Undergraduate Research Shines at MERIT Fair

Konstantin Khrustov (left) and Saket Vora (right)

Industry, government, and University representatives were on hand for the Maryland Engineering Research Internship Teams (MERIT) Annual Fair at the Stamp Student Union Grand Ballroom on Friday, August 11.

MERIT is a unique, 11-week summer research program that offers top undergraduate engineering students from around the country the opportunity to engage in cutting-edge, team-based, cross-disciplinary research projects at the University of Maryland. The summer program culminates in the MERIT Fair, a half-day program that provides student teams a chance to showcase their work to a wider audience, and to be judged on the quality of their research efforts. Student projects were scrutinized by a panel of judges selected from academia, industry, and government laboratories.

In the RITE (telecommunications) program, two teams shared first place.

Konstantin Khrustov from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Saket Vora from North Carolina State University won best project award for their research titled "High Powered Widebank Microwave Interference on Switching Power Supplies." They worked under Professor John Rodgers and Professor Victor Granatstein and graduate student Todd Firestone.

Sharing first place honors were Maryland ECE students Eric Chen and Harneet Khurana who worked under Professor Pamela Abshire and graduate students Nicole Nelson, Alfred Haas, Marc Dandin and Somashekar Prakash. Their project was titled "Bio Labs-on-a-Chip: Monitoring Cells Using CMOS Biosensors."

In the MICRA (microelectronics research) program, Daniel Chang from Princeton University won the best project award for his research titled "Electron Beam Induced Deposition of Platinum Contacts." Daniel worked with ECE Professor John Melngailis, Dr. Matthew Ervin, Dr. Barbara Nichols and Dr. Alma Wickenden from the Army Research Lab, and John Barry, an engineer with the University of Maryland's Institute for Research in Electronics & Applied Physics (IREAP).

This year, 23 students participated in the MERIT program. In addition to University of Maryland students, MERIT participants included students from Columbia University, Cornell University, Princeton University, University of Illinois at Chicago, Brigham Young University, the Citadel, Frank W. Olin College, North Carolina State University, University of the District of Columbia, University of Portland, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

For more information about the MERIT program, please visit www.ece.umd.edu/MERIT.

Published August 15, 2006