January 4, 2010

BME holds first Undergraduate Research Day

The first Biomedical Engineering Undergraduate Research Day was conducted last semester on the Homewood campus to showcase and judge student research projects. Sixteen biomedical engineering undergraduates submitted abstracts and posters focusing on research they had conducted during the past year.

Faculty members judged the posters and selected four finalists, who offered oral presentations about their work. The judges then chose the top award winners.

The first-place honor went to freshman Daniel Peng for “Engineering Thermoreversible Hydrogels for Controlled Drug Delivery.” Peng also received the Students’ Choice Award, as voted by the freshman class, for his poster.

In second place was junior Joseph Heng for “Hierarchical Processing of Temporal Envelope and Fine Structure Information in Cochlear Implant-Mediated Perception of Musical Timbre.”

Third place went to junior Nicholas Tan for “An Empirical Model That Predicts the Effects of PGC-1α and HIF-1α on VEGF Distribution in Skeletal Muscle Tissue.”

The honorable mention recipient was senior Carolyn Park for “The Role of Ventricular Geometry in Arrhythmogenesis Under Brugada Syndrome.”

Elliot McVeigh, director of Biomedical Engineering, presented certificates to the four finalists. The top three students also received monetary awards that will cover partial expenses to a national scientific research conference.