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When the speed of sound isn’t fast enough, there is hypersonic travel — speeds five times the speed of sound. Doing so is quite possible. Engines have been designed to do so for at least a decade. But for those engines to operate optimally, there’s a world of physics challenges. That’s where Jeffrey Doom, an associate professor in the mechanical engineering department at South Dakota State University, comes in. This summer he will make his fourth trip to the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio, to undertake simulations and observe physical experiments.

A heavy-duty cart designed to transport heavy loads in deep underground mine tunnels was the top project presented at the April 22 Engineering Expo at Raven Precision Agricultural Center. The transporter was built by South Dakota State University mechanical engineering students Braden Hanson, Luke Degen, Haley Evenson, Alli Krantz, Phil Baker and Tyson Boeve on behalf of the Sanford Underground Research Facility, the former Homestake gold mine in Lead that now is a physics research facility.

Three student teams from South Dakota State University have advanced to the finals of two different NASA contests in the coming weeks. All are mechanical engineering students. The Gateways to Blue Skies competition advanced eight teams to Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, May 20-21. Both of SDSU’s entries in the Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concept-Academic Linkage contest were selected for the finals of the small lunar servicing and maintenance robot division in Cocoa Beach, Florida, June 2-4. A total of 14 teams were selected in three divisions.

Haley Evenson received the 2025 Schutlz-Werth Award for her research and was recognized at SDSU's Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Active Day award's ceremony on April 16.

South Dakota State University Endowed Alfred Chair associate professor in dairy manufacturing Maneesha Mohan is utilizing nanosized bubbles to improve the efficiency of dairy wastewater treatment.

A Brookings-based animal health company, Medgene, is leading a revolution in the development of veterinary vaccines that is turning the tide in the endless battle against animal disease.

While living in his hometown in Nigeria, Africa, John Akujobi recalls a tragic construction accident in which a bricklayer backing up a wheelbarrow didn’t realize his proximity to the edge of a four story scaffold and fell to his death. The incident stuck with him. As he progressed in his computer science studies and through conversations with his friends at South Dakota State University, Akujobi discovered the power of sensors, algorithms and machine learning. He realized those things hold the potential for preventing such future tragedies. His solution, a wearable safety system named AMBER – Affordable Multimodal Sensor-Based Environmental Risk Detector designed to alert workers in real-time of environmental hazards in their blind spots.

When it comes to grain harvesting, time is money and mess equals stress. Raven Industries (now CNH Industrial) developed a product to address those concerns, and Travis Burgers, a research engineer at CNH and an adjunct assistant professor in mechanical engineering at South Dakota State University, and CNH colleague Matt Horne developed a concept to test the effectiveness of the product before it even went on the market. As a result, Burgers and Horne won the 2025 Rain Bird Engineering Concept of the Year Award by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers. It will be presented at the group’s annual international meeting in Toronto July 16.

Fred Boehm set out to become a medical doctor, certainly the pathway to a fulfilling career. However, well into his medical school education, Boehm discovered something else with an even greater potential to impact lives — biomedical research, or in Boehm’s case biostatistical research. Boehm, who is in his first year as a faculty member at South Dakota State University, said the message that changed the direction of his life was a sign at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Protecting Health, Saving Lives — Millions at a Time” is the school’s vision. That and the work demands of a new physician convinced Boehm to chart a new direction.

In new research from South Dakota State University, a novel framework for accelerating the speed at which reinforcement learning algorithms are trained has been developed by researchers in the Jerome J. Lohr College of Engineering.