Two teams spearheaded by doctoral students in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering (MIE) Department were among the three winners of the University of Massachusetts Innovation Challenge Final on April 5, when $65,000 in seed money was distributed to the prizewinners. eBiologics finished in first place, winning $30,000 and led by Alexander Smith, a doctoral student in MIE. The other prizewinning MIE team was Kinase, Inc., which finished in third place and won $15,000. Kinase is headed by Nariman Banaei, a doctoral student in MIE, and MBA student Amir Ali Jazayeri of Hofstra University.

Industrial Engineering Professor Shannon Roberts of the University of Massachusetts Amherst notes that some modern vehicles have more than 100 computing components containing over 10 million lines of code. However, most vehicles are not designed with cybersecurity in mind and, as a result, they are susceptible to cyberattacks. For example, a 2015 Jeep Cherokee cyberattack in St. Louis resulted in a recall of 1.4 million vehicles. Moreover, there are countless other scenarios in which vehicles can be hacked to trigger crashes. With all these perils in mind, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has funded Roberts to study vehicle cybersecurity and find solutions.