FAMU/FSU Reveals Top Secret Projects at HDMI Open House

FAMU-FSU College of Engineering held their first High Performance Materials Institute & Industrial Manufacturing Engineering Open House at the FSU Materials Research Building. 

“Our Slogan is boost your career,” said Emily Hammell, the coordinator of the HPMI & IME Open House and FSU graduate student, “we want to empower students with the knowledge that they can pursue a career in industrial and manufacturing engineering and what that means to do so.”

The HPMI & IME Open House shows the Tallahassee community all of the research the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering conducts daily.

“Nothing moves anything like manufacturing. It creates job, it generates our economy everything…a number of students and the general population do not understand, and we are trying to get them more involved,” said Okenwa Okoli, Ph.D. Associate Director of HPMI. “This building is currently the largest advanced composite materials research building in any United States university. It is a secret, but we want to expose that secret.”

The open house includes 11 manufacturing demonstrations, including the tailoring of lightweight energy-friendly vehicles, printing of materials, customizing of sockets for amputees and a project the college collaborated with Veteran Affairs to create comfortable accessories for people with limbs.

“I came to this event out of curiosity not knowing anything about engineering,” said Tatyana Franklin, a senior Political Science student at Florida A&M, “There was a racing car made of some very light materials that they said some students made from the ground up. I was impressed."