Undergraduate Students

Undergraduate researchers share their experiences as participants in the ME SPUR Program. ME SPUR, modeled after CU Summer Program for Undergraduate Research, enabled undergraduate students to work with mechanical engineering faculty on research that could be conducted remotely.

As ME SPUR participants, Kirsty Hodgkins, Evan Kirk and Paula Pérez worked with Professor Jana Milford to understand how reduced traffic, telecommuting and reduced industrial activity during Colorado's Stay-at-Home and Safer-at-Home orders have affected air quality with goals that the project would inform future strategies for improving air quality.

Kathryn Kubacki hopes to use her mechanical engineering skills to further the medical device industry and is excited that her senior design team is developing a 3D-printed respiratory system that she believes will end up helping a lot of people.

As an ME SPUR participant, Ryan Smith worked with Assistant Professor Nick Bottenus to use medical image data to develop 3D finite element models of the abdominal wall and perform various compressions to mimic clinical practice.

Wesley Schumacher was born in Pakistan and grew up in Afghanistan. When he thinks of engineering, he thinks of people’s lives and believes it’s essential to recognize that our advancement in technology is not simply for our own benefit but largely for the people around us and society’s improvement.

As an ME SPUR participant, Paul DiTomas worked with Research Professor John Pellegrino to perform analysis for scenarios of the minimum energy requirement for robotic missions that will be used in a review article about portable power devices for next-gen robots.

As an ME SPUR participant, Sydney Evans worked with Assistant Professor Kaushik Jayaram to develop a novel robot capable of sticking to and navigating virtually any surface, leveraging electrostatic attraction.

As an ME SPUR participant, Jonathon Gruener worked with Associate Professor Svenja Knappe to create a testing environment for highly-sensitive miniature magnetic field sensors with non-invasive brain imaging, space and industrial applications.

As an ME SPUR participant, Andrew Beiter worked with Assistant Professor Debanjan Mukherjee to develop an in-house library of models for arterial hemodynamics in human patients, using CT and MRI scans and microscopy image data. His summer research project was titled, Image-Based Modeling for Cardiovascular Systems.

As an ME SPUR participant, Julia Beattie worked with Professor Corey Neu to measure intranuclear mechanics. The goal was to provide a non-invasive framework to investigate the mechanobiological function of subcellular and subnuclear domains limited only by the spatiotemporal resolution of the image acquisition method.