Portland State University sits in the middle of downtown, where transit lines converge, cranes mark new construction, and the Willamette River cuts through the city’s infrastructure. Several times each year, the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science opens its labs and public spaces for the Maseeh Exchange, a themed evening that brings research, conversation, and regional partners into the same building. On an urban campus embedded in downtown Portland, the Maseeh Exchange draws the city into the building and sends the building’s work back into the city.
Maseeh College’s research laboratories are not typically open to the curious public. During the Exchange, researchers opened those doors and invited visitors into spaces where projects are still underway, data is still evolving, and faculty and student researchers test their assumptions with experiments. The Geotechnical Engineering Lab highlighted the mechanics of soil liquefaction and the potential instability of saturated ground. The Healthy Buildings Research Lab focused on indoor air monitoring, particulate matter, and filtration. The Fluid Mechanics and Hydraulics Lab demonstrated how fluid forces interact with the built and natural environments. In a city built on river sediment with a recurrent history of smoke-filled skies from wildfires, those explanations landed differently. Curious visitors asked what it means for Portland.
Beyond research labs, student organizations test structural principles in real-world constraints through competition teams. Student members of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) the Concrete Canoe team showed off their latest build next to the Steel Bridge team's own competition model, and Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI)’s Balsa Tower wobbled but did not fall. They fielded queries about competition schedules, material limitations, fabrication setbacks, and recalculations.
The cultural program, Riveting Resilience, did not function as intermission. President Ann Cudd addressed Vanport and the 1948 flood with specificity, situating the region’s growth alongside displacement and rebuilding. Dr. Yvonne Fasold of the American Rosie the Riveter Association detailed wartime production along the Columbia River, emphasizing the scale and coordination required to sustain it. Doreen Kilen, a World War II "Rosie" speaking via Zoom, described working at Monarch Forge & Machine in Portland while still a senior in high school. Representatives from the Veterans Resource Center connected those wartime histories to current students who balance coursework with military service. PSU student representatives from the Veterans Resource Center (VRC) spoke movingly about resilience as structural and personal.
After a contextual introduction by the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department Chair, the Ignite speakers took the floor for a series of Ignite talks built for a broad audience, each working against a fast-moving slide deck that advances automatically for five minutes. Thomas Schumacher delved into the possibilities of non-destructive testing and shared photos from his time scanning the Giza pyramids. Newly-minted PhD Kayla Sorenson turned to soil liquefaction and how better understanding subsurface conditions can help buildings survive seismic events. Wang addressed infrastructure resilience in the Pacific Northwest, explaining that we need strategies across the region to face an inevitable Cascadia earthquake. In rapid-fire jargon-free presentations, each named the constraints, the discoveries, and the tradeoffs engineers experience when they work in a city like Portland.
When the formal program ended, people did not move toward an exit so much as back toward one another. Conversations between students, faculty, alumni, and community members resumed mid‑thread and carried into the atrium where introductions continued and earlier exchanges deepened. The evening wound down through those sustained interactions, closing one Exchange even as attention began to shift toward the next program in the series, which will bring a new set of questions into the same shared space.
Foundations: Infrastructure & Resilience MX program followed a fall Exchange on Power & Energy and precedes a spring program showcasing Artificial Intelligence. The MX themes shift; the format remains deliberate. Students explain active research, faculty articulate their work in under five minutes, and we reveal an intersection between culture and technology. For an evening, the engineering building, which operates daily as a site of instruction and experimentation, will again become a point of connection between campus, community, and city. We hope to see you on May 20th for the next one.