Undergrad Student Spotlights

Fighting iBots

Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering

Game Day for Engineers

Go Irish! On Friday, April, 23, 2010, 67 senior mechanical engineering design students competed in the second annual Robotic Football Blue-Gold Game at Notre Dame. The students designed and built robotic football players as part of their senior capstone course.

The equivalent to an exam, the mechatronic game consisted of two 15-minute halves with normal football rules modified for mechanical play. The “players” were semi-autonomous and controlled by the student designers with remote controllers. According to Associate Professor Jim Schmiedeler, the experience of designing and building the football devices acquaints students with important principles used in intelligent prosthetics and other innovative robot-related research, such as biomedical devices and electromechanical systems, being conducted by Notre Dame researchers.

To see the action and learn more, click the photo above.

Click here to learn more about the Fighting Ibots.

Yamil Colón

Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

2009 Graduate

Yamil Colón, a chemical engineering graduate from Bayamón, Puerto Rico, was awarded a scholarship for graduate study from the Fulbright Program and is currently studying separation processes and phase equilibra at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

For more information, click here.

The group in which Colón is studying is led by Professor Alberto Arce and Associate Professor Ana Soto and is internationally recognized for its work with vapor-liquid equilibria (VLE) and ionic liquid (IL) research.

He is focusing his efforts on VLE phases and measuring the physical properties of ILs for industrial applications, including the removal of metal and other contaminants from water, carbon dioxide capture, and the removal of sulfur compounds from diesel fuel.

ILs have the advantage of being non-volatile, meaning that by replacing VOCs with ILs there would be no pollutant emissions and the impact on global warming would be greatly reduced. ILs also represent a more efficient way to perform separations. By using more efficient technologies, the energy required to run the processes would be reduced.

Created by Congress in 1946, the Fulbright Program is the U.S. government’s premier scholarship program, designed to foster mutual understanding among nations through educational and cultural exchanges.

Sarah Keithley

Department of Civil Engineering and Geological Sciences

2010 Graduate

Across the College of Engineering, undergraduates like Sarah Keithley work with faculty and graduate students on cutting-edge technologies. Most recently, she was working with Associate Professor Robert Nerenberg to develop less-polluting and more sustainable energy technologies.

During her senior year at Notre Dame, Keithley was part of a team studying microbial fuel cells (MFCs) in order to harness the energy in organic wastes. This is important because more than 90 percent of the world's energy comes from fossil fuels. These fuels are in limited supply, and their use can negatively impact the environment.

MFCs work like chemical fuel cells, but they use microorganisms or enzymes to catalyze reactions and transfer electrons to an electrode. Because they can generate electricity from essentially any biodegradable organic matter, MFCs can simultaneously produce electrical energy while treating municipal or industrial wastewater. Still in the early stages of research, Nerenberg's team is now focusing on the development of new and more efficient MFC configurations. They are also working to determine the basic mechanisms of MFC operation, including the microbial community structure of the MFCs and the mode of electron transfer from the bacteria to the electrode. 

Keithley, a 2010 graduate, is continuing her studies in environmental engineering as an graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin.

For more information about Keithley and other student highlights, click here.

James Notwell

Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Senior

James Notwell, a senior in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, spent the summer between his junior and senior years as an intern for the Microsoft Corporation. He worked as a program manager for the summer within Bing™, which collaborates with Microsoft’s® research arm, and was part of the Index Serve team, the group responsible for maintaining the index of documents returned to users. His job? To analyze customer behavior and identify markets in which Bing was struggling as well as succeeding to develop metrics for user engagement and make recommendations for specific markets.

More recently, Notwell was selected to receive a 2010 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Distributed annually, the award recognizes and supports outstanding students as they pursue research based master's or doctoral degrees in NSF-supported engineering, science, technology, and mathematics disciplines. Notwell, who received his bachelor's from the University in May, will continue his studies in computer science at Stanford University this fall and will focus on applying machine learning techniques to biology – extracting novel insights from genomic data and using probabilistic models to better understand biological phenomenon.

For more information about Notwell, his recent NSF award, and other student highlights, click here.

Team LED Zeppelin

Department of Electrical Engineering

Senior Project Team

For their senior capstone project, electrical engineering seniors Matt Prelee, Arthur Kinsey, Rob Jones and Jon Altenburger (Team LED Zeppelin) developed a “teach yourself to play” system for the guitar.

For more information about Team LED Zeppelin click here.

Each of the team members is a guitarist and understands the challenges novice guitarists face as they try to memorize chord shapes and scales. To address these challenges, the team modified an electric guitar by installing LEDs in the neck of the guitar. The LEDs light up in a pattern that shows the player where to place his or her fingers. This makes learning to play easier … not only during practice but because the system is mounted to the guitar, there is no need to carry books and charts along.

Approximately 30 color-coded LEDs are integrated into the fret board, with six near the top of the neck and the others located on the first four frets (six per fret) to illuminate most basic chord shapes and scales in both a “chord” and “scale” mode for correct finger placement.

For more information about this and other electrical engineering senior design projects, visit http://seniordesign.ee.nd.edu.

Herbert Harms

Department of Electrical Engineering

A 2008 graduate, Herbert Harms chose to pursue graduate school because he wanted to continue conducting research similar to the work he performed as an undergraduate researcher in cognitive radio using a software-defined platform. Not only did he work with Associate Professor J. Nicholas Laneman in Notre Dame labs during the academic year, but he also landed summer internships in industrial research labs.

These summer experiences solidified his desire to pursue an advanced degree. As a doctoral student at Princeton University, Harms concentrates his efforts on radar applications and cognitive radio, as well as signal processing methods to improve the effectiveness of radar systems. His current work has military applications, such as developing more jam-resistant radar systems. It also has social applications, such as using software-defined radio for more efficient use of the wireless spectrum and improved data connectivity to the Internet. His best advice? “Participate in undergraduate research and take as many advanced courses as you can.”

Click here to learn more.