A number of VCU Engineering undergraduates and faculty mentors will receive funding through VCU’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) for collaborative research projects during the summer and upcoming academic year. UROP funds come from the VCU Office of Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry, the Center for Community Engagement and Impact, the Wright Center for Clinical and Translational Research and the Institute for Inquiry, Inclusion, and Innovation.

Congratulations to VCU Engineering’s 2020-2021 VCU Undergraduate Research Fellows, and many thanks to the engineering and computer science faculty members serving as UROP mentors: 

VCU Fellowships for Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry

• Katherine Centofanti, with Mo Jiang, Ph.D., Department of Chemical and Life Sciences Engineering. Project: Continuous crystallization in monitored tubular slug-flow crystallizer.
• Neha Dil, with Bridget McInnes, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science. Project: Learning from unlabeled and pseudo data for clinical named entity recognition.
• Steele Farnsworth, with Bridget McInnes, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science. Project: Named entity normalization for problems, treatments and tests in the clinical domain.
• Aidan Myers, with Bridget McInnes, Ph.D., Department of Computer Science. Project: Application of natural language processing to lipidomic data for new knowledge discovery.
• Marguerite Nichols, with Christina Tang, Ph.D., Department of Chemical and Life Sciences Engineering. Project: Binary and Tertiary Liquid Crystal Formulations with Cholesteryl Chloride.
• James Wimberly, with Christina Tang, Ph.D., Department of Chemical and Life Sciences Engineering. Project: Electrospinning of Polycaprolactone and Liquid Crystal Blends.

Undergraduate Fellowships for Clinical and Translational Research

• Lilly Balderson, Department of Chemistry, with Hong Zhao, Ph.D., Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering. Project: 3D-Printing Epithelial Cell-Laden Scaffolds for use in Pharmaceutical Testing Applications.
• Emily Clement, Department of Biomedical Engineering, with Joao Soares, Ph.D., Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering. Project: Accelerated Degradation of Electrospun Polycaprolactone Scaffolds.
• Panth Doshi, with Jennifer Puetzer, Ph.D., Department of Biomedical Engineering. Project: Combating Aging-Induced Advanced Glycation Endproducts in Tendons with Tensile Loading.