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

What do you get when you cross American Idol with top-flight engineering student research? This year's David and Lorraine Freed Undergraduate Research Symposium – and the entire Lehigh campus community is invited to help select the winner of the Symposium's People's Choice Award,” a brand new Symposium prize for 2010.

The Symposium will take place from noon-4:30 on April 15, 2010, in the lobby of Packard Laboratory. This event -- in its sixth year under the guidance of Professors Himanshu Jain and Wojtek Misiolek of materials science and engineering -- also marks the second year that Lafayette College will be sending its top undergraduate engineering researchers to participate, ratcheting up the competitive spirit even further.

Each spring, the Symposium provides participants an opportunity for Lehigh engineering students to showcase their research and network with peers. Perhaps most importantly, it is also a chance for students to practice communicating their ideas in a manner that is accessible to generally-educated audiences -- an ability that is crucial to success in any research-related field.

With the aid of their faculty advisors, participants develop and display posters that describe their research. The presentations are judged by a panel of academic and industry researchers for creativity, significance to an engineering problem, visual quality of the poster, and ability of the student to defend the research. The top three students win travel stipends to attend professional conferences.

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.”

Participants are nominated and selected from each engineering major program to participate in the Symposium. The 2010 Lehigh student-competitors are as follows:

Michael DiRosato, Dan Faro, Casey Parker, Chemical Engineering
(Advisors: Mark Snyder, Hugo Caram)

Kristen Falotico, Alla Miroshnik, Environmental Engineering
(Advisor: Sibel Pamukcu)

David Gritz, Information and Systems Engineering
(Advisor: Emory Zimmers)

Adam Kohn, Materials Science and Engineering
(Advisor: Raymond Pearson)

Phoebe Lai, Industrial Engineering
(Advisor: Aurelie Thiele)

Whitney Levine and Eric Wasserman, Computer Science and Engineering
(Advisor: Xiaolei Huang)

Carolyn Scott, Bioengineering
(Advisor: Sabrina Jedlicka)

Edward Stilson, Luke Yoder Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics
(Advisor: Jochim Grenestedt)

Jordan Warncke, Civil Engineering
(Advisor: Clay Naito)

Alexander Wendt, Electrical Engineering
(Advisor: Nelson Tansu)

Megan Stoner is a Lehigh journalism student working as a writing intern for the P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science.