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Converging technologies at Union is perhaps best described by the people putting it into practice: our students. Below are a few remarkable undergraduate research projects illustrating some of the creative ways our students integrate engineering and the liberal arts and sciences. Union's small size fosters interdisciplinary collaborations. |
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Palma Catravas' office on the second floor of Steinmetz Hall bulges with papers and books - titles with "optics," "circuits" and "electromagnetics" are prominent - and the marker board on the wall is filled with colorful zig-zag diagrams that are, she explains, regions of convergence for z-transforms - part of digital signal processing and the product of hours of meetings with students taking the class on "Discrete Systems."
Her desk, meanwhile, overflows with fliers and programs announcing chamber music concerts, recitals, lectures and other musical events.
Forging new links between music and engineering is a natural for Catravas, who performed solo with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra when she was 12 and completed a double degree in electrical engineering and piano performance as an undergraduate.
Marissa Post ('04, ME) is a member of this year's aerogel research team. The project began in 2002 with a single student senior project. The student, Ben Gauthier, '02 was interested in the properties of aerogels. (Aerogels are extremely low density solids, formed of a very porous silicon-based lattice. They have very interesting thermal insulating properties; work well as the basis for a catalyst or sensor because of their enormous surface area per volume, and also have interesting electrical properties.)
Ben wanted to learn to fabricate aerogels, and turned to faculty in Chemistry and Mechanical Engineering for help. This led faculty from both departments to discover substantial overlaps in their research interests, and to an NSF application to establish an aerogel fabrication lab. Now, having won the grant, and built the lab, Union has an active ongoing research team in this area. Last summer, seven students remained on campus working on the project, and this past Fall, members of the team attended a national Aerogel conference, and presented three papers.
Union's AFCAL (Aerogel Fabrication, Characterization and Application Lab) has completed one patent application.
Visit Marissa´s Site
Visit Smitesh´s Site
With funding from the Keck Foundation, Union has developed several miniterms abroad with the express goal of bringing engineering and liberal arts students together. One of particular note was our program in Cordoba, Spain. This past summer (last July) our students conducted a digital mapping project. In the ten weeks before they left, the students learned about the long history of Cordoba, which was arguably the most important city in Europe in the year 1000, and also learned the basics of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) mapping software. While in Cordoba, student teams were assigned different periods of Cordoba history, and were charged with creating different map layers, and with creating the reference materials to link to the map. The students completed an interactive website on the history of Cordoba when they returned, and presented their work at the Steinmetz Symposium on this past May 7th.
The project is online at: doc.union.edu/Spain/Project
We have also sent students to Brazil to study water resources problems, and to New Zealand to study alternative energy.
Mike Losure, Steve LaPlante and Bryce Levin received funding from our East Asian Studies Program Freeman Foundation grant, to travel with Prof. Nixi Cura in the Visual Arts department, to China, where they visited an 18th Century burial tomb from the Qing dynasty. Since their trip in December 2003, they have produced a stunning 3D rendering of the tomb, including a fly-through, and pan-and-zoom camera views.
The project is online at: cs.union.edu/SeniorProjects/#7
Equidistant Letter Sequences in Homer's Iliad
Justin King and Mark Weston undertook a joint Project between Classics and Computer Science. Here is a part of their abstract:
"For centuries, the Bible has been used to make predictions. With the rapid evolution of computers, researchers have begun to investigate the presence of encrypted messages in this holy text. The leading researchers in this field are Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg (WRR), who searched for equidistant letter sequences (ELS) in the Book of Genesis. An ELS is a word who letters are equally spaced throughout a source text. WRR found that ELS behavior is substantial and asserted that it is unique to the Bible. Since their results were published, other researchers, like Michael Drosnin, author of The Bible Code, have performed similar searches with an emphasis on current events and predictions."
King and Weston applied similar methodology to Homer's Iliad. Their conclusion: " . ELS behavior is present in the Iliad, however, further examination is required in order to verify the significance of this behavior."
In order to help predict the way proteins will act in an organism, biologists cross-examine sequences of amino acids from many proteins. There are a total of 20 amino acids in existence and proteins often consist of 300 or more amino acids. A "multiple alignment" is performed on a collection of sequences to maximize the areas where the amino acids are similar across all sequences. Online websites presently are available to accomplish the task.
Once the multiple alignment is complete, a tedious process begins of searching for contiguous subsequences of the aligned group of protein sequences that may be useful in determining properties about the proteins' functions. Subsequences that are selected for further analysis are called "primers." The primer search process is often done by hand and can take hours for small sequence lengths.
This project entails a Java program that automates the primer search process and a database organizing results obtained after primers are generated. The software allows the user to examine multiple primers at once and to adjust primer lengths. Once the primers are generated, lab tests are performed on the primers and the results are entered into a database. The database can be queried to find results that might be useful to a biologist.