This year’s University Research Day took place on April 17th, 2024. School of Engineering students and faculty attended the event, presenting their research projects to members of the Catholic University community. This annual event highlights the research and innovation currently being conducted at the university and serves as a platform to celebrate the academic contributions regularly made by our students and faculty.
The event began with a welcome address from President Peter Kilpatrick in the Della Ratta Auditorium and an update on the State of Research at the university from Provost Aaron Dominguez. This was followed by a Keynote Seminar by Dr. Jeffrey Herrmann, the newly endowed St. Abbo of Fleury Chair of Engineering. Dr. Herrmann—who is an expert in modeling engineering design decision-making processes—discussed metareasoning, or the ability to think about the way that one thinks and makes decisions. His talk considered how faith and reason work together and how metareasoning might play a role in understanding the interrelation between them. He also explained the applications and implications of metareasoning in robotics, discussing how we program robots to perform metareasoning, so that they can recover from failures and use their limited computational resources more efficiently going forward.
The remainder of the day included several oral presentations, a poster ceremony, live musical performances and film festival, and the concluding award ceremony. A number of engineering students won overall university awards at this year's event. Below you will find the list of School of Engineering award winners:
Award Winner - Best Undergraduate Oral Presentation
Spinal Suspension System for Prosthetic Arms
Students: Daniel Zhao, Louis Nwuha, Abigail Post, Maria Hargrave, Nathan Ford, and Sean Farrelly
(Department of Biomedical Engineering)
Advisor: Dr. Alessandro Vato
Award Winner - Best Undergraduate Poster
Electromechanical Properties of Distal Electrofabricated Chitosan Membrane Crosslinked with Cu2+
Students: Maria Erquiaga (Department of Mechanical Engineering) and Emma Wallace (Department of Biomedical Engineering)
Advisor: Dr. Xiaolong Luo
Collaborators: Claire Wang, Pricilla Yeh, and Long Duong
Several students also placed as finalists. Below you will find the list of School of Engineering finalists:
Finalist - Master’s Oral Presentation
Brain Tumor Detection: A Hybrid Transformer Approach
Students: Sandeep Shiraskar (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
Collaborator: Alireza Omidi
Advisor: Dr. Dominick Rizk
Machine Learning Approach to Predicting Electric Vehicle Adoption Rates at the County Level in the United States
Michael Graham-Cornell (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)
Advisor: Dr. Lin-Ching Chang
Finalist - Undergraduate Poster
Rotary Kite Wind Turbine
Students: Ethan Kerr, Michael Dougherty, Matthew Dietl, and Payton Seppala
(Department of Mechanical Engineering)
In addition to the student award winners and finalists, two School of Engineering faculty won teaching awards this year. Dr. Jason Davison, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, won the Teaching Excellence in Early Career Faculty Award, which honors faculty who have excelled in the teaching role and who have taught at the university for less than ten years. Dr. Gregory Behrmann, Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, won the Overall Teaching Excellence Award, which honors an accumulated record of teaching effectiveness and recognizes faculty who have excelled in teaching over a period of at least ten years.
The School of Engineering is well represented at University Research Day each year, sending faculty and student representatives from each of the academic departments. Participation—and success—at this event exemplifies the achievements of our engineering faculty and students, as well as the valuable contributions they continually make in their respective areas of expertise. Congratulations to all of the School of Engineering students and faculty who conducted research this year!
For more information on University Research Day and the School of Engineering award winners this year, please visit the following websites:
https://engineering.catholic.edu/research-and-faculty/research-day.html
https://research-day.catholic.edu/