Riding Toward Recovery: How One Student Team is Creating a Custom Bicycle Seat for U.S. Marine Corps Veteran Dustin Huff

(from left to right) Daniel Zhao, QL Plus Executive Director Mark Robbins, Dr. Gregory Behrmann, Clarisse Quitan Dapul, Kathleen Delate, Andrew Loman

We believe the most meaningful learning happens when students use their skills to make a real difference in someone’s life. That’s exactly what Andrew Lowman and his team at The Catholic University of America are doing through their senior design project: building a custom bicycle seat for a cancer survivor who served in the U.S. Marine Corps between 2000 and 2004.

Andrew, a biomedical engineering student, chose to partner with QL Plus because it gave him the unique opportunity to apply what he's learned in the classroom to help another human being. His team was assigned to Dustin Huff, a father and veteran who underwent surgery to remove cancer in his right gluteus muscle—a procedure that left him unable to ride bikes with his young children.

“My inspiration for this project is to deliver a working product that can make a positive change in his life and restore a function he lost due to cancer,” said Andrew.

The project is more than a class assignment. It’s a chance for Andrew and his teammates—Daniel Zhao, Clarisse Quitan Dapul, and Kathleen Delate, guided by Dr. Gregory Behrmann—to give back to someone who sacrificed for his country. Together, they’ve designed and built a custom bicycle seat tailored to Dustin’s needs. The seat includes a widened base, a plastic insert to support the area affected by surgery, and reflectors to keep him safe while riding. Their goal is to help Dustin get back to what matters most: riding bikes with his kids.

Pictured: Custom bike seat prototype

For Andrew, this experience has shaped how he thinks about engineering, teamwork, and service. “I hope to achieve the gratitude and fulfillment from delivering a product to a veteran and giving back to him for what he sacrificed for us,” he said. “It will show future employers that I was able to work with a team for an extended period of time to meet the needs of a client and deliver a product.”

Andrew plans to attend law school after graduation—but he’ll carry the lessons of this project with him wherever he goes.

At QL Plus, we’re proud to support student engineers like Andrew who are building real-world solutions that improve lives.