Sam Rubaker

Background

About Sam Rubaker

I am currently an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. I am teaching a class titled the Design of Coffee that covers engineering principles such as heat transfer, thermodynamics and fluid mechanics through the lens of roasting and brewing coffee. I also cover the future of coffee and the sustainability of current coffee farming practices. The class culminates in a design competition in which the students have to roast and brew the best cup tasting cup of coffee while using the least amount of energy while both brewing and roasting.I recently graduated with a Master's in Mechanical Engineering from CU Boulder in August. Throughout graduate school I worked in Dr. Alaa Ahmed's Neuromechanics Lab studying human movement. I designed a Virtual Reality "game" that utilizes an VR headset, VICON motion capture system, and an instrumented treadmill to study how humans walk in a virtual world. I used Unity3D along with C#, Matlab, and VICON Tracker to create the game. We conducted a pilot study to show that the game is capable of studying human locomotion with promising results. The lab is continuing with my work and my hope is that it is used as the basis for a paper soon.