2006 Award Recipients

Heather Taylor and Corinna Thompson.
 
Heather's research topic is ' Integrating Radio Frequency Identification  and Wireless Sensor Network Technologies.'

Corinna's research topic is ' Experimental Validation of a Model to Predict the Temperature Increase Within the Human Eye When Subjected to a Laser Source.'

2005 URECA Recipients
Karmen Anderson	Jennifer Gagnon
Robotic Knee for Biomedical Testing of Total Knee Anthropasty II KARMEN ANDERSON - is attending the University of Vermont as a fourth year student majoring in Mechanical Engineering. Karmen’s project centers around a Robotic Knee for Biomechanical Testing of Total Knee Arthroplasty. She is a member of MoonCat, a project funded and coordinated by VSGC for  NASA's Great Moon Buggy Race. Karmen has also received the June Veinott Award from the Society of Women Engineers.		Assessing Linkage Between  Stream Geomorphic Condition and In-Stream Habitat Jennifer N. Gagnon, Dr. Cully Hussion, Dr. Donna Rizzo, & Christina Cianfrani JENNIFER GAGNON - is attending the University of Vermont as a fourth year student pursuing her degree in Environmental Engineering. Jennifer is currently working on a project to determine if there are correlations between Rapid Habitat Assessment scores and field measured diversity in watershed and stream classifications.

2004-2005 URECA AWARD RECIPIENTS
PHIL BOURN - is attending the University of Vermont as a fourth year student. His project centers on Mobile Robotic Survelliance and Sensing so as to enable sensing in areas that are too dangerous or awkward to place humans. The practical uses of these robotic systems are not just military based. By scanning walls, ceilings and floor robots can help determine the structural integrity and possibly locate trapped victims; robots could be deployed in burning structures to search for people in cases where it is too dangerous to send in firefighters; ductwork, crawl spaces, and caves can be inspected and searched easily with small robotic systems. Phil's goal is to analyze the parameters of a small selection of mobile robotic surveillance systems: mobility issues such as controllability, load capacity, range efficiency,
stability, and measureability of three types of ground mobile vehicles. These three types are: wheeled vehicles, tracked vehicles and walking/crawling vehicles. Phil is majoring in mechanical engineering and has been involved in several projects including composite drive shaft analysis.

BENJI CAPSUTO - Graduated from UVM in electrical engineering in May 2004. His project centers on Wireless Sensor Network Protocols. Many areas of study require collection of field data and often it is not practical to have individuals at each location requiring monitoring. For example, temperature, light and humidity readings in a corn field would require a researcher to walk around the corn field with instrumentation to gather the data. Not only would the data be inconvenient to collect but also be temporally sparse. Using wireless sensor network (WSN), however, could quickly and inexpensively send the data using a radio transmitter. Furthermore the network could be designed to collect data on a continuous basis and send the results to the researcher via the internet. The University of California at Berkeley (UCB) has developed small wireless sensors called Motes. They are capable of collecting data across distances of hundreds of meters, and are able to "hop" the data between each wireless sensor back
to a base station. Benji's research has explored various routing protocols for WSN, using the Motes as a test platform. Most proposed protocols have only been tested in simulation. Benji's research will implement the protocols in hardware. Benji has designed and built several websites including the site for the Mini-Baja team.

2003-2004
DAVID KORDA-
is attending the University of Vermont as a third year student. His project centers on the Effects of Damaging Compression on Mechanical, Chemical and Structural Properties of Intervertebral Disc Tissue. A most common cause of disability, low back pain affects up to 70% of all human beings at some point in their lives, resulting in an estimated yearly cost of 50 billion dollars in the U.S. (Not including earning and productivity losses) . The integrity of the intervertebral disc affects spinal function. Mechanical loading of the Intervertebral disc may be directly responsible for alterations in the structure and intervertebral disc properties or may stimulate biological remodeling of the matrix. David's study seeks to investigate and provide a quantitative relationship between mechanical loading and the resulting structural and biochemical changes. David has won several scholarships and was awarded the Tau Beta Phi Freshman award.
 

URECA
RESEARCHER/ TITLE	PROJECT TITLE	RESEARCH STUDENTS ASSISTANTS, FELLOWS, COLLABORATORS	PERIOD STUDENTS/ ASSISTANTSHIP
VSGC/UVM Provost Office Direct Management	URECA	David Korda Phil Bourn Benji Capsuto	2003-2004 2003-2004 2003-2004
VSGC/UVM Provost Office Direct Management	URECA	Karmen Anderson   Jennifer Gagnon	2005-2006
VSGC/UVM Provost Office Direct Management	URECA   “Integrating Radio Frequency Identification & Wireless Sensor Technologies”   “Experimental validation of a model to predict the temperature increase within the human eye when subjected to a laser source”	Heather Taylor           Corinna Sue          Thompson	2005-2006           2005-2006