solution / Build a depressible kill switch device on the sides of the bike that will automatically cut the engine on impact with the ground

team / Brian Forde, BMET ’13, Sergei Panasenko, BMET ’12, and Evelio Portillo, BMET ’12

description / “We figured we would start off with a crash knob. A crash knob is something that already exists on most [racing bikes] as an attachment to protect the frame of the bike. So we decided to take that one step further. Instead of just trying to protect the frame, we would also try and protect the rider…. We integrated a button in there so that when the bike falls down—[and it works] only with the force of the bike or greater, so it won’t be pushed by accident—the engine stops, the wheel stops, and the rider doesn’t go through more serious injury once he’s already on the ground.”

relevant courses / Computer Aided Manufacturing, Manufacturing Processes, Strength of Materials, Instrumentation and Measurement, and Mechanical Design

Kenneth Bacheller, ’36, was an airplane engineer

“The houses that my sister and I live in, he built them,” said Suzanne Bacheller, one of two daughters who survive him. “He built many houses and condos over the course of lots of years. I’m proud of that. He contributed to a lot of people’s lives.”

Bacheller was born on March 26, 1917, in Lynn, MA. He attended Wentworth and married Ann Jean in 1940 before heading to California to continue work in the aircraft business. Then, in 1947, he and his wife headed to Fort Lauderdale, FL.

“He saw the opportunity and became a builder,” Suzanne said. “He really jumped into it.” Throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies, Bacheller built houses, hotels, and condominiums.

In 1977, he retired and moved to Delray Beach, enjoying a more leisurely lifestyle of golf and travel throughout the country—especially to Arizona—with his wife. The two were married almost 68 years.

Suzanne remembers his family devotion. “He always said, ‘I just want to take care of my girls,’” Suzanne said. She also recalls how friends and colleagues always turned to him for advice for any problem from business to personal. “He had a very analytical mind,” Suzanne said. “Everybody mentioned that he could calculate anything in his head extremely quickly.”

That mind certainly helped at Wentworth, which Bacheller remembered fondly. As he got older—still a short but powerfully built man, said Suzanne— he thought a lot about his earliest memories. In 1997, he created the Kenneth G. Bacheller Charitable Foundation and included Wentworth in an annual scholarship donation.

“He wanted to do things for people he remembered from his early days, and that was Wentworth,” Suzanne said. Now she and her sister, Kay Bacheller, continue to manage the foundation in the way their father would have wanted.

“The best we can do for him is to fulfill his wishes,” Suzanne said. “We loved him and we miss him.” Bacheller died on February 26, 2012. In addition to his two daughters, Suzanne and Kay, he is survived by his nephew, John Bacheller. —KIMBERLY THORPE

Her trip was part of Bike and Build, a national nonprofit that organizes a series of summer cross-country treks to raise money and awareness for affordable housing projects. Riders get hands-on, too: her group spent nine days of their journey helping with home-building projects in communities across the country.

All told, Murphy and her pack of 31 other riders raised $168,000 with their trip, which traced a path that included some of the country’s poor, forgotten rural sections that one might not necessarily see on a highway route. Avoiding the beaten path, though, had its dangers: in the fifth mile of what was to be a 70-mile day of riding in Iowa, Murphy hit a hole while crossing train tracks and broke her left hand. After being fitted with a removable cast and having a bike shop rework her brakes so she could control them with her right hand, she was back on the road.

But when it came time to reach their final destination of Seattle, the pace slowed. It wasn’t that she and her fellow riders were tired—though they were certainly that. “We just didn’t want it to end,” she says. The trip’s formal close was to come via another “wheel dip” ceremony, this time riders dunking their front wheel into the Pacific Ocean. As they approached the beach in Seattle, though, they saw that an unexpected crowd had gathered—parents, friends, loved ones. Spurred by their cheers, the entire crew spontaneously, dumped their bikes, ran across the beach, and dove into the waters of the Pacific.

Reflecting on it months later, Murphy—an admitted biking novice— says the journey’s mileage never became daunting. “You don’t see it—you just do it.” Even now, the full measure of the feat remains elusive. “I guess I am still waiting for it to hit me,” says Murphy. —DAN MORRELL

But Castro’s dish was different—built from an advanced recycled concrete mixture that comes out more ceramic than sidewalk, the dish is a durable little number that prevents clumping and staining, major problems for its wooden counterparts. Within a year’s time, that little spice holder blossomed into Port Living Co., a group of four with Castro at the helm, specializing in products for the home—things like salt dishes, spice caddies, and coasters. In the company’s first year, its Culinarium brand of home products brought in $15,000 in revenue. This year, Castro’s predicting half a million—thousands in coasters alone.

But Castro hasn’t always been on the brink of such career success. After dropping out of Wentworth, he spent years working as an independent contractor—buying, renovating, and selling homes and managing rental properties. He was doing pretty well until the housing market went belly up. Castro lost nearly 30 properties in the economic downturn, including his own home. He, his wife, and his two children became the renters, and Castro reached a tipping point: “The first thing I decided to do was go back to school.” Castro headed back to Wentworth, this time to finish his degree in construction management and to pursue another in project management. He delivered pizzas and worked on getting his career back in motion by applying for product management positions.

In his downtime, he fiddled in the workshop. He made a salt cellar, “threw it up on Etsy,” and that was that. He made a few sales and made a few more items based on the products he’d like to have around him in the kitchen. “I make them for me,” he says. “They’re what I would like to use.” Before long, wholesalers and retailers were calling, national magazines wanted to feature his products, and he was bringing in employees to help him keep up with demand.

“We didn’t plan on this,” says Castro, who was recently named an “Emerging Designer” at the New York International Gift Fair. “Especially considering where we were a couple of years ago.” But he’s glad he’s right here, right now. —MAUREEN HARMON

With all the physical changes to the school and its surrounding area, though, O’Leary says that the Institute and its educational mission have remained steady. “Wentworth has done a good job of keeping its traditions,” he says.

Chief among those traditions is providing students the same opportunities that a Wentworth education afforded him. “It’s given me a wonderful way of life— the opportunity to have a family and do everything I could for them; to educate my children and my grandchildren,” says O’Leary, who recently committed $200,000 in support of the Invest in Tomorrow campaign.

After a successful career in construction as well as property management and development, O’Leary says he gives back to Wentworth to ensure that current students enjoy the same opportunities. “I want to see the school and its graduates have success and continue to grow.”

IT’S NEARING 5:00 P.M. ON JULY 28, and a steady stream of students begins to file into the Evans Way /Tudbury Auditorium. They settle into groups, huddled around laptops, delivering presentations to the walls. The room is anxious. Tonight is important. As part of Wentworth’s inaugural Accelerate program, a new student-business startup competition, student teams have the opportunity to tell a panel of judges about their game-changing idea and potentially walk away with thousands in funding to get it off the ground.

The lights are lowered, and the pitches start. There’s a team that wants to start a kind of Netflix for moving boxes, offering Boston’s massive college market the ability to rent durable, stackable crates rather than the traditional, more expensive, less environmentally friendly cardboard boxes. Another group has plans for a new portable speaker system that would offer both a rugged body and clear sound. There’s even a team that wants to revolutionize the modern pedicab—those human-powered, three-wheeled bicycle rickshaws.

The pedicab team, made up of Eric Crouch, BMET ’12, and John Pelkey, BIND ’12, takes the stage with a presentation they’ve been fine-tuning for weeks. Pelkey does the talking. First, an intro to the world of pedicabs. (“This is the most fun you can have in Boston, I’m telling you.”) Then he walks through the big advantages of their new, improved model: reliability, aesthetics, ergonomics, cost-effectiveness. He talks about how 28 of the cabs ordered by the company he works for needed repairs within their first year of operation and how the new drivetrain he and Crouch developed will save thousands of dollars.

A few months ago, Crouch and Pelkey’s new pedicab was an idea for their senior design studio—a cool project, but one whose ultimate purpose was academic. Now it looked like something that could live beyond the walls of Wentworth. Something that could meet a market need. Something that could make money. Pelkey and Crouch aren’t just thinking like students anymore—they are thinking like CEOs.

Photo by Jarrod McCabe

SOCCER IS FACING THIS PROBLEM that baseball didn’t have: baseball statistics are wildly available,” says Devin Pleuler, BCOS ’11, a former Leopard goalkeeper and data scientist who spends his off-hours exploring soccer stats as a columnist for Major League Soccer. “[Famed baseball statistician] Bill James didn’t need much more than box scores.”

Baseball has traditionally tallied all sorts of numbers to measure performance: hits by type, runs batted in, stolen bases, walks, strikeouts. But soccer box scores don’t offer much more than a record of goals and fouls. To gain real insight into a team’s tactics, Pleuler and his fellow soccer wonks need “more granular statistics than that box score can offer”—players’ pass completion rates, how often they convert scoring opportunities, the number of tackles they win. And while there are companies that have begun to compile more complex soccer data, they are generally for-profit enterprises, limiting the data’s availability. “It’s impossible to do this kind of analysis if the data is only in the hands of a couple hundred people.”

Pleuler got his first taste of the power of soccer stats two years ago while developing his senior capstone project: a  “network passing graph”—a visual representation of a soccer team’s tactical movements, capturing how many passes occurred between a set of players, how much territory players covered on the field, and where they spent most of their time. “Previously, people looked at how often the players passed the ball to each other, but nobody included things like average position and variation in players’ field position,” says Pleuler. With his layout, coaches and managers can get an objective view of how their team moves the ball and potentially make more informed tactical decisions about lineups and formations. “That was something that I thought was valuable.”

Major League Soccer agreed. In March, a few months after starting a blog that detailed his continued work on passing graphs and other soccer analytics—and pushing the content via Twitter and Reddit—the league asked Pleuler if he would like to write for them as an online analyst. His blog, Central Winger, has been hosted on the site ever since.

The road to relevancy, though, is rocky. While data availability is slowly improving—some international clubs are starting to release select data to the public—Pleuler’s aware that he and his fellow soccer stat acolytes may never be able to break down the beautiful game the way we now quantify baseball. But even a little bit of clarity, he says, can make a massive difference. “It’s like when these European teams are exchanging players for tens of millions of dollars,” Pleuler says. “If I can evaluate a player and put a number on his head that is ten percent more accurate than anyone else’s, there’s a lot of value there.”

—DAN MORRELL

a Production

Problem: People would respect food more and waste less if they grew it—but those living in urban settings have limited access to farming space.

Solution: An aquarium-based food production system: water circulates between a fish tank and a tray of plants, providing nutrient-rich fish waste to the plants and using less than 10 percent of the water of a typical garden. (Sarah Fox, BIND ’13, and Greg Ordway, BIND ’13)

b Preparation 

Problem: 87 percent of consumers aren’t aware of the issue of food waste.

Solution: A passive, long-term approach: a children’s iPad case, app, and kitchen tool set—packaged and sold in toy stores—that gets kids interested in cooking meals while teaching them the value of food. (Colby Higgins, BIND ’13)

c Storage 

Problem: Bought with the best intentions, more than half of all fruits and vegetables American households buy go to waste.

Solution: A wall-mounted modular rack system that keeps the fruit stable, visible, and accessible. (Bailey Giles, BIND ’13, and Jared Neely, BIND ’13)

d Preservation 

Problem: Our current refrigerators contribute to food waste, with poor visibility, unnecessary space, and inefficient technology.

Solution: Smaller refrigerators will encourage less long-term storage—and less spoilage—while consuming less energy. (Stefano Giuliani, BIND ’13)

e Reuse

Problem: Composting food waste can be impractical for city-dwelling consumers.

Solution: An indoor composter that doubles as a food prep table. Perfect for urban settings where space and materials are scarce. (Alyssa Molinaro, BIND ’13)

#12

6 // Consecutive years that the Princeton Review has named Wentworth a “Best in the Northeast College”

1,149 // Total new students in fall 2012—the largest incoming class in Wentworth’s recent history

10 // Dr. Russell Pinizzotto’s blog was rated by his fellow provosts to be one of the country’s top 10 in an OnlineColleges.com poll

62 // New courses since fall 2011

322 // Wentworth was named one of the Princeton Review’s “322 Green Colleges” this year, thanks in part to on-campus recycling initiatives and energy-efficient buildings

$500,000 // Wentworth’s total expected award from a National Science Foundation program aiming to increase science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduates over the next five years—Wentworth’s largest grant in the last decade

#38 // Wentworth’s ranking in “U.S. Institutions with the Most International Students, 2010-2011” among baccalaureate institutions in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Almanac of Higher Education 2012