On Thursday, October 10, doors opened at Rockwell Pavilion and the Honors College in the M.D. Anderson Library for the Ninth Annual Undergraduate Research Day. Guests browsed the rooms to watch 130 students display their research.
Three student groups from the College of Technology Engineering Technology Department were under the mentorship of Dr. Mequanint Moges. The group projects included Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, AquaSMART: Intelligent Control System, and Electronic Safety and Monitoring System for Handguns.
Team HAWK designed an aerial surveying vehicle with the safety of others in mind. Students Adrienne Low, Justin Fong, Alex Rios, Jed Avanzado and Sony Thomas named the project Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). UAV mitigates the overall damage of surveying equipment and harm to crew members that have become immobilized from their assignment. This device can be beneficial to numerous industries for security and surveillance purposes. The efficient design was engineered with an autopilot and image processing systems.
AquaSMART: Intelligent Control System is a networked self-functioning aquarium system that maintains an aquatic environment and provides remote access to its data from any platform with an internet control panel. It also comes ready to control pH, oxygen levels, salinity and nitrate concentration. This device can be used for pools and other aquatic environments. With competition costing more than $1,000, AquaSMART is set out to create an affordable, easily expandable control system. This senior project lab was created by the bright minds of Karam Salih, Peter Kuo, Enobong Eduok and Shirdora Thompson.
In an effort to provide a safe medium concerning the control and limitations of firearms, Team Hephaestus Technologies is improving upon the innovations of smart guns. Andy Tran, Brian Hoffart, Christopher Nix, Erick Torres and Ryan Clark created the project Electronic Safety and Monitoring System for Handguns. The project focuses on a mobile Android application that pushes the photo and GPS location of the phone and notifications to the user. It also has a database that simultaneously provides access to multiple users and allows rapid searching, browsing and querying of records. This new smart gun capability alleviates storage requirements on local devices.
Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) student, Lisa Lau, presented the Correlation between Antibiotic Degradation and OP Pesticide Degradation in Bacterial Organisms. Lau’s research addresses whether metallo-beta-lactamase protein can be used to degrade harmful pesticides in a more effective and cost efficient manner that does not harm nature and humanity. An OP pesticide that most farmers use to deter pests can affect the human nervous system at low-level exposures. At high-level effects, this can contribute to the development of cancer and Parkinson’s Disease. Student Lisa Lau completed her biotechnology research under the mentorship of Dr. Rupa Iyer.
SURF student, Vishal Gulati, presented Effectiveness of Electronic Medical Records (EMR) in American Healthcare. Mentored by Dr. Xin Ding, Gulati’s research analyzes the impact of electronic medical records on performance measurements such as net operating revenue, total operating expense, and number of adjusted patient days.
The College proudly supports of its students and wishes them well in their innovative pursuits.