When Emily Moreno-Hernandez saw the final designs for the feeding apparatus that was installed at the Duke Lemur Center, she couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride. The designs of the students she’d been helping mentor weren’t as complex or robust as the one developed by Duke Engineering first-year college students. But that was to be expected—the students are, after all, ninth and tenth graders at Oxford Preparatory School.
“I was excited to see that Oxford Prep students had a lot of the same ideas as the college students,” said Moreno-Hernandez, who coordinates operations and outreach for the Shared Materials Instrumentation Facility (SMIF) at Duke. “I could tell that they’d been paying attention and were embracing learning the engineering design process.”
As part of her job with SMIF, Moreno-Hernandez is engaged with Duke Engineering’s arm of the national
