This award provides support to undergraduate students in science and engineering disciplines, in particular underrepresented women and minorities with cohort and high-quality research experiences in an interdisciplinary area of information technology and automotive engineering. The program is run in an eight-week long intensive summer research camp involving ten students per year. The program is cross-disciplinary, involving twelve participating faculty mentors from three departments: Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computer Science, and Biomechanical Engineering. The program seeks to improve students' skills in applying the scientific method to hands-on research and train each student in modern research techniques; lead students to greater independence in pursuing their research interests; and strive to increase the participation of women and underrepresented minorities who enter and complete graduate programs in science and engineering.
The students will be matched with suitable mentors to participate in a wide range of individual research projects in the fields of computer modeling and simulation in vehicle safety study, embedded systems and computer-based control in vehicles, vehicular networks, telematics applications, and reliable and secure mobile Internet services. The program integrates meaningful interdisciplinary research and active learning experience into undergraduate education to promote retention of students in science and engineering, and motivate them to continue to graduate schools. The program benefits society at large by contributing to developing an educated computing workforce capable of quickly putting new ideas to work in innovative ways that serve the needs of the populace and begin to take better advantage of flat world realities.
