David Harris Research Group

The HMC Aero Lab

Since Spring 2017, over fifty Harvey Mudd College students and thirteen junior high/high school children have devoted over 5000 hours building a Vans RV-7A experimental airplane in the Aero Lab under the guidance of Professor David Harris.

The HMC Aero Lab built the empennage in 2017–18 and the wings and fuselage in Summer 2018. During the 2018-2019 academic year, they test-mounted the wings and empennage to the fuselage and installed various systems, built the engine at Superior AIrcraft, and selected the avionics and interior.

A team of four HMC students spent Summer 2019 continuing the project: Joseph Anderson, Laura Gordon, Sabrina Shen, and Yuki Wang. Three were rising juniors and one a rising sophomore. They were joined part time by four high school student volunteers. Major work included the sliding canopy, firewall-forward (engine and cowling), and avionics.

Clay-Wolkin Fellowship

The Jay Wolkin ’99 and Clay Family Foundation Fellowship, named in memory of the famous and fun-loving Mudder Jay Wolkin, provides students opportunities to pursue basic and applied research initiatives in VLSI Design within the context of the unique engineering program at Harvey Mudd College.

David Harrisis the Harvey S. Mudd Professor of Engineering Design at Harvey Mudd College. Professor Harris received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1999 and his S.B. and MEng. degrees from MIT in 1994. His research interests include CMOS VLSI design, computer arithmetic, experimental aviation, and the mountains of Southern California. He is the author or coauthor of CMOS VLSI Design: A Circuits and Systems Perspective, Digital Design and Computer Architecture, Logical Effort, Skew-Tolerant Circuit Design, and many hiking guidebooks for Southern California. He holds more than 15 patents, has written numerous papers, and has designed chips for Broadcom, Sun Microsystems, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Evans & Sutherland.