"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."
The proposed three-year renewal REU site will provide research experiences for ten undergraduate students per year. The primary focus of the research projects is in the area of sensors and sensor networks. REU participants will be exposed to the entire exploration process of creating a viable sensor network for various real life applications. Sensors and sensor networks have become a significant part of nearly every aspect of our daily lives by supplying information for numerous applications, such as medicine, transportation, manufacturing, national security, food safety, and environmental sustainability. Faculty mentors for this REU program come from various disciplines, including medicine, as well as materials, chemical, architectural, mechanical and electrical engineering. Students will work closely with faculty mentors and their research group on a specific research problem that falls within the "design to implementation" theme. The program provides not only stimulating research opportunities, but it also offers a variety of additional educational and enrichment activities. These include: 1) research workshops covering various sensor and network related research topics; 2) technical communication workshops; 3) ethics workshops; 4) field trips to demonstrate how research findings are transformed into industrial products; and 5) a poster contest and original research white paper exercise. The undergraduate students will be required to synthesize their knowledge from both in the lab and workshops by creating a poster and mini-proposal. The posters will be displayed during the final week's poster session and will be judged by the faculty and graduate students and a prize will be awarded for the best poster. The research mini-proposal is similar to the original research section of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) application, where the students develop and original research idea using the skills learned throughout the intensive ten-week summer program.
In order to accomplish the recruitment goals of the program, the PI will target students who are juniors (rising seniors) who are in the process of pursuing a science or engineering undergraduate degree and have not necessarily chosen to go on to graduate school. This program will encourage underrepresented minority participants to pursue careers in research.
The PIs will disseminate the project results through presentations in a variety of international and national meetings (e.g., the American Chemical Society, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and Materials Research Society annual meetings, etc.) and publications in international and national journals (e.g. Journal of Chemical Education, Journal of Materials Education, Journal of Engineering Education, etc.). In addition, all SENSORS-related information will be posted on the SENSORS website (www.mse.drexel.edu/programs/sensors/).
