Research Opportunities for Undergraduate ECE Students

The ECE Department encourages undergraduate students to become involved in ongoing research activities with faculty and graduate students. Such experiences broaden the student's perspective on his/her chosen profession, complementing the conceptual material covered in the classroom. These research experiences are often arranged by individual faculty members as part of senior projects or senior honors theses performed for credit, or as part-time jobs as part of externally funded research activities.

In a more formally organized program, the Intelligent Structures Group within the ECE Department offers research experiences to groups of undergraduate students in areas such as machine vision, VLSI circuit design, neural networks, and robot control. The National Science Foundation sponsors this program via grants from the NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site Program. The REU Site experiences involve carrying out independent research projects, usually as part of a larger project involving graduate students and faculty. Two groups of students participate each year: one group is involved full-time during the summer while the second group participates part-time during the academic year. The following statements, extracted from the NSF solicitation, summarize the purpose of the program. "One of the National Science Foundation's principal goals is to assure an adequate supply of high quality mathematicians, scientists and engineers for the future. This requires continuing efforts to attract talented students into research careers in these fields." A total of thirty-two students participated in our REU Site during the previous two-year grant cycle. This spring we received a new two-year grant from NSF, allowing us to continue the program until May, 1998.

Seventeen students are participating in the REU Site at UNH this summer. Shawn Staker and Carolyn Tousignant are working with Dr. Bernhard developing software to help characterize the electromagnetic environment of portable wireless data communications systems. George Fitch is studying neural network techniques with application to multi-variate forecasting under the guidance of Dr. Pokoski. Jonathan Scalera, Eric Swanson, Michael Shannon, and Chris Plumlee are working in the Robotics Laboratory, developing a sensory driven wheeled autonomous robot for Dr. Miller. Joel Mellin, Pedro Irazoqui-Pastor, Jeffrey Butler, Ryan Rousseau, and Jon Frain are all part of the CATSAT team directed by Mr. Hludik and Dr. Rucinski, and are helping to design a research satellite which is scheduled for launch in two years. Craig Lombard, Mike Dalton, and Jeanette Lauder are developing advanced software for machine vision applications with Dr. Messner. Finally, Tim Rosario and Brian Dow are working with Dr. Glanz studying the potential of pneumatic muscles for robotics applications.