PI: Stephen Schultz

Project Description

The MEG funds used for this projects supported undergraduate students working in the IMMERSE program starting in the Summer of 2015. IMMERSE employed a total of 35 students, with 14 of them being supervised directly by Dr. Aaron Hawkins and Stephen Schultz. The students working for Drs. Hawkins and Schultz were paid hourly wages for their research work from this MEG grant.

Student participants in IMMERSE 2015: Luke Hsiao, Zach Walker, Matt Hamblin, Ben Haymore, Parker Ridd, Kevin Costner, Peter Zabriskie, Jacob Kimball, Derek Clement, Steven Hammon, Adriaan Riet, Alexander Petrie, John Vogel, Kyle Davidson, Jessica Doud, Joe Valentine, Carlos Vilorio, Chase McCloskey, Jared Anderson, Jared Baxter, Erik Hamilton, Roger Chu, Canute Peterson, Jeff Barton, Trevor Decker, David Jeffs, Jacob Johnson, Shreeya Mody, Steven Whitaker, Jordan Anderson, Nate Whitehead, Taylor Welker, Miles Rennick, Kevin Cuzner, Michael Wray, Andrew Cutler, Andrew Keller, Jessica Johnston, Katy Dallon, Brittany Stark, Forrest Howell, Anthony Gillespie, Legrand Shumway, Jacob Larsen, Eric Swindlehurst, Matthew Cannon, Luna Zhang, Luke Newmeyer

Program Objectives

The three main objectives of the IMMERSE program are: (1) Involving undergraduates in significant, publishable research in the field of electrical and computer engineering (ECE). (2) Improving the ECE infrastructure at BYU through equipment upgrades and on-line
documentation. (3) Initiating research in topics that will lead to external funding and greater visibility for BYU.

All students employed by IMMERSE participated in a substantive research project, with the majority of them publishing some type of scientific paper. In addition all students participated in some type of outreach activity or infrastructure improvement. One of the most significant outreach activities undertaken in 2015 was the first Chip Camp. Chip Camp is an engineering day camp designed for 7th and 8th graders. We hosted 120 of these students during 2015 with IMMERSE students acting as camp counselors. Additionally, several research proposals to external funding agencies were written as a direct result of the preliminary research performed by IMMERSE students.

While some papers are still being written based on research work done for the IMMERSE 2015 program, here is a list of publications completed so far which involving IMMERSE Students funded by this MEG Grant (IMMERSE students in bold):

1. Matthieu Giraud-Carrier, Cameron Hill, Trevor Decker, Jennifer A. Black, Holger Schmidt, and Aaron Hawkins, “Perforated hollow-core optical waveguides for on-chip atomic spectroscopy and gas sensing,” Applied Physics Letters 108, 131105, (2016).
2. Thomas A. Wall, Roger P. Chu, Joshua W. Parks, Damla Ozcelik, Holger Schmidt, and Aaron R. Hawkins, “Improved environmental stability for plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition SiO2 waveguides using buried channel designs,” Optical Engineering 55, 040501, (2016).
3. Matthieu Giraud-Carrier, Cameron Hill, Trevor Decker, Aaron R. Hawkins, Jennifer A. Black, Soren Almquist, Holger Schmidt, “Non-diffusive Rubidium Vapor Transport in Confined Glass Channels,” in review Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A 34, 031602, (2016).
4. Matthieu Giraud-Carrier, Trevor K. Decker, Aaron Hawkins, Jennifer A. Black, and Holger Schmidt, “Perforated Hollow-Core Waveguide Devices for Atomic Spectroscopy with Alkali Vapor,” CLEO/QELS, San Jose, CA, June 5 – 10, (2016).
5. Bangerter NK, Kaggie JD, Taylor MD, Hadley JR. Sodium MRI Radiofrequency Coils for Body Imaging. NMR in Biomedicine 2016; 29(2):107-118.
6. Whitaker ST, Taylor M, Wang H, Bangerter NK. SNR and Banding Artifact Reduction Analysis of Phase-Cycled Elliptical Signal Model bSSFP. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the ISMRM, May 2016, p. 6461.
7. Howell F, Wang H, Park DJ, Taylor M, Sveinsson B, Bangerter NK. Simultaneous Extraction of ADC and T2: Validation of Quantified DESS Sequence at 3T and 7T. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the ISMRM, May 2016, p. 4770.
8. Taylor M, Park DJ, Wang H, Whitaker ST, Palmer AJR, Bangerter NK. Rapid High Resolution Morphological Imaging of Cartilage at 7T. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the ISMRM, May 2016, p. 6197.
9. L.-F. Tsai, H. Gong, K. Dallon, B. A. Mazzeo, G. Nordin. Light Emission from Electrodes under Dielectrophoresis (DEP) Conditions. Journal of Micro/Nanolightography, MEMS, and MOEMS, In Press (2016).
10. M. M. Forouzan, C.-W. Chao, D. Bustamante, B. A. Mazzeo, and D. R. Wheeler. Simulation of the fabrication process of a lithium-ion battery cathode for determining microstructure and mechanical properties. Journal of Power Sources 312, 172-183 (2016).

Mentoring Enviroment

The mentoring environment used for IMMERSE 2015 consisted of four primary parts: Group meetings, individual meetings, inter-project interactions, and external project interactions.

Group Meetings:
Group meetings were conducted on a weekly basis and consisted of four to seven faculty and all of the involved students. These meetings allowed faculty members to give training on general research methods and oral and written communication. The following are a list of topics presented by faculty members: a) How to give a technical oral presentation b) How and where to publish a paper c) How to assemble and write a technical paper d) How to find and use reference articles e) Applying to graduate school f) Applying for fellowships g) Engineering ethics h) Is graduate school right for you i) Formulating webpages for maximum impact.

Each student gave a technical presentation in this meeting which provided a supportive atmosphere consisting mostly of their peers, helping them to develop better communications skills and put their specific research into a “big picture” context.

Individual Meetings:
The student research topics were divided between faculty members. Faculty held individual meetings at least once a week with the students involved in the subtopics. These meetings included progress reports given by each of the students involved.

Interproject Interaction:
All of the students supported by this MEG grant were working on research projects which involved microfabrication processes or photonics systems. Thus, the individual subtopics had a great deal of overlap. This overlap fostered interaction between the students working on the individual projects. This student interaction provided mentoring between the students. This interaction also helped the students learn to work in teams to solve technical problems.

External Project Interaction:
This mentoring environment also fostered relationships between undergraduate students working on these projects and graduate students working on related projects. This relationship encourages the transfer of expertise from the graduate students to the undergraduate students and vice versa.

Funds Spent

All of the $20,000 awarded by this grant went to student wages for undergraduate researchers.