6:22 p.m., July 7, 2009----Ten undergraduate students from schools across the country have joined the Nature InSpired Engineering (NISE) program at the University of Delaware this summer through a Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The rising juniors and seniors will collaborate with a group of regional math and science teachers who are participating in the related NISE Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program, which was launched at UD in 2008.

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The REU program is supported at a level of $380,000 over three years, with funds from the UD College of Engineering supplementing the NSF grant.

Led by Kenneth Barner, professor and chairperson of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the sister programs are hosting two teachers and two undergraduate researchers in each of five laboratories. The teachers will spend six weeks in the lab, while the undergraduates will be here for 10.

This year's research program comprises five projects, one in each of the college's departments: robotic exploratory mobility units for the biologically challenged, bio-based composite bridges, biomedical tissue engineering, green roofs for indoor climate control, and optofluidic microscope employing tomosynthesis.

Barner and co-principal investigator Takashi Buma, assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering, both see the potential for valuable synergy between the REU and RET programs.

“We hope that this joint program will help the high school teachers to realize that their students will, in two or three years, be the same age as these undergraduates and will be able to contribute to novel laboratory, computational and field research,” Buma says. “The experience should also help the teachers to prepare their students for college.”

“From the perspective of the undergrads,” Barner adds, “the team experience is invaluable. While they would be exposed to collaboration with faculty and grad students in any REU program, the RET program adds another dimension and an interesting dynamic, with the teachers and undergrads as peers. We hope that the interaction may also encourage some of the REU participants to choose teaching as a career.”

In addition to research, the NISE program includes workshops on collaboration-enhancing technologies, ethics, technical writing and poster preparation, as well as trips to regional laboratories and companies relevant to the NISE theme.

Selected from a pool of more than 100 applications, the students in the 2009 REU program include Kathryn Barber (Penn State University), Jonathan Carrera (Syracuse University), Allen Che (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology), Stephen Dolph (Valparaiso University), Jennifer Dunn (Kansas State University), Michael Habimana-Griffin (Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology), Sherry Liang (The Cooper Union), Kyle Macasevich (University of Delaware), Alex Nagorniy (The Cooper Union), and Caitlin Pretz (University of Delaware).

Article by Diane Kukich