Summer research opportunities pay off for undergraduates, faculty, and the advancement of engineering.
With a strong belief that technological competitiveness is vital to the well being of the United States, SCU alumnus and former IBM president Jack Kuehler and his wife created the $1 million Carmen A. and Jack D. Kuehler Undergraduate Engineering Research fund. Each summer, a handful of faculty members invite promising sophomore and junior students to join them in research funded by this grant.
Students are paid to work with their faculty mentor—and often with fellow undergraduates, master's and Ph.D. students from their own and affiliated fields—building a foundation for collaborative scientific investigation and developing the skills required for ongoing education at the graduate level or for a successful career. Many students continue this work for their senior capstone projects and even further as they pursue dual degrees in our 5-year program.
In addition to the meaningful hands-on experience of being an integral part of a faculty member's research program, participants enjoy co-authoring peer-reviewed articles and presenting their results at national conferences.
2020 Kuehler Awards:
Faculty: Prashanth Asuri
Student: Emma Barrett-Catton, Bioengineering
Objective: Explore the relative roles of polymer–nanoparticle and polymer-polymer interactions on the mechanical properties of the interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) hydrogel nanocomposites.
Faculty: Unyoung (Ashley) Kim, Maryam Mobed-Miremadi
Student: Dwight Johnson
Objective: Explore the feasibility of thread-based electrochemical mechanisms for free radical detection using 3-D printed microneedles for wound healing applications.
Faculty: Christopher Kitts
Student: Steven Reimer
Objective: Explore techniques through both simulation and experimentation to detect and diagnose problems with complex engineering systems such as satellites, using the modeling and AI techniques.
Faculty: Bill Lu
Student: Jiayi Zhang, Bioengineering
Objective: Developing stealth exosomes for the next generation of nano-medicine.
Faculty: Kurt Schab
Student: Austin Rothschild, ELEN '21
Objective: Establish rigorous physical single- and multi-objective bounds on various aspects of light-matter interaction in nanophotonic systems in order to inform and direct future work in inverse design (automated synthesis) of such devices.
Faculty: Sara Tehranipoor
Student: Jack Edmonds, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Objective: Survey recent developments in attacks on lightweight hardware security primitives, including PUFs and TRNGs
2019 Kuehler Awards: