Achievements

Pascal Biwole

School of Engineering

Professor Pascal Biwole, of the School of Engineering, and his team have published several papers, including: 

"Thermal mass vs. insulation trade-off in bio-based buildings: Climate-dependent energy performance of hemp, straw, and wood-based constructions", by Amer Bakkour, Salah-Eddine Ouldboukhitine, Pascal Biwole, and Sofiane Amziane, Energy and Buildings, Volume 358, 2026,

"Retrofitting Towards Net-Zero Energy Building Under Climate Change: An Approach Integrating Machine Learning and Multi-Objective Optimization", Ibrahim Mahdi, Pascal Biwole, Fatima Harkouss, Farouk Fardoun, and Salah Eddine Ouldboukhitine. Buildings 16, no. 3: 537, 2026. 

"Experimental evaluation of literature-established delignification techniques on poplar wood", by Yi Hien Chin, Christophe Vial, Yoshiki Horikawa, Joseph Gril, Rostand Moutou Pitti, Salah-Eddine Ouldboukhitine, Nicolas Labonne, and Pascal Biwole, Wood Science and Technology, Vol 60, 22, 2026.

"Gradient-Delignified Wood as a Sustainable Anisotropic Insulation Material"  by Chin, Yi Hien, Salah-Eddine Ouldboukhitine, Christophe Vial, Joseph Gril, Rostand Moutou Pitti, Nicolas Labonne, and Pascal Biwole, Energies 18, no. 20: 5519., 2025

"PEMFC cathode humidification: Can direct water injection compete with membrane humidifiers? A direct comparison study" by Flavien Marteau, Pedro Affonso Nóbrega, Cédric Sernissi, Pascal Biwole, Iona De Bievre, Christophe Vacquier, Christian Beauger, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Volume 172, 2025.

Eileen Cashman

School of Engineering

Dr. Eileen Cashman received a grant to lead a sea level rise planning and economic study for the Murray Field Airport in Eureka. The airport provides critical services to Humboldt County, including air freight, postal delivery, air ambulance, and Coast Guard operations, but faces growing vulnerability to sea level rise, making this study essential to inform long-term planning decisions for its future. The study will assess sea level rise impacts and develop conceptual designs for possible adaptation options. Evaluation will include flood prevention strategies, economic impacts, and alignment with community goals. 

Funding is provided by the California State Coastal Conservancy.

Aubrey Cooper & Kaden Smith

School of Engineering

Aubrey Cooper and Kaden Smith, mechanical engineering undergraduates and co-owners of Change LLC, showcased an impressive pitch for their innovative Sodium Ion-powered motorcycle at Grow Tech Fest 2025! Their efforts earned them 1st place accompanied by a cash prize!

Sayra Montesinos, Sean Ruzicka, Roland Carter and Zander Leigh

School of Engineering

For at least 25 years, students from the School of Engineering have successfully participated in the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP) annual Mathematical Modeling Contest (MCM) and Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM). The contest begins on a Thursday afternoon and ends on the following Monday evening. This year the competition started on January 23, 2025 and over 27,000 teams of up to three students from thousands of universities around the world produced a report summarizing their solution to one of six possible problems.

This year, two Environmental Resources Engineering (ERE) student teams of two students each from the Cal Poly Humboldt School of Engineering entered in the competition. Both teams selected an ICM problem focused on constructing a model to track habitat change from forest-to-farm over time as the ecosystem evolves along with accompanying agricultural choices. The analysis was required to include both natural processes as well as human decisions.

Competing against over 6,000 teams that selected this problem, the ERE team of Sayra Montesinos and Sean Ruzicka was awarded the score of Honorable Mention, with less than 10% of the 6,000 teams receiving a higher score. The ERE team of Roland Carter and Zander Leigh was awarded the score of Finalist, with less than 1% of the 6000 teams earning a higher score.  Congratulations to Sayra, Sean, Roland and Zander for their achievement in this extremely competitive event. We appreciate your efforts which bring recognition to the School of  Engineering at Cal Poly Humboldt!

Press Release with Photos

Elijah Harnar, Roland Carter, Zander Leigh, Shea Ciuca Duffy, Erika Ospenson, Nicholas Weiser, Kyle Ellis, Andrew Bricken, Sean Ruzicka, Kyle Amann, Jason Dyck, Felix Canari, Leonardo Castro, Eden Hill, Celeste Joyner, Erick Herrera, Teophil Labus, Hector Manuel, and Micah Matias.

School of Engineering

Our Cal Poly Humboldt engineering team won first place in the Water Treatment Competition this weekend at the annual American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Mid-Pacific Conference, hosted by UC Berkeley!

The Water Treatment Competition challenges students to design a sustainable and effective filter for treating simulated wastewater.

Our students spent two semesters building and improving their filter, and all that hard work paid off. The judges were impressed by their teamwork, school spirit, and ability to effectively communicate technical content.

We’re incredibly proud of their achievement and the way they represented Cal Poly Humboldt on a regional stage. Go Lumberjacks!

This year’s winning team included:
Elijah Harnar, Roland Carter, Zander Leigh, Shea Ciuca Duffy, Erika Ospenson, Nicholas Weiser, Kyle Ellis, Andrew Bricken, Sean Ruzicka, Kyle Amann, Jason Dyck, Felix Canari, Leonardo Castro, Eden Hill, Celeste Joyner, Erick Herrera, Teophil Labus, Hector Manuel, and Micah Matias.

Pascal Biwole

School of Engineering

Two research articles were recently published in international journals.

Amer Bakkour, Salah-Eddine Ouldboukhitine, Pascal Biwole, Sofiane Amziane,
Modeling heat and moisture transfer in bio-based wall structures using the finite element method: Application to straw walls in varied climatic conditions, Journal of Building Engineering, Volume 104, 2025

Mahdi Ibrahim, Fatima Harkouss, Pascal Biwole, Farouk Fardoun, Salah-Eddine Ouldboukhitine, Multi-objective hyperparameter optimization of artificial neural network in emulating building energy simulation, Energy and Buildings, 2025, 115643
 

Pascal Biwole

School of Engineering

Professor Pascal Biwole co-authored the following recently published original research papers:

• Hygrothermal performance of wood-cement walls across various climate conditions, by Amer Bakkour, Salah-Eddine Ouldboukhitine, Pascal Biwole, and Sofiane Amziane, Materials and Structures, Volume 58 (8), February 2025.
• Multiple 3D particle tracking velocimetry for measuring airflow and pathogen trajectory in large indoor spaces, by Mohammed Umar Musa, Pascal Henry Biwole, and André Labbé, Building and Environment, Volume 271, 1 March 2025

Pascal BIWOLE

School of Engineering

A recent publication in the first-quartile (Q1) journal "Energy and Buildings": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378778824008235

Christa L. Meingast

School of Engineering

Christa L. Meingast, Assistant Professor from the Engineering Department, was awarded a grant for a soil remediation study in distributed environments. Infectious diseases are a significant threat to public health. Though society enacts practices to prevent the spread of these dangerous diseases, challenges remain. Therefore, continual advancements in treatment and prevention are required. Wastewater treatment and viral clearance in pharmaceutical applications are two key health measures that prevent the spread of infections.

JuEun Lee and Joshua Steimel

School of Engineering

Drs. JuEun Lee and Joshua Steimel recently published a paper in the Journal of Orthopaedics. The study examined the effect that vancomycin, tobramycin, and the combination of these two ubiquitous antibiotics can have on the compressive and tensile strength of bone cement. As the concentration of antibiotics increased there was a decrease in both the compressive and tensile mechanical performance of the bone cement. The results of this study can be utilized to guide future surgical techniques to reduce the incidence of failure of bone cement in the presence of antibiotics.