A Year of Exchanges: What Happens When You Open the Door

A year ago, the Maseeh Exchange (MX) was a planning document, built on the success of the college's Research Week Open House and designed to deepen what that event had started: strengthen a sense of community, drive inquiries, forge industry connections, engage alumni, highlight programs. The format would run quarterly, each event organized around a research theme in which the college had real expertise to share with the public.

Dean Joseph Bull notes that exchanges give the college a chance to raise awareness:

Some of our neighbors don't know PSU has a nationally recognized engineering school, and the Exchange exists partly to fix that, and to show what we're actually doing once they're here. Not everyone knows what happens inside this building. The Exchange is one way we bring the work to the community rather than waiting for them to find it.

The Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science produces research that matters to Portland, yet most of that work stays behind keycarded doors in the Engineering Building. The Exchange was designed to open them. Not through a website or a newsletter, but by filling the building with people who don't normally occupy it together: PSU leadership and other academic units, alumni, industry partners, prospective students, faculty, high school counselors, senior learners, city officials, community members who pass the building every day without knowing what happens inside.

Three research impact areas across three quarters. Power and Energy in fall. Infrastructure and Resilience in winter. Artificial Intelligence in spring. Research, faculty expertise, industry connections, cultural components, and community engagement shaped every evening. Those three evenings showed that the value of opening the door depends less on what flows out than on what comes back through it-among the things that came back, quarter after quarter, were the same people.

These events showcase research in progress and allow faculty to share their work through the Ignite Talk, a format that gives just five minutes and 20 slides to explain an engineering conundrum to a lay audience. In fall, faculty presented work in power systems and energy storage. In winter, structural health monitoring and seismic resilience. In spring, natural language processing, applied AI and cybersecurity, reinforcement learning, AI and semiconductors. The format opens something less visible than a laboratory door. A researcher whose work lives in labs, journals, conference proceedings, and grant reports stands in front of a room that includes high school students, alumni who left engineering a decade ago, city officials, and industry partners, and makes the reasoning behind years of inquiry accessible to all of them at once. The Ignite talks give PSU researchers an opportunity to share research that is accessible to the broader audience and to focus on why this problem exists, why this approach might work, why it matters to someone who may have never heard about the subject before.

Research laboratories are not typically public spaces, but during an Exchange evening, they become exactly that. Visitors enter rooms where experiments are in process, where graduate students explain work they are still figuring out, where the equipment is not behind glass but running. The students staffing those labs are not tour guides. They are researchers, many working closely with senior faculty on active projects, and the Exchange puts them in front of audiences that include their future employers, their future colleagues, and community members who have never met a researcher their own age. At the first Exchange, undergraduate researchers stood beside their posters in the Circuit Lounge and fielded questions from members of the Powerize Northwest Consortium, the network of 61 public agencies, industry partners, and universities positioning the Pacific Northwest in energy storage and smart grid markets.

Maseeh Exchange is an opportunity to showcase our research, our academic programs, and also our values," Assistant Dean of Academic Innovation, Tong Zhang notes. "Showing how the college engages with and elevates important cultural elements of our community is as central to our identity as our research and academic endeavors.

The subjects change each quarter, from smart grid technology to soil liquefaction to augmented reality, but the encounter stays the same: people standing inside active research rather than reading about it from a distance. And the questions that come back are not the questions researchers prepare for. They are questions shaped by people who manage actual grid infrastructure, who make hiring decisions, who live in the neighborhoods where this research will land. The room changes the work by changing who is in conversation with it.

Every Exchange included an integral cultural element that shaped the context of the research and distinguished the series from a standard showcase. Fabian Quenelle performed an honor song before "Ideas with Impact" was unveiled during Native American Heritage Month. Those panels now hang permanently in the Engineering Building, created by PSU and painted by the community the building serves; they are part of the space in a way no brochure or banner could be.

Winter tested the idea most directly. President Ann Cudd opened "Riveting Resilience" with a specific account of the 1948 Vanport flood, connecting PSU's founding to a history of displacement and rebuilding. Dr. Yvonne Fasold of the American Rosie the Riveter Association detailed wartime production along the Columbia River. Then Doreen Kilen appeared via Zoom, a WWII Rosie describing her work at Monarch Forge and Machine in Portland while still a senior in high school. Veterans Resource Center students followed, connecting wartime histories to their own service and current coursework.

None of that was engineering content, but all of it provided culture and context. Twenty minutes later, newly minted PhD Kayla Sorenson presented soil liquefaction research, and the ground beneath Portland carried two kinds of instability at once: geological and historical. Yumei Wang explained that a Cascadia earthquake is not a hypothesis but a timeline. The Ignite talks were strong on their own. But the Rosies had changed the room they landed in.

By spring, CETI's XRchive project brought augmented reality installations into the building that surfaced the erased histories of Chinese laborers in Block 14 at Lone Fir Cemetery, using the same tools the evening's Ignite speakers were analyzing. The cultural component and the technical content arrived at a question neither would have asked alone:

What do these technologies make visible, and for whom?

The cultural programming does not soften the engineering. It sharpens it by insisting that research does not happen in a vacuum-but as an attempt to solve a particular problem, in a particular place, with a particular history. That story is not separate from the work but part of what makes the work honest.

People kept coming back. President Cudd attended the first Exchange and confirmed her attendance at the next before she left. She returned for winter, where she opened the Rosies program. By spring, the room held Katherine Juengel from Prosper Portland, Skip Newberry of the Technology Association of Oregon, Sam Keen, co-founder of Portland AI Engineers, alongside student competition teams and a Discover CS cohort. Senior learners kept returning. Students from Beaverton Academy of Science and Engineering asked to attend.

A fireside panel brought faculty and industry onto the same stage. Zhang moderated. Antonie Jetter, Sam Keen, Katherine Juengel, and Skip Newberry sat together for a conversation about where the AI industry is heading and what role a public university should occupy in that trajectory. The college announced new degree programs launching in fall 2026: a BS and minor in Artificial Intelligence, a minor in Cybersecurity, and certificates. That announcement landed in a room already composed of the industry leaders who will hire the graduates, the faculty who designed the curricula, the students who will enroll, the community partners whose work these degrees respond to.

Development Director Erin O'Roak notes that "The Maseeh Exchanges reflect what makes this community so special. Our alumni show up not just as attendees, but as proud ambassadors of their alma mater-eager to reconnect, to learn, and to contribute. Through conversations with industry and community partners, new ideas take shape and relationships grow stronger. That exchange is how we live our motto, 'Let knowledge serve the city,' in real and meaningful ways."

The MX events share the work of our college with the community, not as a one-sided showcase of cutting-edge research, but as an invitation into a researcher's space grounded in reciprocity. Three quarters. Three themes. Invitees came back because the format earns it, because the cultural programming surprises them, because the research is real and unfinished and explained by the people doing it. And because the conversations that happen at the reception are worth staying for.

The exchange is not one directional," Zhang emphasizes. "We learn as much about what resonates and interests people as they do from us. Also, attendees bring new perspectives and engage with us as future students, future faculty, or as collaborators for our college, our faculty, and our students.

Our fourth MX, focused on Engineering Education, is planned for fall 2026. The door will open again, and everyone is welcome.