Engineering News Winter 2018

Taylor Mau ’18, double majoring in electrical engineering and computer engineering and minoring in design thinking and innovation, recently won a highly competitive IEEE Power and Energy Society Scholarship Plus Initiative award. A habitual overachiever, Mau was honored for her commitment to exploring the power and energy engineering field through both coursework and career experiences.

The busy senior has held internships at FileMaker and Apple, and work she performed with teammates last summer in the School of Engineering’s Latimer Energy Lab led to a poster presentation, “NanoGrid: A path to energy efficiency and renewable energy,” at the IEEE Conference on Technologies for Sustainability last November. She was also a member of SCU’s 2016 Tiny House team, which took first place in California’s inaugural competition.

For her senior design project, Mau is developing an air quality monitor. “Poor air quality contributes to a lot of deaths, so I’d like to bring awareness to this problem. I’m working on a prototype that harvests energy from the sun, vibration, or thermal energy to power the device. Data will be sent to the cloud and then to an iPhone to notify users of poor air quality,” she said.

At SCU, Mau has shared her excitement for engineering as a School of Engineering tour guide, vice president of the student chapters of IEEE and Association of Computing Machinery, and president of the Maker Club. She is also an avid artist and enjoys drawing, painting, and various other arts and crafts. “I never took any art classes. I want to, but my schedule is kind of busy,” she said, not even registering the understatement there. “After graduating, I want to get a job in prototyping or product design. Combining engineering and art in a career would be awesome.”