Our students know that to achieve their goals, they have to approach challenges from all sides—including collaborating across seemingly separate majors.

For their senior capstone project, four physical therapy students and four engineering students teamed up to tackle a real-world problem: developing a custom, foot-powered wheelchair joystick for a man with cerebral palsy. His current setup—held together, in part, by duct tape—caused him discomfort, and with mobility limited to his right foot, existing alternatives were not viable. The teammates—culling from knowledge in their respective fields of expertise—were eager to find a solution. But they couldn't just devise a proposal; their design had to actually work.

Interdisciplinarity proved key to their success. The engineers would build a model that met their mechanical goals, and then their physical therapy counterparts would analyze it based on the client's physical needs. As the process continued through several iterations, the two groups began to come together as one.

Electrical engineering major Brian Talbot says, "We're working with entirely different languages. As engineers, we are able to dream a little bit more, but then be put in our place by the other half of our team. They're able to point out flaws in our design and come up with something more creative than if just engineers were working on the project."

Their combined efforts paid off. The physical therapy students wrote a case study to submit to a scholarly journal, which they presented at the NU Research and Scholarship Expo and at a conference in New Orleans, where they were among the five winners of the Assistive Technology Design Competition, sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Meanwhile, the engineers are in final stages of building the footplate for the client's wheelchair.

Hopes are high for the team. Physical therapy major Katie Masters says, "If it works out, the client could be in less pain, be functional, and his physical status could improve so much. We're totally changing this man's life."

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