Engineering Summer Fellowship – UROP Summer Symposium 2021

Engineering Summer Fellowship

A Virtual Reality Game for Radiation Protection

Emmanuel Hernandez | Engineering

Background: Virtual Reality (VR) is largely the result of immersive game evolution, which strives to make players feel like they are really “in the game”. Many software and hardware companies have been creating the next best immersive experience to make the not real, very real. Despite this, many of the most popular games only serve the player as entertainment and don’t supply any additional value. Applying the VR gaming concept to education could encourage students to learn, create, and think critically while having fun. When VR is applied to radiation safety, the resulting accrued experiences could ultimately even save lives. Specialized software platforms, such as Unity and Unreal, allow individuals with only basic skills to create games. Three-dimensional (3D) object modeling tools like SolidWorks and Blender permit the creation of objects which may not already be readily available in digital libraries.




African Futurist Greenhouse

Noah Winkler | Engineering

Colonialism may be in the past, but its legacies live on today, with populations still marginalized by income and still “primitivized” by the colonial view. New movements like AfroFuturism resist these stereotypes by combining technological sophistication with an anti-primitivist view of Black culture. In the book African Fractals, Dr. Eglash makes the case for scaling geometries–the nonlinear shapes found in nature–as a tradition in African design. Together with professor Audrey Bennett at UM’s Stamps School of Art and Design, and Olayami Dabls, the owner of Dabls’ MBAD African Bead Museum, they have developed a proposal to create an African Futurist greenhouse that will utilize the scaling geometry traditional to African homes, jewelry, and sculptures. Funded by Stamps and Poverty Solutions, this greenhouse will grow plants that furnish seeds for Dabls’s beadwork, food for local consumption, and more generally embody a decolonial approach that combines the circular economy of Indigenous traditions with the beauty and utility of culture-technology hybrids.




Analyzing Readability of COVID-19 Biomedical Literature

Aaron Zheng | Engineering

Reading scientific literature such as preprints and papers is different from reading ordinary English novels. The average American reads at the 7th- to 8th-grade level, according to the Literacy Project [1]. The COVID-19 pandemic is unique in a way that not only scientists but also the general public actively seek for scientific information that would help to understand the new viral infection and fight its spread. The COVID-19 related literature has been read by the public, government officials, and people who had no prior biomedical education but it is questionable how much was understood. The goal of this project is to understand how readable the COVID-19 biomedical articles are and whether they could be easily understood by an average American.




Apoptotic Effect of Deoxycholic Acid and Ursodeoxycholic Acid on Human Colon Cancer Cells

Crystal Sanchez | Engineering

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States. Current treatments for colorectal cancer include surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy; however, the five-year survival rate for distant CRC is 16%. Due to the ineffectiveness of standard treatments, especially at distant CRC, new therapeutics are needed to provide more effective treatment options at all stages.




Cultural Cybernetics: Merging Artisanal Tradition with Digital Fabrication

Andres Garcia | Engineering

Colonialism may be in the past, but its legacies live on today, with populations still marginalized by income and still “primitivized” by the colonial view. New movements like AfroFuturism resist these stereotypes by combining technological sophistication with an anti-primitivist view of Black culture. In the book African Fractals, Dr. Eglash makes the case for scaling geometries–the nonlinear shapes found in nature–as a tradition in African design. Together with professor Audrey Bennett at UM’s Stamps School of Art and Design, and Olayami Dabls, the owner of Dabls’ MBAD African Bead Museum, they have developed a proposal to create an African Futurist greenhouse that will utilize the scaling geometry traditional to African homes, jewelry, and sculptures. Funded by Stamps and Poverty Solutions, this greenhouse will grow plants that furnish seeds for Dabls’s beadwork, food for local consumption, and more generally embody a decolonial approach that combines the circular economy of Indigenous traditions with the beauty and utility of culture-technology hybrids.




Data Mining for Modeling Drivers’ Response to a Leading Vehicle’s Merging/Demerging Maneuver

Beverly Liu | Engineering

Although there have been many recent strides in automated vehicle features (e.g., lane-keeping assist or automatic emergency braking) and autonomous vehicles (e.g., Cruise), there is still a significant need for research on human drivers’ behavior and decision-making. One larger goal of this research is to increase users’ acceptance and comfort with these driving technologies by helping align the technology’s actions / warnings more closely with human behavior and expectations. This research project, in particular, applies data mining (including statistical and machine learning methods, primarily via MATLAB code) to naturalistic driving data in order to model drivers’ behavior in response to two specific scenarios: cut-ins and cut-outs of the lead vehicle on US freeways.




Development of automated photogrammetry system for measuring biological tissue geometry in situ

Michael Beltramo | Engineering

In determining engineering stress, a shape’s cross section is estimated and then the stress is calculated from there. For engineering materials, a general idea of the stress a part undergoes is usually all that is needed. However, when calculating stress on biological tissues, such as mouse tendons, it is more difficult due to the irregular shape, size, and precision needed. My research has been to develop a photogrammetry set up that automatically acquires pictures from multiple angles and in conjunction with a secondary software, calculates the cross sectional area of mouse tendon (or other object) in order to improve the accuracy of data for research.




Establishing Forster Resonance Energy Transfer Protocol for Extracellular Matrix Proteins

Bianca Hernandez | Engineering

Understanding protein interactions is important as it could serve as a basis for designing extracellular matrices (ECM) in-vitro to mimic in-vivo characteristics which would help elicit better biological responses from cells and be useful for disease modeling and drug testing. The purpose of this research is to create Forester Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET) technique for a protein called fibronectin to study its conformational changes and molecular interaction with other proteins.




Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping of the Food System in Flint, MI

Madie Czajka | Engineering

The food system in Flint, MI lacks the ability to serve the needs of all community members. The goal of this project is to map the Flint food system to identify and explore opportunities for positive change.




Lasers: Optical Tweezers for Medicine

David Pulido | Engineering

Using laser beams as a means of manipulating and trapping particles on the nanoscale has been proven extremely beneficial to the fields of chemistry and biology. These “optical tweezers” are highly useful for their non-invasiveness and precise delivery of nano-objects such as metal nanoparticles. In this study, we will optimize a two phase ligand exchange process to develop stable metal nanoparticles. This two phase ligand exchange technique is a reliable and relatively straightforward method of producing stable metal nanoparticles capable of being used in a variety of biological applications.




MATLAB Programming for Data Packaging

Megan Brooks | Engineering

Research is being conducted within the University of Michigan Direct Brain Interface (UM-DBI) Laboratory to develop an option for people with physical impairments to access communication devices without physical movement through brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Currently, the majority of the BCI data from the laboratory is stored in a BCI2000 file format which is raw data and cannot be edited or modified after it is obtained. The MATLAB Programming for Data Packaging Project focuses on improving the data storing and editing process for a custom Data Packaging Graphical User Interface (GUI) within MATLAB.




Ontological Representation and Machine Learning Prediction of Drugs for COVID-19 Treatment

Zalan Shah | Engineering

Background: SARS-CoV-2 is a human coronavirus that has caused COVID-19 and is able to rapidly mutate and spread throughout the world. While the usage of COVID-19 vaccines has drastically reduced illness, new variants of the virus continue to show up and reduce vaccination efficiency. Given the continuous spreading of the disease, effective drugs for treating COVID-19 are urgently needed; however, very effective drugs for COVID-19 have not yet been approved for public use. Drug repurposing is a strategy to discover new uses for thousands of approved drugs previously used for other illnesses. It is possible to use the drug repurposing strategy to find drugs for effective COVID-19 treatment. This study aims to analyze drugs and their effects on the human body to further predict effective drugs for COVID-19 using machine learning algorithms.




The Effect of Prosthetic Leg Length on Low Back Muscle Activity and Pain during Walking and Sit-to-Stand

Robyn Pfeiffer | Engineering

People with lower limb amputation have a greater incidence of low back pain than the general population, with some estimates as high as 65%. One potential cause of pain in this population is leg length asymmetry as it can lead to altered trunk-pelvis movement, and subsequently altered low-back loading. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of changes in prosthetic leg length on low back muscle activity and self-reported low-back pain.




Wicked Solutions Domain

Angela Ponce Solano | Engineering

Data visualizations such as the John Hopkins COVID-19 Map, has become an impactful way of presenting updated health information to stakeholders such as policy makers and the general public. This pandemic dashboard has become a precedent for developing platforms that help provide useful information for issues with which our society is struggling. Using design thinking and participatory mapping, the WISDOM research team led by University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor Audrey Bennett aims to create an equitably accessible Wicked Solutions Domain for networked collaboration and knowledge exchange of existing data and research resources in relation to wicked problems such as food, poverty, and sustainability.




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