Capitology Blog

Sponsored by the National Association of Women in Construction (NAWIC), Women in Construction Week (WIC) is an annual event used to raise awareness of women in the industry and celebrate their construction contributions.

The 2021 theme for International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge”. For centuries, women have been challenging the stereotype that the STEM fields are not ones they should pursue. This blog posts highlights women who have made contributions to STEM and beyond.

Most people know who Google’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are and many people even have daily interactions with these personas, but few have met Kismet, Leonard, Aida, Autom, or Huggable.

Capitol Tech sat down with Pam Phojanakong, an epidemiologist with a PhD from Drexel University, to discuss the challenges facing data scientists in the midst of a global pandemic. Pam currently works as a data scientist for CORMAC, a Baltimore-based data management and analytics firm, supporting a contract that works with data submitted by post-acute care providers. Pam was instrumental in developing a COVID dashboard, which looks at COVID rates compared to Census data for key occupations and social characteristics.

The world of cryptocurrency can be difficult to understand, especially when trying to predict how it will behave on the market. This is where cyber analytics may be used to uncover the link between cryptocurrency coding and market behavior.

Five years ago we were awarded a NASA CubeSat Launch Initiative 'free launch' via Virgin Orbit for any science payload we could build-- as long as it fit into a 30cm x 10cm x 10cm '3U' CubeSat frame.  Oh, and we had to build the frame as well.  And the test gear.  And the comms system.  Solar panels. A ground system.  In short, it had a lot of parts.  As a result, over 30 students got to participate in Capitol's Cactus-1 (Coordinated Applied Capitol Technology University Satellite 1)CubeSat project over its 3 year build cycle.

Women and their contributions to America society have been celebrated annually in March since 1981, when Ronald Reagan approved Congress’ request to proclaim the week of March 7 as “Women’s History Week. After half a decade of celebrating women in this fashion, the National Women’s History Project petitioned for the week to be expanded nationally into Women’s History Month and Congress passed the resolution.

Dr. Guion Bluford, otherwise known as “Guy”, first entered space in 1983 on the STS-8 Challenger mission making him the first African American person to even enter space.

The love to tinker and build, void of scientific reasoning, was most likely how many engineers and engineering technologists got their start. I can recall it, just like yesterday, at the age of eight, as I attempted to repair an old broken record player in my home. The process of discovering the problem, disassembly, remedying with a solution, and reassembly, brought excitement to the job at hand. The thrill it would bring, to hear it play music once more would soon be thwarted by failure, over and over again.

Dr. Coray Davis, Capitol Tech's Chair of Engineering, spoke with the Capitol Technology University Blog to talk about his personal experience leading to his career in engineering in celebration of Engineers Week.