Who’s your favorite engineering researcher? Stop by to vote!

What do you get when you cross American Idol with top-flight engineering student research?

This year’s edition of the David and Lorraine Freed Undergraduate Research Symposium, which is being held today from noon to 4:30 p.m. in the lobby of Packard Laboratory.

Each spring, the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science (RCEAS) holds the symposium to give student researchers the chance to display posters and present their work to a panel of professionals. Engineering students from Lafayette College will compete this year for the second time. The event is now in its sixth year under the guidance of Profs. Himanshu Jain and Wojtek Misiolek of Lehigh’s department of materials science and engineering.

The panel of professionals chooses first-, second- and third-place winners. Each winner receives a stipend to travel to a conference.

This year the RCEAS is asking the campus community to help select the winner of the Symposium’s new “People’s Choice Award.” Visitors can vote for their favorite poster between noon and 4 p.m.

Learning the art of communication

The goal of the symposium is to allow engineering students to showcase their research, network with peers and practice communicating their ideas in a manner that is accessible to general audiences.

Students create posters and prepare presentations with help from faculty advisers. The presentations are judged by academic and industry researchers for several criteria, including creativity, significance to an engineering problem, visual quality of the poster, and ability of the student to defend the research.

“The symposium provided an environment for me to learn proper industrial and academic research methods and a forum for sharing my findings with students, professors, staff and industrial visitors,” said last year’s third place winner, Corey Luthringer ‘09. “It helped me learn how to explain my research to an audience using a variety of skill sets and technical knowledge.”

The symposium was endowed several years ago by Andrew D. Freed ’83 in honor of his parents. Freed is a member of the RCEAS advisory board.

Symposium participants are nominated from each engineering field. This year’s Lehigh competitors and their major fields (with faculty advisers in parentheses) are:

Michael DiRosato ’10, Dan Faro ’10 and Casey Parker ’10, chemical engineering (Mark Snyder, Hugo Caram)

Kristen Falotico ’11 and Alla Miroshnik ’10, environmental engineering (Sibel Pamukcu)

David Gritz ’11, information and systems engineering (Emory Zimmers)

Adam Kohn ’11, materials science and engineering (Raymond Pearson)

Phoebe Lai ’10, industrial engineering (Aurelie Thiele)

Whitney Levine ’10 and Eric Wasserman ’10, computer science and engineering (Xiaolei Huang)

Carolyn Scott ’10, bioengineering (Sabrina Jedlicka)

Edward Stilson  ’11 and Luke Yoder ’11, mechanical engineering and mechanics (Joachim Grenestedt)

Jordan Warncke ’10, civil engineering (Clay Naito)

Alexander Wendt ’10, electrical engineering (Nelson Tansu)