Skip to main content

Lehigh Beats Lafayette Again.. In Engineering Research

Never one to refrain from crowing about Lehigh's successes over "that school in Easton", the Rivalry has gone into brand-new territory: engineering research.

The David Freed Undergraduate Research symposium, which took place on April 1st in Packard Lab (making it a "home game"), billed itself as an extension of the Lehigh/Lafayette rivalry in their write-up on the Lehigh website.


The Lehigh and Lafayette football teams have played each other 144 times since 1884, more than any other two college football teams in America.

On Wednesday, April 1, top undergraduate engineering researchers from the two schools faced off for the first time in Lehigh’s Packard Laboratory.

The occasion was the annual David and Lorraine Freed Undergraduate Research Symposium, which is endowed by Andrew D. Freed ’83 in honor of his parents. Freed, a member of the RCEAS advisory board, is president and CEO of Medical Device Investment Holdings Corp. in Malvern, Pa.

The research symposium has been held each of the last five years. This year’s event was the first in which Lafayette students were invited to compete.

Unlike the football "Rivalry", it's hard to see any losers in this initiative - just winners, and likely some lucrative research situations or jobs after graduation - though it must be told that Lehigh senior bioengineer Stephen H. Henry won first place for his presentation "Understanding Bioneedle Penetration Mechanics" (pictured) over the best Lafayette engineers.

Think there was any taunting going on?

ā€œThe competitive aspect was definitely secondary to the academic aspect,ā€ said Henry, who will enroll as a doctoral candidate in the University of Pennsylvania’s bioengineering program next fall. ā€œEvery one of the contestants deserved the honor that I received.ā€

Oh, well. Only 237 days until the next meeting on the football field.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How The Ivy League Is Able To Break the NCAA's Scholarship Limits and Still Consider Themselves FCS

By now you've seen the results.  In 2018, the Ivy League has taken the FCS by storm. Perhaps it was Penn's 30-10 defeat of Lehigh a couple of weeks ago .  Or maybe it was Princeton's 50-9 drubbing of another team that made the FCS Playoffs last year, Monmouth.  Or maybe it was Yale's shockingly dominant 35-14 win over nationally-ranked Maine last weekend. The Ivy League has gone an astounding 12-4 so far in out-of-conference play, many of those wins coming against the Patriot League. But it's not just against the Patriot League where the Ivy League has excelled.  Every Ivy League school has at least one out-of-conference victory, which is remarkable since it is only three games into their football season.  The four losses - Rhode Island over Harvard, Holy Cross over Yale, Delaware over Cornell, and Cal Poly over Brown - were either close losses that could have gone either way or expected blowouts of teams picked to be at the bottom of the Ivy League....

Examining A Figure Skating Rivalry: Tonya and Nancy

It must be very hard for a millennial to understand the fuss around the Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding figure skating scandal in the run-up to the 1994 Olympics. If you're of a certain age, though - whether you're a figure skating fan or not, and I am decidedly no fan of figure skating - the Shakespearean story of Harding and Kerrigan still engages, and still grabs peoples' attention, twenty years later. Why, though?  Why, twenty years later, in a sport I care little, does the story still grab me?  Why did I spend time out of my life watching dueling NBC and ESPN documentaries on the subject, and Google multiple stories about Jeff Gilooly , idiot "bodyguards", and the whole sordid affair? I think it's because the story, even twenty years later, is like opium. The addictive story, even now, has everything.  Everything.  The woman that fought for everything, perhaps crossing over to the dark side to get her chance at Olypic Gold, vs. the woman who...

Made-Up Midseason Grades for Lehigh Football

 We are now officially midway through the 2023 Lehigh football season.  The Mountain Hawks sit at 1-5 overall, and 0-1 in the Patriot League. I thought I'd go ahead and make up some midseason grades, and set some "fan goals" for the second half. The 2023 Mountain Hawks were picked to finish fifth in the seven team Patriot League.  In order to meet or exceed that expectation, they'll probably have to go at least 3-2 the rest of the way in conference play.  Their remaining games are vs. Georgetown, at Bucknell, vs. Holy Cross, at Colgate, and vs. Lafayette in The Rivalry. Can they do it? Culture Changing: B+ .  I was there in the Bronx last week after the tough 38-35 defeat to Fordham, and there wasn't a single player emerging from the locker room that looked like they didn't care.  Every face was glum.  They didn't even seem sad.  More frustrated and angry. That may seem normal, considering the agonizing way the Mountain Hawks lost, but it was a ma...