Santa Clara University

SCU Junior wins Goldwater fellowship

Since grade school, Casey Kute has had her eye on a career in robotics. That vision has come into focus more clearly for the junior in mechanical engineering, thanks to her education and opportunities at Santa Clara which also helped her win a prestigious Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship.

The Goldwater Scholarship was established by Congress in 1986 to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers by awarding scholarships to college students intending to purse careers in those fields. Kute was one of 317 winners from a field of 1,100 applicants. She is one of only 54 engineering students among the recipients.

"Awards like the Goldwater, or the Rhodes or the Marshall are not ends in themselves, but they are a means to some other end. That?s why you need to find these students who have the vision, who know what they want to do, and can see the pathway pretty clearly. And I think Casey has that," said Richard Osberg, director of the Office of Student Fellowships and director of the Honors Program. He helped guide Kute and others through the process of applying for the Goldwater. "She has the large vision and she has the technical expertise."

Kute has developed that expertise working in the Robotic Systems Laboratory (RSL) at the university. "Robotics is why I came to Santa Clara," Kute says. "I was very adamant about finding a place that had a really strong robotics department and one that would actually let me work in it as an undergraduate." The heads of most robotics labs either eyed her skeptically or flat out refused to allow her access as an undergraduate. But SCU associate professor Christopher Kitts, the RSL director, told her she could begin working in the lab the second quarter of her freshman year if she came to Santa Clara, after she?d settled in to college life. "He was true to his word."

This past summer, Kute worked full-time as an independent researcher in the lab, funded by two grants from SCU?the Provost Junior Research Fellowship and the Jack Kuehler Undergraduate Research Program.

She worked at adapting small, commercially available robots (Boe-Bots from Parallax, Inc.) for use as urban search and rescue robots in perilous situations. "With the events of 9/11, I really got the idea of using robots in hazardous environments in order to help search for people or to neutralize the area so that it was safe for people to go into, rather than sending in firefighters or rescuers. If we?d had these when the towers collapsed, we wouldn?t have lost all the firefighters," Kute says.

The Goldwater has important implications both for Kute and SCU, notes Osberg. "First and foremost, kudos to Casey. This is a significant individual accomplishment for her. The Goldwater really is an imprimatur that presages many other significant awards that I?m sure she?ll go on to win," he says. "But I think the second thing that?s really important is the significance of independent research and the opportunities to do that independent research at Santa Clara. I think her Goldwater signals that we have the means in place now, and we have the cultural and intellectual capital, to help students who have that vision. We have the means to help them be competitive in these national competitions."

For more information about the Goldwater Award, visit www.act.org/goldwater/

For more information about the SCU Robotics Systems Laboratory, visit http://rsl.engr.scu.edu