Students at the University of Colorado Boulder had a new course offering and introduction to the medtech industry via a partnership between the University and Velentium, a Houston-based engineering firm that specializes in the design and manufacturing of therapeutic and diagnostic medical devices.

Garrett Schumacher, cybersecurity lead at Velentium and adjunct professor, led a course on embedded cybersecurity and secure product development. The program gave students both classroom and hands-on experience in the medical device security realm and included a capstone project with a focus on machine learning and artificial intelligence in relation to threat modeling.

“Velentium is committed to educating the next generation of aspiring engineers and plans to expand this initiative to additional universities around the country, ultimately creating a certification course,” said Schumacher. “It was a joy to work with some brilliant-minded students, and we were proud to hire two interns out of the CU Boulder program, providing opportunities for young engineers to enter the industry and experience career advancement.”

“Beyond theoretical concepts, this course allowed us to experience a hands-on approach for network devices and understand hardware hacking,” said Rushikesh Dodamani, one of the students who joined Velentium as an intern after completing the course. “It also helped students understand different steps of the product development lifecycle and the issues present in each step, gaining insight in how to mitigate those problems. The most significant insight I learned during the course was never to give up while testing a device for vulnerabilities. Velentium helped us understand that there are multitudes of techniques to utilize, and in the process, learn something new and have fun while you’re at it.”