alumni council. The Barton School of Business Alumni Council consists of professionals who received their bachelor’s or master’s degrees from the business school and represents different regions, degrees and backgrounds. The diverse, global group serves as leaders to numerous companies. The council members can be found on the council’s website.

“We’re excited to partner with the Barton School in creating its alumni council,” said Courtney Marshall, president and CEO of WSU Alumni Association. “There’s a lot of pride in the program you graduate from at WSU. We hope this opportunity creates a deeper connection for our alumni to the Barton School.”

The FirePoint Innovations Center at Wichita State University has welcomed the first class of students into its Future Innovators Program, a new engineering internship opportunity aimed at introducing historically underrepresented students into the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) technical talent pipeline.